Chong’s covers

Last month’s cover subject, Paul Kelly, proved immensely popular when we began advertising a new series of portrait prints based on W.H. Chong’s cover images. Each portrait is available exclusively from ABR. The unframed prints – presented in limited editions – are signed, numbered, and (in some cases) hand-coloured by Chong, who, with typical generosity, has waived any income from the series, to support the magazine. ABR subscribers pay $150 per print; non-subscribers pay $195. Prints may be purchased online, or via the ABR office: (03) 9429 6700.

The first series (Paul Kelly with coloured dots) has almost sold out; a few prints are still available. We fancy that Dorothy Hewett, this month’s cover subject, will prove equally popular.

Evergreen Webb

It would be a benighted land that ignored the poetry of Francis Webb (1925–73), regarded by many critics as Australia’s finest poet. Major publishers, in recent years, have often spurned poetry, to the detriment of Australian readers. How pleasing, then, that UWA Publishing has just issued the Collected Poems of Francis Webb, edited and introduced by Toby Davidson. The retail price ($32.95) is almost absurdly low for such a body of work. Chris Wallace-Crabbe will review the collection in a coming issue.

First up, though, from UWA Publishing, comes the Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett, chosen by her daughter, Kate Lilley. Susan Sheridan reviews it this month. With Dr Lilley’s permission and that of the publisher, we reproduce Dorothy Hewett’s poem ‘This Version of Love’.

Stop press

Next month we will announce details of our short story prize, renamed after one of Australia’s finest authors, and with a substantial increase in prize money. This development is possible because of the largesse of one of ABR’s senior Patrons. Indeed, it is largely because of the kindness of patrons that ABR is able to offer lucrative prizes and fellowships and editorial internships. Private patronage is transforming the magazine and broadening its programs. If you wish to help a cultural organisation with DGR status, consider supporting the magazine that supports Australian writers. See the print edition for more details.

Readers’ Choice Award

Margaret Steinberger has won the ABR Short Story Competition Readers’ Choice Award prize of seventy-five new Popular Penguins, courtesy of Penguin Books. Ms Steinberger nominated Reader’s Choice Award-winner Josephine Rowe’s story ‘Suitable for a Lampshade’ as her favourite, praising Rowe’s ‘sharply observed characters, realistic and believable dialogue and … flashes of humour’. ‘Suitable for a Lampshade’ appeared in our February issue.

The heritage of ABR

Advances is truly chagrined. In its many moves and transmogrifications over the years, ABR somehow managed to lose its only copies of several of the original issues in the first series of ABR – the one that Max Harris and Geoffrey Dutton launched in Adelaide in November 1961, and that ran (monthly or quarterly) until 1974, when ABR lapsed until its revival, in Melbourne, in 1978.

The first issue itself – tabloid format, sixteen pages, handsomely laid out – is fascinating. The editors certainly hit the ground running. Among their contributors were Geoffrey Blainey, Robert Hughes, Sylvia Lawson, Stephen Murray-Smith, Randolph Stow, and Rosemary Wighton. The editorial, which we shall post on our website, is proud, determined, emphatic. ‘A country which absorbs one out of every four books exported from Britain can sustain an expanding national literature: there’s little doubt of that! ... Fortunately, there is no shortage of critical intellect in Australia.’ ABR would love to possess a full set of the first series. We have a list of those we are missing. Please call us if you can help.

Good advice

ABR’s editorial advisers, all of whom are listed on the imprint page of our print edition, assist us to place certain books and to find new contributors. Periodically, we add to this honorary advisory board – most recently, Professor Margaret Harris, Director of Research Development in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney, whose most recent contribution to ABR, an article (written with Elizabeth Webby) on the papers of Patrick White, appeared in the December 2010–January 2011 issue; and Jake Wilson, whose writings on film appear in The Age and elsewhere. Jake Wilson, in the current issue, reviews a new book on that scarifying film Wake in Fright. Next month he will launch our new film column with a review of the second dramatisation of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock. Each month, to complement our critical coverage of books on film, we will review a major new feature film or documentary.

March giveaways

Ten new subscribers this month will receive a signed copy of Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth, courtesy of Text Publishing. Existing subscribers who renew for two years will receive a ticket, valued at $90, to the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s May performance, Glittering Fröst, in Melbourne, Sydney, or Perth. Thirty subscribers who renew for one year will receive a double pass to the film, Never Let Me Go; adapted from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, thanks to Twentieth Century Fox.

