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In 1993, when Victoria Haskins undertook research into the relationship between Aboriginal and white women, she was ‘plunged into the argument that white academics were only perpetuating colonialism by writing Aboriginal people’s history … that white Australians should not, could not, try to speak for Aboriginal people, nor try to represent the Aboriginal experience’. Left floundering by ‘the difficult politics of writing Aboriginal history as a white Australian scholar’, Haskins was unreceptive to her grandmother’s pleas to embark on the despised ‘trivial bourgeois pursuit’ of family history, dismissed as ‘middle-class … the province of mildly ridiculous ageing relatives, searching for the dates of their ancestors’ arrival in the colonies’. But curiosity about an old photograph of her grandmother as a fair-haired toddler with an Aboriginal nanny prompted her to root out her great-grandmother’s boxed papers, then languishing in an aunt’s garage.

Treasures exhibitions have reached epidemic proportions in Australia since the runaway success of the National Library’s ‘Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries’, which ran from December 2001 to February 2002. Now the National Library has decided to repeat its act, but this time to concentrate on home-grown exhibits. Australia’s ‘great’ libraries, it must be noted, are in this case only the national, state and territory collections, a definition that might put the noses of some of the other major Australian libraries, such as those belonging to the older universities, out of joint.

Having taught literary studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Adrian Caesar is perhaps better placed than most to understand the troubled relationship between power and culture, order and creativity. ‘All Cock Red’, one of the poems in Caesar’s fourth book of poems, High Wire, attends to such a context:

This book is a double-barrelled memoir, its two authors providing, at heart, a first- and second-generation account of the Burma Railway and its resonances down their line. It’s arc is wider though, and it’s preoccupations more universal, than a simple family history, if there is such a thing. Arch Flanagan, the patriarch and veteran, contributes five pieces, two of memoir, two short stories and an obituary. Martin, son and searcher, intersects these texts with a narrative of his own, alternately probing the spaces and interrogating the players of this history.

In his introduction to Chappelli Speaks Out, Ashley Mallett relates how he realised early on in the project that he would need to step outside the bounds of traditional biography in order to do justice to his old mate. His variation on the genre, not entirely revolutionary, is to insert passages of direct quotation into the body of the text, literally allowing Ian Chappell to address the reader.

Imagine, if you will, the blessed child of a parthenogenetic conception involving the Oracle of Delphi and Cassandra. The girl has Cassandra’s clarity, passion and a good deal of her accuracy, combined with the Oracle’s high degree of credibility but without its duplicity. What could that girl grow up to become but a theatre critic and commentator, even if she had been raised in the 1930s, in the world’s most isolated capital city? Please note, before returning to mundane reality, how diminished the myth of Cassandra would be without the Trojan War, and how little we would care for the writhing of the Pytho, the priestess at Delphi, if Oedipus had not consulted her. A public voice needs subject matter that is at once contemporary and timeless if its utterances are to transcend the ephemeral.

Phil Sparrow lived and worked as a UN aid worker in pre-9/11 Afghanistan for nearly three years. Evacuated when the country was attacked by the US, he returned to Australia and worked as an interpreter for Afghan refugees in Australia. In this book, Sparrow writes about his experiences in Afghanistan and Australia, and his reading of the Australian government’s response to refugees, particularly those from Afghanistan.

If any scholar has written anything worthwhile on Australia’s early colonial history, it is unlikely to be mentioned in this book. In Michael Connor’s depiction, things have become so bad that all the historians, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and health experts, and everyone else who has written or spoken publicly about our history over the last thirty years, should be sacked immediately. So too should staff in the departments of education, in the Australian Research Council, and all their national and international academic peer reviewers. Recent PhD graduates should be asked to give back their degrees, as they have not been properly trained. Many historical research assistants should never be given jobs again. The appellations ‘associate professor’ or ‘professor’ should be removed from office doors. Historians of the Australian academy do not deserve them. The first targets should be the most prolific and popular historians. And finally, tenure and terra nullius should be banned.

Todd Alexander’s début novel, Pictures of Us, ambitiously tackles a smorgasbord of weighty issues – mortality, grief, adultery, homosexuality – through the experiences of one family. The sudden death of Marcus Apperton, husband to Maggie and father of Isabel and Patrick, forces his wife and adult children into an uncomfortable reunion. Left to piece together a fractured family past, the Appertons begin to uncover some unsettling truths about their relationship to each other.