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On 15 February 2005 the Labor Opposition launched a ‘matter of public importance’ (MPI) debate on ‘truth in government’ in the House of Representatives. An MPI debate is really only an invitation to comment on a ‘matter for discussion’, with no vote taken, as would be the case in a censure motion. The parliamentary discussion is simply timed out. But it is a useful opposition tactic for getting arguments and evidence on the public record.

Dreams of leaving can be a powerful force in the lives of young people. These four novels are each touched by the desire for other places. The idea that a more authentic self lurks beyond our familiar zones shapes these books, three of which are written by Australians, and one by an American writer who spends half his time in Australia and half in New York.

A number of the poems in Lidija Cvetkovic’s first book stem from revisiting places and people in the war-torn country of her birth, the former Yugoslavia, but the poetry springs from an interrelated heritage. An Eastern European sensibility guides this poetry, informing and being informed by laconic Australian understanding. Poems that speak of ethnic and regional conflict, and of self, lovers and family in two continents, are woven into the same breath; and as the inexplicable in human experience is measured, a quiet celebration of human resilience can be heard.

The country south-west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where wild rivers tumble from stony ramparts through coastal scrub plain to the sea, was one of the last places in Australia where settlement was attempted; more integrated with Asia to the north – thanks partly to the sojourning Macassans – than Melbourne or Sydney to the south, let alone London; a world where Aboriginal society was strong enough to resist dispossession, surviving, despite everything, to this day. It has also been something of a last frontier for historians.

The beauty of ‘chick lit’ is the discussion of sometimes quite painful, but always familiar scenarios surrounding love, life and happiness, in an open and self-deprecating way. Apparently, it doesn’t pay to take yourself too seriously when it comes to matters of the heart, and rightly so – why weep when you can have a good laugh? In The Catch, Marg Vandeleur’s first novel, the search for happiness is complicated by the plight of the woman whose sudden desire for a child is thwarted by a clutch of eggs past their prime and nary a bloke in sight. Social commentators, researchers, religious leaders and feminists have all put their oar in over the last year or so on this topic. Now it’s time for ‘chick lit’ to have its say.

‘If goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will.’ This prescient remark was made by the Western Australian politician Sir Hal Colebatch, well before the German and Japanese armies started their march in 1936. In a federation not lacking in strong state politicians – Thomas Playford, Henry Bolte, Don Dunstan, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Charles Court and Jeff Kennett come to mind for the twentieth century – Colebatch (1872–1953) stands out by virtue of his interests and priorities. He is a reminder (and the eastern states often need reminding) that Western Australia has been from the start, and remains to some degree, another country.

Few Australian authors have been so prolific or so well-rewarded for their labours: twenty-six novels, as well as plays and a reluctant memoir; not to mention advances – in the 1960s – of hundreds of thousands of American dollars per book. How many of our writers have sold copies of their works in tens of millions, let alone been translated into twenty-seven languages at last count? None has been so prescient in his fiction, whether predicting papal succession, international terrorism, the quagmire of Vietnam, or another Arab–Israeli war. Yet the author of whom all this is more or less true is largely without critical honour in his own country. The author is Morris West (1916–99), who had the distinction of emulating Charles Dickens by dying at his desk with an unfinished manuscript before him. In West’s case, this was The Last Confession (2001), another of his attempts to understand the brave heretic and Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno. Of Bruno, West wrote ‘the better I knew him, the more modern I found him’.

Australian folk memory of the Pacific War centres on specific events – the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin – events overlaid by semi-mythical visions of an insomniac prime minister and his cable wars with Winston Churchill, and of epics of soldierly endurance on the Kokoda Trail. The horrors of the Thailand–Burma railway belong, in a sense, to the immediate postwar period, when the stories of liberated survivors penetrated the national consciousness. The horrifying images of emaciated men with gaunt faces and prominent ribs brand that generation and, to some extent, their children. In the diaries of Weary Dunlop and in Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo (1946), the immediate postwar Australia was given a vivid picture of Japanese cruelty and Australian suffering.