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Over the past four years, we Australians have had considerable experience of the conflicted, and sometimes agonising, politics of war. In this study, Michael A. McDonnell, a historian at the University of Sydney, examines the unanticipated social and political contestations aroused by the demands of another war. In the late eighteenth century, Virginia endured a six-year struggle against the imperial rule of Britain. A settled class of wealthy gentlemen planters who had previously assumed the right to leadership came to find that role questioned in a wholly new politics of war. Middle- and lower-class Virginians began to ask them: how will you distribute the burden of the war equitably across society? Should the wealthy planters be exempt because of their property holdings? Who is to fight and die in this war? Who is to control recruitment? 

The cover of Judith Godden’s biography of Lucy Osburn, the founder of modern nursing in Australia, is dominated by a ghostly white statuette of Florence Nightingale. Lucy herself appears in a bottom corner, photographed with a book in hand, an insignificant figure dressed in black silk, with a white cap over a severe hairstyle. At times, it seems as if Nightingale is going to overshadow the book, too. But despite her largely unsuccessful attempts to carry out the wishes of the ‘lady with the lamp’ in New South Wales, Osburn did succeed in creating conditions whereby scientific practices could be introduced into nursing in Australia, though she failed to convince the medical establishment that women could be trusted with medical knowledge or were capable of managing hospitals.

Making Noises is the second self-published novel from Melbourne author Euan Mitchell, and follows in the footsteps of his best-selling début, Feral Tracks (1998). Like Feral Tracks, Mitchell’s new book is partially inspired by his own life experiences, in particular his time spent playing in pub bands and working at Ausmusic.

There is colour immediately in Paul Morgan’s Turner’s Paintbox, a juxtaposition of a love story and the history of the famous painter. The novel is a sensory read which falls into the improbable when Morgan begins to write of love.

The naturalist has been something of a recurring figure in recent Australian historical fiction: there is Ingrid in Jessica White’s A Curious Intimacy (2007), Lindsay Simpson’s Lady Jane in The Curer of Souls (2007), and now the real-life William Caldwell, from Nicolas Drayson’s Love and the Platypus. The novel opens in 1883 with the young British naturalist arriving in Queensland. In search of the elusive platypus egg, he crosses overland to the Burnett River, where he sets up camp and begins his investigation.

Genna de Bont’s first novel draws on her experience in working with children and adults with disabilities. Her gaze is drawn to moments of human frailty, which she renders with empathy and precision. The prevailing tone of The Pepper Gate is autumnal, placing us in a profoundly reflective world, one in which the weight of the past is more pressing than the demands of the present.

It is hard to shake the impression that Tony McMahon’s The Single Gentleman’s Dining Club is a book intended for those who don’t usually read. From the back-cover blurb, which compares it to Sex and the City, to the large font and short chapters, this is a book that feels a lot like television. Similarly, like most men depicted by the media, McMahon’s club members struggle with adulthood. Well into their thirties, they are still looking for casual sex, reeling off Star Wars references and trying to ignore their own mortality.

Before you settle into this ‘random history of the twenty-first century’, grab an atlas: Andrew Mueller is one well-travelled hack. A fatalist philatelist, he has spent most of his career collecting the types of stamps that adorn passports, not envelopes. In I Wouldn’t Start from Here, Mueller reports on and from some of the most exotic sites of international strife imaginable: Jerusalem, Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul. There are also trips to places of lesser renown, aspirational statelets and breakaway provinces in countries as far-flung as Georgia (Abkhazia). All of which, as his publishers congratulate him in their press release, is ‘[n]ot bad for a guy who originally hails from Wagga Wagga’.