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Like Drusilla Modjeska’s earlier book, Poppy, this is a book that resists easy classification. It’s the sort of book that may infuriate those who like their ideas served up in separate self-contained portions: fiction, history, biography, criticism. It’s also likely to confound librarians and booksellers, faced with the problem of where to shelve it. Modjeska’s ideas are not answerable to the Dewey Decimal System.

Part guru, part factoid, Gough Whitlam shows every sign of enjoying his retirement from politics. Thanks primarily to Sir John Kerr, Sir Garfield Barwick, and Sir Anthony Mason. And of course, Malcolm Fraser.

In 1956, A Book of Australian Verse, edited by Judith Wright, was published by Oxford University Press. Her choice of her own poems included ‘Bullocky’ and a couple of others, the over-anthologising of which, at the expense of her other work, was later understandably to provoke her exasperation.

Okay I’ve just finished reading Tim Winton’s The Riders. I’ve scribbled notes on pages all the way through, but I don’t want to go back and consult them. Who wants to return to hell?

This is a dazzling book. A sprawling, sensual, rambunctious marvel of a novel, it drives its readers out of their everyday world and every comfortable preconception. It takes enormous risks, not least that of demanding our understanding for the monstrous.

In recent years, scholars have attempted to come to grips with the prodigious range of Sir Joseph Banks’s activities during a public career that lasted more than fifty years. Wherever one turned in the establishment circles of George III’s England there stood, it seemed, the massive figure of Joseph Banks: President of the Royal Society, Privy Councillor, adviser to government, patron of the sciences, Cook’s sailing companion and ‘Father of Australia’ for some, the moving force behind the African Association and ‘Father of African Exploration’ for others.

As Nicholas Hasluck’s latest novel points out more than once, the adversarial system of judgement upon which this country’s law is based consists of the telling and re-telling of stories. The prosecution presents a version of events, the defence uses the same facts but tells a different story and, in summing up, the judge constructs a third one. Finally the jury is empowered by society to decide the ‘truth’. Counsel for the prosecution and for the defence are obliged to argue their respective points of view to the limit of their professional ability. The most effective way of doing this, as one of Hasluck’s characters points out, involves ‘subverting rational argument – constantly interrupting, confusing witnesses with nit-picking questions, blocking the presentation of crucial facts, shaping the truth to suit his client’s case’.