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We use the term ‘The Dreaming’ to refer to an Aboriginal way of thinking about their place in the universe; it is ‘a cosmology, an ancestral order, and a mytho-ritual structure’, in the words of Canadian anthropologist Sylvie Poirier. The Western Desert people with whom she lived for many months in the 1980s and 1990s (the Kukatja – though she acknowledges the difficulties of such labels) call it tjukurrpa, a term whose meanings include ‘story’. The stories are about the world- and knowledge-creating ancestral creatures. In the Kukatja world, as manifested in the Western Australian communities of Wirramanu, Mulan and Yagga Yagga, the more prominent stories are about Luurn (kingfisher), Wati Kutjarra (two initiated men), Kanaputa (digging stick women), Marlu (kangaroo), Karnti (yam) and Warnayarra (rainbow snake). When Kukatja narrate the travels of these creatures, they select segments in the itinerary that account for the narrator him or herself as a person who belongs to the places named in the story.

Ross McMullin’s Will Dyson is a new edition of a book that first appeared twenty years ago. Over that time,  the author has promoted his subject, according to the book’s subtitle, from ‘Cartoonist, Etcher and Australia’s Finest War Artist’ to ‘Australia’s Radical Genius’. ‘Genius’ is a strong word, and the new edition does not make a case for its use any more than the old one did. But Dyson is certainly an important, often unregarded, figure in the history of political cartooning. The story of this talented, likeable, thoroughly political man is well worth knowing on many fronts: as a saga of early Melbourne working-class bohemian culture, as an example of the invigorating effect on English political cartooning by antipodean artists in the early part of the twentieth century (the career of David Low shadows that of Dyson), and as an account of the way that World War I registered on a sensitive, and responsible, Australian imagination.

Due to some clever product placement (James Bond and wife bashing) Diane Cilento’s Nine Lives have become public property, even before the reader picks up the book. We know it all: she is a member of a celebrated Australian family and made her reputation in some famous movies; she had three husbands, including two well-known ones; she set up a theatre commune in North Queensland. We even know from the gossip columns details that are not in the book: the farcical story of the last days of her third husband, the wonderful Tony Shaffer (worth a hundred Sean Connerys), his London mistress and the Shaffer inheritance. I flick through the book, notice the enthusiastic style, look at the not-quite-thrilling photographs, dip into the quite amusing anecdotes, and study the index in vain for the name Jo Jo Capece Minutolo, Tony’s mistress, whom everyone has been talking about. She has called the book ‘inappropriate’; Connery has called it ‘a crock of shit’.

On a cold, grey day in February this year, economist Larry H. Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard. Though some undergraduates gathered in Harvard Yard to wave signs saying ‘Stay Summers Stay’, the rift with faculty and the governing board proved too much. Summers issued a dignified letter to the Harvard community, shook hands with well-wishers, and disappeared.

A personal renaissance, with a raison d’ệtre of such significance that it shifts the reverie of the characters in this book into a dimension of former youthfulness and revitalises the possibilities that seem to vanish with age: On a Wing and a Prayer is about friendship, loyalty and respect in the lives of three ordinary people drawn together under extraordinary circumstances in a small country town in central New South Wales. It confounds the adage that once you have reached a certain stage in life there is no further use for you.

‘Black Widow’ is the name given to the female Chechen rebels, who were widows of insurgents killed by the Russian army in Chechnya. They went on to serve under Shamil Basayev, leader of the Beslan school siege in September 2004. Sandy McCutcheon has set his latest political thriller two years later, in a story of revenge orchestrated by six female teachers at Beslan, who take on the guise of black widows to turn the tables on the hostage-takers.

Sometimes, the middle ground is a good place to be. The Shifting Fog is classy commercial fiction that sits happily in the space between literary fiction and mass-market trash. It might occupy the middle ground, but it’s far from middle of the road. First-time author Kate Morton (recipient of the six-figure sums for deals in eleven countries that publisher Allen & Unwin is happily hyping) has skilfully and intelligently created a novel that is indeed, as the publicity has it, ‘compulsively readable’.

Perhaps only John Shaw Neilson and Judith Wright have brought an equal sense of place to Australian poetry: the sense of place as a fact of consciousness with geographic truth. But in his latest collection, Biplane Houses, Les Murray considers more airy habitations – flights, cliff roads and weather – and the collection has a matching airiness that is only sometimes lightness ...