CONTENTS: MARCH 2011

Dorothy Hewett is a vivid presence in all her poetry. This selection from her life’s work opens with a poem written in her last year at school. It begins:

The dark fires shall burn in many rooms;
will they sometimes miss me with my
tangled hair –
still girls in dark uniforms … ?

These two books were written in the last stages of a fatal illness. What is remarkable about them is their poise. They show no signs of anguish, anger, or remorse. They remind us of the discipline of a trained and responsible mind, nimble and true to its calling until the end.

What is it about the Ballets Russes that resonates with so many people? Is it the magic of a redeemed art ordained in a marriage of artists, dancers, and composers overseen by a master celebrant – Sergei Diaghilev? Is it remembrance of a creative fire that burst onto the stage in 1909 and assured a strong future for ballet around the world? The answer is ‘yes’ to both, but I think that what attracts us most is nostalgia for a particular moment in time; the desire to have witnessed those famous performances in the early decades of the last century.

‘Who do you think you are?’ an eminent paediatrician once thundered at me across a child’s cot during his weekly grand ward round. ‘Anton Chekhov?’

I was a lowly medical student; my white student-smock had a small front pocket meant for my doctoring tools; mine contained, a little ostentatiously, a book of poems instead. I had failed to answer a question correctly. His Eminence plucked out the highly visible book, asked a few polite literary questions to lull me, then proceeded to humiliate me in front of the entire ward team, at length. This was before medical schools became more touchy-feely, caring-sharing places; the old-school teaching principle of ‘thalamic learning’ meant that a public humiliation in front of your peers left such an indelible trace that you never made a fatal mistake again.

The four years prior to the period covered by this new volume of Britten’s letters had been difficult for the composer, with the first real setbacks in a hitherto charmed career. In 1954, his opera Gloriana celebrated the dawn of a new Elizabethan age by looking back to the final, troubled years of the first Elizabeth’s reign, in particular her private life. Not only did the opera fail to please the first-night toffs, it was also the subject of questions in the House of Commons, the Establishment having hoped for something more like Merrie England in the coronation year. Then, in 1956, Britten’s only ballet score, The Prince of the Pagodas, caused him unprecedented difficulty: this most fluent and professional of composers was encountering something like writer’s block.

In September 1857, after twenty-one years of marriage, Charles Dickens began the eight-month long process of separating himself from his wife, Catherine. At forty-two years of age, Catherine had given birth to ten children and managed Dickens’s large household. Until the mid 1850s she and Dickens seemed to enjoy a happy partnership, yet by 1858 Catherine was exiled from the family home and cut off from all but one of her children.

Why do you write?

To find cogency, peace, quiet, and joy; to practise radical attention to the world, to be an activist through words, and to forge solidarity through imagination.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Copiously, hyperbolically.

Where are you happiest?

On the road; with a view of the Sea of Mamara; on Yallingup beach in winter; walking almost anywhere.

What am I? A crushed hominid.
A can of couscous, seeding.
A shudder of my former self, a
self-defrosting fridge. Good
with dogs, at looking after dogs,
at looking dog-like.
Mosquito slapper, hopeless unwrapper
of shrink-wrapped cheese.

What am I here for? To look after
my fading father, to bury and speak
when the time comes for scatter and ash.
To be a glorious father, hah.
To bother and fret like waves at a beach.
To be pointless, mute, obtusely loving.

Where do I live? In squalor, dreaming
of valour. In the dingo’s tent
taking what moves. In polar silence
where voices of friends locate me.
In a log cabin with gaps in the walls,
books on the shelves, a ravenous fire
framed and fed, the sea a snore away.

What do I miss? Everything.
A mother’s voice cannot be recalled.
The tall man will never be small again.
The beautiful moments mimicking amber.

When am I happy? In the sea, always,
in the sea on a wave in the sea.
When the backhand winner bludgeons doubt.
When doors are open and weather walks in –
cumulus drama of women, cirrus blokes
streaking the high days with laughter.

Where am I going? Home.
The longed-for soup.
The hand-built fire.
To the garden, often.

Dreams and Artefacts

after the Titanic Artefact Exhibition

Moonlight Sculptures

I could say hello to things.
Theodore Roethke

i.
The hand’s wave,
when it comes –
formal, yet never once the same,
awkward sometimes,
sometimes half-
withheld –
from the sunlight of the brain
makes a shadow of intent.

