Netflicks is the first book in UWAP’s ‘Vignettes’ series. The series’ brief is to introduce readers to contemporary scholarly thinking about pressing issues of modern life in the format of short, lucid books. Judging from the first iteration, ‘Vignettes’ promises to offer complex and coherent readings of the world we live in now, informed by deep knowledge but wearing its learning lightly. Netflicks is written in accessible prose that invites the reader into the scholarly analysis of television, should they be new to it, with clear and uncomplicated language. When technical concepts are introduced, the author makes sure to provide a definition and to justify his deployment of what might seem to be jargon.

Shortly after Black Saturday, David Lindenmayer was giving a seminar on post-bushfire recovery when a member of the audience yelled out, ‘If it wasn’t for you greenies, none of this would have happened.’ Lindenmayer’s response was neither defence nor attack, but rather to rephrase the man’s words. ‘Your hypothesis,’ he said, ‘is that a fire in a forest that is logged and regenerated will be less severe than a fire in an intact forest.’ Many years of research followed this heckle. The result? A counter-intuitive finding that fire severity increases in logged forests.

It is only a coincidence that my book Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths, the first in a two-volume cultural biography of the Australian author, ends in 1974 – the same year that Copyright Agency was incorporated – and that it was published in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this incorporation. As Moorhouse himself always argued, such coincidences, chance happenings, and historical accidents are often far more important in shaping our culture than we like to concede.

Studies of ‘regional modernisms’ have frequently framed the non-metropolitan in strictly Northern Hemisphere terms, construing London or New York as centres of innovation, and cities and towns further afield – but still in the same country or region as those art-world capitals – as the belated adopters of phenomena that are often perceived as the province of metropolitan actors and audiences. Margot Osborne’s monumental volume The Adelaide Art Scene: Becoming contemporary 1939-2000 tells a far more complex story of modernism’s reach, impact, and legacies in twentieth-century art practice. In forensic detail, Osborne and her contributors explore the ways in which modernism’s significance was expressed in and affected a city that found itself both connected to and rival with Sydney and Melbourne, as well as with the established international centres. Whether through the training or travel of artists who called South Australia home at one point or another in their lives, Adelaide has been an important node in those movements for longer than many might imagine.

Kevin Hart’s Dark-Land is the memoir of a distinguished poet and scholar who was born in England in 1954, moved with his family to Queensland when he was eleven, and migrated again in 2002 to the United States, where he is currently Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. Dark-Land is well-written and amusing, with memorable vignettes ranging from his time in a London primary school to his bonding as an Australian teenager with his cat Sooty. On a wider spectrum, though, Dark-Land addresses more weighty concerns around time, memory, and intellectual or religious illumination. He recalls as a child listening to a BBC performance of the allegorical journey invoked in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he describes himself now as ‘still clambering up the hill I had known since childhood in London’. The title of his memoir signals this putative passage from darkness into light.

In late 1999, NASA announced that its Mars Climate Orbiter, a multi-million-dollar robot probe designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was lost somewhere in space. The craft had failed to manoeuvre into its optimal orbit, ending either on a course towards the sun or in a fatal collision with the red planet. Investigations uncovered the source of the blunder: one team working on the orbiter had been using metric measurements, another team had been using imperial.

One of the joys of reading – and a point of difference from narratives told on the various screens we turn to for leisure – is imagining a story’s mise en scène. Our mental pictures (termed phantasia by a group of British neurologists) are a strange alchemy of images from our memories, thoughts, and dreams. Though visualisation is not a universal experience, many readers may comment that a book-to-film adaptation was ‘exactly as I pictured it’ or else ‘nothing like what I saw in my mind’s eye’.

You need to look closely at the cover of Shankari Chandran’s novel Safe Haven to notice the sharp edges of the deceptively inviting image it depicts: the handcuffs, the barbed wire, the boat that seems to sit on top of the waves and yet be at the bottom of the sea, and the rebuke contained in the book’s title.

‘Everyone allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.’ So said Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Even allowing for Regency hyperbole, there is some truth in the sally. We think of the inimitable letters of Emily Dickinson, who once wrote to a succinct correspondent: ‘It were dearer had you protracted it, but the Sparrow must not propound his crumb.’ In 2001, Gregory Kratzmann edited A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood, 1943-1995. Anyone who ever received a letter or postcard from Harwood – surely our finest letter writer – knows what an event that was. She was nonpareil: witty, astringent, frank, irrepressible. Now we have this welcome collection of letters written by Elizabeth Harrower and Shirley Hazzard (unalphabetised on the cover, in a possible concession to the expatriate Hazzard’s international fame).

One of Caledonian Road’s primary characters, Milo Mangasha, tends to speak in political slogans, which his childhood friend identifies as ‘college talk’. Readers may recognise in Milo the rhetoric of characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s previous novel, Mayflies (2020), a popular and critical success that was subsequently adapted for television. Like Mayflies, Caledonian Road is stridently certain about its political and moral positions. It reads like a passionate argument for purification. In this fictional world, set in contemporary Britain, a person who maintains ties with corrupt and wealthy conservatives, while voicing left-wing principles and ideals, risks a ‘crack-up’. Failing the test of moral consistency turns you into a cipher, a hollow man, a danger to yourself and others.