The Karratha Gas Plant sits on the Burrup Peninsula, a short drive from Dampier in the remote north-west of Western Australia. From a visitors centre perched on a hill above it, you get a spectacular view of the giant facility: stretching over two square kilometres, it is bound by the blue waters of Withnell Bay and the red rock hills of the Murujuga National Park. The first time she took in this vista, author and journalist Marian Wilkinson was stunned. ‘No image’, she writes, ‘quite captures its breathtaking size and scale.’

Walter Lippmann might be the defining example of a public intellectual. He profoundly influenced public and political debate in America during the twentieth century. A prolific journalist and columnist, he also published ten major books and even more edited collections and compilations. The best of these were thought-provoking disquisitions on public opinion, communications, politics, international relations, and the ways in which liberal thought has developed in the United States. His was, argues Tom Arnold-Forster, ‘a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics’.

With a title that grabs the attention of readers and a subject deserving of a wide readership, I eagerly awaited Julie Marcus’s Sex and Savagery in the Good Colony: South Australia 1836-1901. As an anthropologist who specialises in depictions of race, gender, and sexuality, Marcus is well placed to survey the historical sources and provide fresh insights into early cross-cultural relations, frontier violence, the mistreatment of Aboriginal women, as well as the enduring impacts of colonialism in South Australia. Unfortunately, red flags appeared in short succession.

Adorning the cover of The Wurrumbar, a début novel by William J. Byrne, is a green and brown yabby, an Australian freshwater crustacean; it emerges from slimy brown water and is at once sinister and potentially delicious. I remember catching them in much the same way as the young protagonist does in the novel, crouching by a clear pond in the bush with some bloody meat in a paper bag ready to tie on to a piece of string and catch a big fat yabby to boil in a billy on a fire. In some ways, this novel captures parts of my life, and for that reason it calls to my heart and no doubt conjures childhood memories for countless older readers.

I was weaned on Blackadder. It was a series that hit its comedy straps when Ben Elton came on board for the 1986 second season to begin his immensely fruitful collaboration with Richard Curtis. Blackadder played a similar role in my childhood to Horrible Histories in the next generation. Its third season should probably take at least partial blame for the decades I spent studying Britain’s Georgian decades.

Every book is snared in the time and place in which it is written. Few authors create work that remains eternally relevant, not only because books that appear groundbreaking when published can easily date or pale with the passage of time, but for more prosaic reasons as well. Given that approximately 23,000 books are published annually in Australia alone, few survive on the shelf beyond a year or two, and even fewer become embedded in the nation’s literary imagination. Still, most authors dream of writing a ‘classic’ – even a minor classic will do.

This is not really a book about Australian foreign policy in the Trump era. It is, however, an attempt to chart the coordinates of President Trump’s approach to the world in his second term. It depicts Australia, not unlike most other US allies in Europe and Asia, scrambling to remain relevant to Washington as the fond and the familiar in the international system are tossed to and fro by the latest Trump hurricane. Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer in the Australian army and now Professor of International and Political Studies at UNSW, is damning of the inability of successive Australian governments to explain to the Parliament or the Australian people why Australia has become, in his words, a ‘US sentinel state’, alongside the Republic of Korea and Japan. The strongest parts of the book are those which ask precisely how this state of affairs has eventuated. The questions are vital, but Fernandes knows that they are unlikely to be answered by this government.

I cannot recall an Australian history book that has received more reviews so soon after its release than Tony Abbott’s recent offering, Australia: A history. Frank Bongiorno, Michelle Arrow, Marilyn Lake, Jane Lydon, Marcia Langton, and even former Australian of the Year Grace Tame have all given their thoughts on Abbott’s tome. The reviews have ranged from mildly positive to utterly scathing. This is hardly surprising, given how polarised opinions are of the former prime minister. Mostly, however, responses from leading historians have challenged the book’s ideological framing, selective storytelling, and the marginalisation of Indigenous and feminist perspectives. This book is in every sense Tony’s Abbott’s ideologically partisan, aspirational history of Australia for Australians.

Mariana Enríquez is deep in the catacombs beneath Montparnasse, the dead arranged in obedient rows. She has a plan. All she needs is a distraction, and one arrives in the form of a fainting tourist, a convenient wuss. The man falls hard – his skull thwacks the stone floor – and Enríquez seizes her moment. She slips into an alcove, works a slim bone loose, and slides it into her jacket sleeve ‘like a knife’. She strolls out past the exit guard and into the Paris daylight. ‘Is it a serious crime to steal a bone?’ she asks. ‘The catacombs are a museum, after all. But I feel so innocent!’

She brings a bag of bundled shades of wool
which overflows beside her corner table
and from it draws a choice of yarn, a range
of needles, lays them out as a surgeon might,
as a thief would, surveying a challenging vault.