Something alights
in the meadow of vision.
Shimmering,
electric,
each datum’s serene
in its dance of arrival from the world –
each met by the sprightly
pas de deux of the brain,
holiest union,
whose coda unfolds
in the body’s
archipelagos of darkening
roads,
where the nerve
bulb flashes
and winks out.

ii.
Loveliness and horror pass through
the open gate.
Appear in the field,
and the widening ripples
begin, startled dancers
and audience beyond, all places in the brain
where the judgments
rise and shout.
How do you open
the gate to a birth?
How do you
open the door on a death?
Open, knowing what must
dart out like a cat;
open, knowing
how the rush will numb the fingers
to any further action,
and the mind
be transfixed before the scene.

iii.
Does the tree return her greeting
when a child says hello?
Something happens in the interval of love,
it must, for though the air
is unmoved, time opens and floats
like the seeds
of a dandelion clock.

Then call the tree
by its name:
like the unicorn,
it steps into your mind
and will remain.

iv.
She came to the door
one afternoon, she said,
Have you seen my brother,
we’ve been calling for a week,
my mother’s
worried.
Our neighbour, who was friendly
and young,
kept unusual hours. His door
absorbed her knocking, back,
back,back, back, an
uncrossable field.
At last she said, I’ll go
get the police.
A quiet hour passed.
Then we heard the door
opened, we heard
a woman weeping at the sight.

v.
Yellow leaves on black water,
weeping willow,
and farther, the tree entire mirrored
for a child too young to understand
the doubling
of a thing between image and is,
how the flapping duck scours off the duck afloat on water
as it rises
into all and only what it is, in air.
This is the time
when what does not exist, begins to.
Symbol and thing acquiesce in their merger,
one and the other
are met by the child
with equanimity, the willow
weeps and is greeted
both in water and in air.

Humility

This Version of Love

Empires are out of fashion. The idea of one people ruling over another has had its day. The mention of any empire – with the possible exception of the Roman one, for which people still have a certain fondness – will almost invariably meet with deprecating comments, even derision. The Dutch, the French, the Belgian, the German, the Russian (if it is even remembered that Russia had an empire), and the British empires have all been cast into the dustbin of history and are things to be generally lamented.

In retrospect, it seems hard to explain the widespread influence of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. When he died at the age of one hundred in 2009, the New York Times said in its obituary that he was ‘the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization’. It was a typically inflated assessment. Not so Patrick Wilcken’s excellent biography of Lévi-Strauss, which brings into sharp focus the extremely idiosyncratic nature of his oeuvre, while at the same time showing how it managed to catch a post-World War II Modernist wave of popularity. When the intellectual surf rolled out again later in the century, Lévi-Strauss was left standing alone, but by then that was exactly how he liked it.

Christopher Booker is appalled that humanity has thrown its glimmering record of progress on the pagan bonfire of environmentalist superstition. He is shocked that the scientific community is helplessly in thrall to a cabal of corrupt hacks masquerading under theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s confected rubric. He is dumbfounded that ‘natural’ climatic fluctuations have been spun into some deranged ‘global warming’ conspiracy theory.

At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.

So said President Barack Obama at a memorial service held four days after the attempted assassination of Democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a shopping centre in Tucson, Arizona, on 8 January. The shooting of Giffords and eighteen bystanders – six of whom died – has triggered much debate in the United States as to whether there has been an escalation of violent words and images since the election of Obama and the advent of the insurrectionist-minded Tea Party Movement. On the face of it, there appears to be a case to answer.

Since the mid 1990s, when Robert Putnam lionised the concept in his famous essay ‘Bowling Alone’, writing on ‘social capital’ has proliferated. It caught the eye of politicians, including then United States President Bill Clinton, and for a while it seemed that everyone was lamenting its decline; it became a staple of debate among politicians, within policy networks, and in the major newspapers. Australia had its own proponents, including public intellectual Eva Cox, and former politicians Mark Latham, Lindsay Tanner, Carmen Lawrence, and Peter Costello.

This mammoth book, first published in Italy in 2006, now appears in an English translation. It consists of some four hundred entries on communism as a world movement. The entries cover aspects of communist theory and practice, organisations and institutions, historical events, leading figures, and key concepts. They range in length from less than a thousand to four thousand words.

