Carbon is, to quote Paul Hawken’s opening, ‘the narrator of lives born and lost’. It ‘organises, assembles, and builds … the most socially adept entrepreneur in the pantheon of life’. One could, with only a little exaggeration, apply this description to the author of Carbon: The book of life.

What was the point of a landscape’s allegories,
or the show of fractured bedrock in Bellini’s
Transfiguration, the way it caught the folding
and tightening, the rough-shod squeezing of old
strata, and the intrusion of the igneous, ferns’

What can a reader expect from the ‘shortest’ history of anything? Probably something that gives basic information about that subject with a possible admixture of humour and a fresh approach that conceals the gaps that brevity inevitably produces. Mart Kuldkepp’s shortest history of Scandinavia achieves these goals skilfully and can be trusted to provide the general reader with a reliable narrative. It also succeeds in analysing what it is about the countries that we call Scandinavia that makes them special, creating a sense of ‘Nordicness’ that is recognised by both insiders and outsiders.

On the evening of Boxing Day 1900, a spectacular pantomime premiered at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney in honour of the imminent federation of the Australian colonies. A theatrical ‘extravaganza’, Australis presented an image of the fledging nation one hundred years hence. In the pantomime’s vision, Australia in the year 2000 is ruled by a former trade unionist, ‘the Boss’, who leads an expedition to annex Antarctica, forming a ‘Great Empire of the South’. One advantage of this move, notes the Boss, is that the capital of the Australian empire can be located on the geographic south pole, thus resolving the dispute between Sydney and Melbourne. Clearly, the pantomime’s librettists (who included theatrical entrepreneur J.C. Williamson) were not above political satire. What Australis also suggests is that there existed genuine popular enthusiasm for an Australian Antarctic empire.

The enduring legacies of Covid-19 have been linked to a post- or new-normal era defined by everything from chronic debt to the rise of Big Data and the lingering unease any of us might feel in a crowd. Those transformations are placed in fresh perspective by Sheilagh Ogilvie’s reminder that humanity has experienced a severe pandemic roughly every five generations since the Black Death scythed across Europe for nearly a decade from 1346. ‘History seethes with epidemics,’ Ogilivie writes. Her interest is in how societies have responded across that long time span. What resources have been mobilised to ‘control contagion’? What changed with, and can be learnt from, those cycles in humanity’s extreme if episodic vulnerability to microbes?

This is a sombre, sad, and at times angry book. It is also a wise book. The sister of one of those Australian prisoners of war in World War II who died at Ambon wrote: ‘Everyone who was touched by Ambon has a crying heart which will never leave them.’ Of an initial force, since known as Gull Force, of 1,131 men, 779 were killed in action or died as prisoners. There were many crying hearts in Australia.

For the past year, I’ve thought deeply and often about rivers, one in particular. The Maribyrnong River is 160 km long and runs from Mount Macedon to Port Phillip Bay. The name, adapted from the languages of the Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung and Bunurong, who called it Mirring-gnay-bir-nong, purportedly means ‘I can hear a ringtail possum’. Initially known by British settlers as the Saltwater River because it is tidal, the Maribyrnong has a gritty history. In Footscray it served as a drain for the noxious industries that lined its banks for decades. The Maribyrnong appears every now and then in the news when it floods, as a place from which stolen cars are dredged, or when bodies wash up.

The cover of the paperback version of Ian Leslie’s John and Paul comes with an extraordinary claim from British journalist Cailtin Moran celebrating ‘the first new Beatles story in decades’ (my emphasis). Really? Don’t we know everything about the band already? Do we need another book? Sure we do, after all, the Beatles are a monumental and serious subject for investigation. For instance, as Leslie recalls, the double A-sided single ‘Penny Lane’/ ‘Strawberry Fields’ was nominated by one critic as the greatest work of art of the last century. For some, this is an extraordinary claim, but then that is part of the joy of thinking about and being affected by the Beatles.

Australia is a weird place. A backwater colonial outpost settled by racist squatters and their indentured convict servants, it is a country forever defined by its isolation, in every sense, from the rest of the world. Faster than Barron Field could say ‘kangaroo’, an Empire crashed onto the shores of the First Peoples who had been cultivating a narrative tradition since time immemorial, and set about writing a (manifest) destiny of its own.

Tasmania punches above its weight in the literary world, as elsewhere. And not before time: traditionally it always seemed marginal and could be left off the map of Australia on logos. A change came about fifty years ago, with the emergence of the Greens and the campaigns to save Lake Pedder and the Franklin River. Now, what with quality food and wines and MONA and MOFO – plus something of a southward migration given climate change – Tasmania has become trendy. But it remains a place where the past lingers.