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On paper, jazz critic John Shand’s Jazz: The Australian Accent is a welcome intervention, one of the first books to take Australian jazz seriously. Shand’s prose is well paced and easy to read, if slightly glib. There is little obfuscation in his method, which is infinitely preferable to the pretensions of many jazz critics who fail to translate jazz into prose. Shand’s descriptions of music are engaging enough to make you want to listen to the musicians whose work he is describing, if only to confirm or deny the mutedly rhapsodic element of Shand’s descriptors. Unfortunately, they generally don’t live up to his prose, which you’ll discover when listening to the compilation CD that accompanies this book.

On 4 October 1918, one month before he was killed, Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother describing the ‘mop-up’ operations in which his division was engaged. ‘It passed the limits of my Abhorrence. I lost all my earthly faculties and fought like an angel.’ Owen assured his beloved mother that his nerves were ‘in perfect order’. This letter, written by the poet who gave us ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, the metaphor of a generation sacrificed like cattle on the battlefield, is a terrible indictment of war and its effect on the human psyche.

The La Trobe Library Journal began life in 1968 as a modest, even dowdy sixteen-pager produced by the Friends of the (still very new) La Trobe Library. Its purpose was to publicise the Library and its holdings. For the first decade of its existence, the journal was edited by that quiet achiever of Australian letters, Geoffrey Serle. Over the following twenty years it was edited, and largely written, by a succession of librarians, high-lighting not only the riches of the Library’s collections but also the calibre of its staff.

The first thing that struck me on picking up Tatjana Lukic’s posthumous collection, la, la, la, is the impressive appearance of this Five Islands Press publication. High-quality production hasn’t always been a feature of this press, but it is now under the new publishing team. Lukic’s volume joins other attractive collections by poets such as Louise Oxley, Barry Hill and Judy Johnson.

There are a hundred ways of putting together any anthology, most of which are going to annoy somebody. In the case of that much sought-after beast, Australian literature, editors have a fair chance of turning into the quarry. It is not so long since J.I.M. Stewart said, from his chair of English in Adelaide, that there wasn’t any Australian literature so he was going to lecture on D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo instead.

I once visited John Batman’s property in north-east Tasmania, happily in the company of a Tasmanian. The guidebook listed it as a heritage site on a public road, but the graded track along the side of a ridge had to be entered by a gate marked ‘Kingston – Private Property’. We drove several kilometres before reaching another gate. We breached this, too. On our left was a nineteenth-century stone cottage incorporated into a weatherboard homestead. On our right was a large shed and stables. A generator puttered away, and music came from the house. We shouted our presence. Only the horse in the stables responded. Clearly, we were not going to find a stall selling Batman memorabilia.

Janette Turner Hospital is an Australian-born novelist with an international reputation, though Australian readers often have reservations about her work. She has written some brilliant short stories, but her novels can strain for effect, with insistent intellectual allusions and postmodern shifts of fictional status. Perhaps, though, this is a typical Australian response to an expatriate writer whose work is not immediately accessible. Australian critics have not been as willing to praise Hospital as some North American readers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who, on the cover of Rainforest Narratives, describes Hospital as ‘a writer of consummate craft and visionary insight’.