Black Glass, speculative fiction with a sentimental edge, explores a nation controlled by an intrusive surveillance culture and subliminal social engineering. Set in a dystopian future Melbourne where the formerly affluent inner-city Docklands district has become a ghetto of ‘vacant high-rise towers’ and marginalised ‘undocumented’ persons, Meg Mundell’s first novel outlines the climate in an opening epigraph: ‘There is no legal requirement to submit a full set of personal data to the National Documentation of Identity Database’, Article 18(b) advises, ‘[h]owever, any person whose full data set is not recorded in the Database and updated as stipulated may forfeit certain benefits, privileges and rights outlined in the relevant national and international laws.’

Michael Duffy, perhaps best known as a newspaper columnist and contrarian, and co-presenter with Paul Comrie-Thomson of ABC Radio National’s conservative corrective Counterpoint, has also been an editor, notably of the Independent Monthly (1993–96), and a publisher. In 1996 he set up his own company, Duffy & Snellgrove, which mainly produced serious non-fiction books, but also John Birmingham’s He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (1994) and the poetry of Les Murray. This house regrettably ceased publishing new titles in 2004. Duffy is also the author of Man of Honour (2003), a biography of John Macarthur, and Latham and Abbott (2004),which traced a self-explanatory rivalry.

Mary Queen of Scots, widow of the youthful French king, returns from her long exile in France to a country bereft of pageantry. A young messenger, Robert, gallops through the deserted streets of Edinburgh announcing her contentious return. When Robert’s horse is offered as royal transport to the palace, the flame-haired Mary rejects the side saddle, saying, ‘In France a queen rides astride.’  This moment telegraphs the pre-occupations of Jesse Blackadder’s second novel, The Raven’s Heart, in which history, invention, gender, sexuality, power, expectation, and reality collide.

From Kafka on, we can trace a line of narratives dealing with alienation in the modern workplace, with forces seen and unseen overwhelming individual volition. S.J. Finn’s first novel makes a humorous contribution to this tradition.

Owen Graves, by occupation a house wrecker and by nature a collector, is summoned to the world’s tallest building by the president of Chicago’s First Equitable Insurance Company. Relentless entrepreneur Hale Gray plans to underwrite insurance policies for the masses by seducing them with exotica from the South Sea Islands, as well as live savages in native huts on the roof of his skyscraper. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s travelogues and letters extolling life amid coral reefs and archipelagos, which were published in Chicago’s Tribune, Owen has already been on a collecting expedition. He agrees to Gray’s terms, and takes responsibility for Jethro, Hale’s weak, inept son.

Kotcheff’s Wake

Jake Wilson

Wake in Fright
by Tina Kaufman
Currency Press, $16.95 pb, 72 pp, 9780868198644

Eight years after its launch, the Australian Screen Classics series of monographs represents a valuable, ongoing contribution to local film culture – though the notion of a classic, taken too literally, can halt debate at the moment it ought to begin. That said, few could deny that Wake in Fright (1971), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff, has earned its position in the canon: from The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) to Wolf Creek (2005), countless Australian films have echoed its Gothic depiction of an outback settlement as an all-but-literal hell on earth.

Unlike China, whose history similarly goes back to the Bronze Age, Europe has been shaped by spectacular collapses and profound renewals, first after the Mycenaean Age and then with the fall of the Roman Empire, which severed what we know as Antiquity from the modern world. The new Europe that emerged from half a millennium of turmoil, cultural regression, and repeated invasion by foreign predators was fundamentally transformed. Its centre of gravity had moved from south-east to north-west; its population was largely composed of former Celtic and Germanic barbarians; its new languages were vernaculars emerging from the pidgin Latin spoken by illiterates; and its religion was Christianity. What made it possible for these originally tribal peoples to build Europe was the blueprint of an extraordinary civilisation, which at first they barely understood, but to which they became the unlikely heirs.

The ‘secret language’ of the title of this book covers many kinds and levels of secrecy (things hidden and concealed), and a similar range of languages. The reasons for secrecy in language are manifold, the book argues, and Barry Blake gathers into his survey a vast range of material that illustrates how people can be oblique or indirect in their uses of language, which can be characterised by the blanket term ‘secret’. While the primary focus is on English, Blake often uses examples from past languages (Latin, Greek, Old Norse), from geographically dispersed languages spoken today, and especially from the Australian Aboriginal languages that were his field of expertise when Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University.

