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It is no easy task for an outsider to anatomise a national cinema, and the Austrian academic Adi Wimmer suggests in this series of essays that Australian cinema has always been more national than most. In other words, our filmmakers have been unusually dedicated to the project of defining a collective identity through a set of instantly recognisable myths: the ultimate Australian film would be one that showed a group of sun-bronzed, laconic, Anglo-Saxon blokes battling droughts and big business in a wide brown land seen equally as a symbol of brooding masculinity and as a hostile mother.

Barcroft Boake is remembered as one of the lesser lights in the school of Bush poets publishing in the Sydney Bulletin in the late nineteenth century. Two facts are probably known to most people who have heard of him: that he wrote a gloomy but impressive and memorable poem, much anthologised, called ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’, and that he hanged himself with his stock-whip when young. (Some, mindful of Keats, might guess he was twenty-six when he died, and they would be right.)

This is a book about warfare, battles and the preparations for them. It is not comprehensive but it is systematic, for it selects major periods or episodes in Western military history in the last one thousand years and, by applying economic theory, tries to pluck lessons from them. It extends from the mania for building fortified castles in medieval times to the bombing of Nazi Germany and the economics of the recent crusade against terrorism.

When applied to art and literature, the word ‘serious’ can be used to suggest a work is substantial and important, not necessarily that it is the opposite of humorous. There is a sense in which Rabelais and Cervantes are serious writers. But the slippage between these two meanings – the fact that our language permits a casual conflation of worthiness and sincerity – reflects a long-standing cultural prejudice which relegates comedy to a second tier, as if a talent for provoking laughter were somehow less praiseworthy than a talent for inspiring pity and terror. Tragedy is often assumed to be profound and ennobling, but comedy’s levelling tendencies, the anarchic implications of mockery and unbridled laughter, are apt to be viewed with suspicion.

Books may furnish a room but they also furnish the mind. As somebody once said, ‘A man is known by the company his mind keeps’. One of my first moves on visiting a home is to check out the bookshelves, to discover something about the owner’s mind. Bob Carr, New South Wales’s longest-serving premier, has conveniently outlined his reading life in this opinionated, sometimes infuriating but always compelling account, which allows us to read his mind without physically visiting his library.

A Fraction of the Whole is Sydney author Steve Toltz’s sprawling début. Wearing its misanthropic heart uproariously on its sleeve, Fraction is a long father-and-son tale that traverses continents and nods to countless literary forebears on its way.