In one of the later short stories in Michael Farrell’s The Victoria Principle, a man anonymised as ‘Bill’ is prompted by an anecdote recounted in a university swimming pool change room to reflect on possible excuses not to arm-wrestle. This does not seem to have been a topic of interest for Bill previously. Indeed, the narrator concedes that for Bill’s ‘milieus (overlapping academic and creative)’ arm-wrestling was given little thought, if any.

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.

The history of the Pilbara is distinctive, but its contours are those of Australian history in miniature. Successive resource booms have saddled that part of Western Australia with the weight of immense national expectation. The rise and fall of trade unionism was compressed into a few short decades in the Pilbara’s iron ore mines, where compulsory unionism once made workers immensely powerful, and where the decline in union membership now leaves them highly exposed to managerial agendas.

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.

Science communication is a basic skill for all scientists, even if it is mostly performed for a restricted academic audience. Nonetheless, all scientists must also write for broader audiences – and some have turned this into an art form. Such practitioners of accessible ‘scientific writing’ have a slightly different task to the ‘science writing’ of writer/journalists who report on, rather than from within, the field. Popular scientific writing engages not just the general public, but also other scientists. Such long-form writing often generates new insights and knowledge by synthesising broad fields of fragmented or isolated disciplinary components, thereby creating new paradigms. These are often the books that change the way we see, think about, and study the world.

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.

A scanning of programs on any streaming service will reveal that the phenomenon of the cult, both real and imagined, continues to fascinate the public imagination. One notorious historical example, and the subject of recent documentaries and a gripping TV series, is a group called The Family, which operated undetected from the late 1960s for over twenty years in a secluded rural property near Lake Eildon in Victoria. What makes this case so unusual is the fact that its leader was a woman: the glamorous, pathologically narcissistic Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Shockingly, as many as twenty-eight of the victims were children who were subject to brainwashing and sustained physical abuse. Discovered and released in 1987, many of those children suffered lasting trauma and some committed suicide. In a stroke of terrible irony, Hamilton-Byrne never faced justice for her heinous crimes because the law judged the testimony of the children to be unreliable.

What is immediately striking about Kirli Saunders’s Eclipse and Anne-Marie Te Whiu’s Mettle is that although both collections have much in common it is the differences that engage the reader. Saunders is a Gurnai woman and Te Whiu an Australian of Māori heritage: both poets write with an assurance and freedom founded on their respective heritages and the political struggles of an earlier generation of First Nations writers. In consequence, the poetry in both collections is precise and individual in its consideration and depiction of contemporary First Nation lives and subjectivities.

The First Cold War is an account of 300 years of British-Russian relations, from mutual incomprehension to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which reached an accommodation between the great powers. This proved remarkably stable and provided the basis for resisting German aggression in the twentieth century. It only ended in 1949 when the next cold war began.

An unknown woman – traumatised, amnesiac, unable to speak – is found just north of Broken Hill in western New South Wales. Who she is and what happened to her is the question that drives Gail Jones’s twelfth novel, The Name of the Sister.