This fascinating book tells of the friendship between two Chinese artists: the traditional brush painter Huang Binhong (1865–1955) and the Chinese writer, critic, and translator Fou Lei (1908–66). While the long tail of Modernism swept through the twentieth century, decelerating only during the two world wars, and following reductive tendencies based on the early work of either Picasso or Duchamp, cultural workers in China had to deal with the end of the old imperial order, foreign invasion, the rise of communism, and the imposition of socialist realism, quickly followed by the decade-long Cultural Revolution. Then came Tiananmen Square and its twenty-year aftermath of commercial openness and democratic closure. These were dangerous times, and just as Walter Benjamin in the West committed suicide in the shadow of the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, so too did Fou Lei in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

Now you won’t believe this one, but I’ll tell it anyway. There was a man, a roof tiler, and he was happily married to a woman called Nicole who worked part-time as a nail technician; they had three kids: Nina, Aiden and Jess. For nine years the marriage was fine, as fine as a marriage can be in a world going to hell in a handbasket, but then Steve lost his job. Nicole still had three days at the salon, so that was all right, but then she got laid off too. They started arguing, screaming, throwing things. Nicole said: I can’t do this any more Steve you’ve got to go. Steve said sure I’ll go but I’m not just going to give you the house and the kids and everything – and so began the long and painful process of unpicking the knot and dividing the spoils.

Noel Rowe, poet and critic, was something of an enigma to me. It is hard to believe that he was still in his thirties (just) when I met him in 1990 at the University of Sydney, he a lecturer, I a postgraduate student. Noel seemed to have an enormous wealth of experience, though he was never showy with it. In 1990 he was still a member of the Catholic religious order the Marist Fathers. (He left in 1992.) He had grown up on a farm, and prior to becoming a priest he had intended to be an actor. He had travelled, and he seemed like a far more senior academic than his recently acquired associate lectureship now indicates. (Like most students, I was largely ignorant of the profoundly hierarchical nature of academia.) Despite the fullness of his life, Noel always seemed essentially young, if youth can be defined by an openness to experience. It seems too cruel that such a man should have died at the age of fifty-six, of cancer, in 2007.

In A Fundamental Fear (1997), Bobby Sayyid wrote about the spectre of Islam haunting the West. Important to this ‘hauntology’ is Muhammad: the last prophet of Islam. From the English chronicler Venerable Bede, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther to the Pentagon’s defence intelligence secretary, William Boykin, many have depicted Muhammad as the obverse of everything the West and Christianity regards as good. In Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas wrote that Muhammad ‘gave free rein to carnal desire’ and ‘those who believed in him from the outset were … beastlike men’. Striking is the parallel drawn by Luther: ‘The coarse and filthy Muhammad takes all women and therefore has no wife. The chaste pope does not take any wife and yet has all women.’ In TheChurch and the Political Problem of our Day (1939), Karl Barth, regarded as ‘the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas’ by Pope Pius XII, made a peculiar observation: ‘It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s prophet.’ To the American evangelicals, he is a ‘demon-possessed paedophile’ (all unreferenced quotes from Frederick Quinn’s The Sum of All Heresies, 2008). The latest example is The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (2007) by Robert Spencer.

At the centre of Reading on the Farm stands a large colonial library of just over 2000 volumes. The library belonged to Brancepeth Farm, a sheep station in the Wairarapa Valley of New Zealand, which, at its height in the late 1890s, employed more than three hundred staff. Brancepeth’s library, consisting principally of contemporary Victorian fiction, about half of it written by women, was considered by its users to be one of the best station libraries in its day, certainly superior to the publicly funded library at Masterton, the nearest town. Remarkably, Brancepeth’s library was never dispersed or culled but has survived intact, gifted in 1966 to Victoria University of Wellington by the Beetham family. The literary and artistic Beethams emigrated from England in the 1850s and became some of New Zealand’s greatest ‘sheeplords’ in the late nineteenth century.

When Bouvard and Pécuchet suddenly become enamoured of landscape design in Flaubert’s novel of 1881, and decide to remodel their own garden, they are bewildered by the ‘infinity of styles’ that are available to them. After much deliberation and research, they decide to install an Etruscan tomb with an inscription, a Rialto, a Chinese pagoda, a mount, and topiary in the shape of peacocks, stags, pyramids, and armchairs. Despite these ‘improvements’, however, when Bouvard and Pécuchet proudly unveil the garden for the first time at dinner, their guests fail to respond as they had hoped; that is, according to predetermined categories of response, which include the Melancholy or Romantic, the Exotic, the Pensive, the Mysterious, and the Fantastic.

When pressed during a Radio National interview last year to identify how Kill Your Darlings differentiates itself from other Australian literary journals, editor Rebecca Starford said, ‘We want to be publishing fiction and non-fiction that has a fearlessness to it, that is frank, that is offering alternative perspectives.’ The fourth issue of this journal pursues this mission with thought-provoking commentary, fiction, and reviews.

A declaration of interest is in order. I have twice appeared in the pages of HEAT. I am also in the latter stages of a doctorate, which I have been writing for the past few years under the supervision of HEAT’s editor, Ivor Indyk. Under normal circumstances, I would decline to review a new edition of the journal for these reasons. The latest edition is, however, of particular significance, for it is the last that will appear in print form. It is important to stress the qualification: Indyk has stated that he is interested in reinventing the journal in an electronic format. But it is difficult not to feel that the occasion has the sense of an ending about it. Whatever form HEAT may take in the future, its life as a printed journal, which began in 1996 and continued through two series of fifteen and twenty-four editions, respectively, is now over.

Australian and New Zealand universities have for more than a century produced significant numbers of medieval and early modern literary scholars and historians. Formerly, full international recognition was won by many who moved to the northern hemisphere, but, happily, in these days of the global scholarly community, those who have chosen to make their careers at home are now accorded recognition and acclaim by their colleagues abroad. Parergon will next year celebrate its fortieth birthday; the journal’s belated coming of age is a tribute to a series of dedicated editors, the most recent being Anne M. Scott and Andrew Lynch at the University of Western Australia.

Once mainly associated with shrill killjoys and desiccated reductionists, atheism has recently received a jolt of adrenaline from Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Yet while these writers delight in exposing religion’s philosophical deficiencies, their tone is predominantly negative. Fortunately, The Australian Book of Atheism goes beyond simply rehashing the New Atheists’ explanations of Why God Doesn’t Exist. Divided into ‘Overview’, ‘Personal’, ‘Education’, ‘Social and Cultural’, ‘Politics’, ‘Philosophy’, and ‘Religion and the Brain’, this collection offers a more nuanced picture of atheism than does the recent crop of celebrity-authored blockbusters.

With the centrepiece of its glorious Edmund Blacket building and its noble quadrangle, the University of Sydney is Australia’s oldest and grandest institution of higher learning – an adornment both to its city and to the nation since its foundation in 1852. Less well known, even in Sydney, is that the university is home to a remarkable accumulation of cultural and scientific treasures – some seven hundred thousand artefacts and objects – held within its museums and collections: the Nicholson and Macleay Museums, the University Art Gallery, the rare books collection of the Fisher Library and university archives, and numerous faculty-based research collections. Last year marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first of these collections, the Nicholson Museum, named after its first benefactor, Sir Charles Nicholson, founding father of the university, its first provost, and later its chancellor. His gift in 1860 of a collection of one thousand or more antiquities from Egypt, Greece, and Italy was intended to provide a foundation for academic learning. More than that, as David Malouf observes, there was the ambition that Australia, for all its strangeness and distance (‘[this] odd corner of the world’), would find new ways to honour the classical culture from which it too had sprung.

The latest crop of children’s picture books highlights the ability of this versatile genre to cover everything from the ever-popular animal tale, to sparkling stories about fairies, to introspective contemplations on the meaning of life.

Six people. Five seatbelts. Six teenagers involved in a horrific car crash. But who has died? After this reader-catching prologue, Karen Tayleur’s Six jumps backwards to follow the teenagers through half of their final year at high school. Sarah, though organised and dutiful, has doubts about her future career path. Her best friend, the possibly psychic Poppy, has recently added stressed-out athlete Nico to her long string of boyfriends. Sarah’s secret crush, Finn, and his long-term girlfriend Virginia have pretended to break up. And Cooper? Cooper’s just creepy. One summer day, a discovery in the woods and a few bad choices link five of the six teenagers. School, relationships, license tests, upcoming exams and parties dominate their everyday lives, but the memory of that day remains. And when Nico starts to receive anonymous I Know What You Did Last Summer-style text messages, he realises that a sixth person shares knowledge of their secret.