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Human beings have a strong need to belong, whether it be to a family, a community or humanity at large. In Belonging, Jeannie Baker explores this need. She takes the reader on a visual journey through twenty-four years in the life of Tracy Smith, her family, her community and her city. Baker also explores the importance not just of living on, but of belonging to and caring for the land that supports us and on which we build our cities.

Geoffrey Bardon spent just two and a half  years, from the start of 1971 until mid-1973, at Papunya, 200 kilometres west of Alice Springs. While he was there, teaching art and craft as well as social studies, Aboriginal art changed. A group of Aboriginal men began painting with Western materials, transferring versions of their traditional sand designs onto boards in a way they had not before, or not in that quantity. One of the biggest questions about Bardon is how much he mattered to this new art – at crudest, would Papunya painting have happened without him?

As the late Susan Sontag noted, interpretation tends to fall into two opposing camps. The first kind, ‘aggressive and impious’, treats works of art as landscapes concealing mineral ore: it ‘excavates, and as it excavates, destroys’. The other, by contrast, resembles less the pit-worker than the more distractible traveller who, so thrilled by the picturesque surrounds, decides to remain awhile: it ‘see[s] more, to hear more, to feel more’. These critical tendencies are still at war, forty years on. In a nutshell, this is the contestation between academic and journalistic writing. Australia’s interdisciplinary periodicals are the ambulances – and the ambulance-chasers – scrambling back and forth across its frontline.

Why are there so few new and exciting voices in Australian fiction? Why do Australian novels so consistently fail to capture the imagination of the reading public? What was the last Australian book you really liked? Where is the next generation of Australian authors going to come from? Who are three Australian writers under the age of thirty or forty?

These two exceptional books should be sent to every household in Australia free of charge. They would be a perfect curative after the federal election. The campaigns of the conventional parties demonstrated how far indigenous Australia has fallen off the political radar screen. Fortunately, the independent creative work of Aboriginal thinkers, writers and artists continues to set high standards and often leads the way in the exploration of social, political and philosophical issues that many in mainstream culture are still unable to face.

On 9 October 2004, 13,098,461 electors were enrolled to vote for the federal parliament. The Australian Electoral Commission’s website records 11,715,132 electors having voted for the House of Representatives on a two-party preferred result. So much for voting in a federal election having been compulsory since 1911. And not a few will have left the polling booth wondering, ‘Why bother?’

‘It is escape not from life, but from literature.’

       (Marjorie Nicolson on the detective genre,

       ‘The Professor and the Detective’, 1929)

I began reading crime fiction in the 1950s and became serious about it in the 1960s, searching out what  scholarship there was then about its history and development, its types and practitioners. So I am probably an atypical reader (and reviewer) of these two books. I read them with the pleasure of familiarity and recognition, being reminded of things I hadn’t thought of in a long time. No little part of that pleasure lies in seeing how others assemble and weigh the components of this genre’s history.

Reflecting on the sixty-year history of the United Nations, it seems obvious that this is an organisation created through the slow and tortured process of natural evolution rather than the product of careful, intelligent design.

Years ago, back when the UN had barely escaped its adolescence, the Nobel laureate and eminent diplomat Ralph Bunche observed that ‘the United Nations is a young organisation in the process of developing in response to challenges of all kinds’. He referred to institutional enlargement that typically continued as the global agenda grew. Agencies soon developed to coordinate the work of other agencies. Consequently, the modern UN became a haphazard creature, made up of a bewildering mix of political organs. Each part is intended to serve a different purpose, whether maintaining international security, advancing respect for fundamental human rights, or promoting economic development. And each component comes labelled with an almost impossible array of scientific-sounding designations (EcoSoc, for instance, UNEP, UNESCO, UNICEF and plenty more to make up page after page of abbreviation lists).

Pity the professional historian. It is hard to know where to turn these days to avoid being abused, even from the most unlikely sources. According to Andrew Riemer, writing lately in the Sydney Morning Herald, the main reason professional historians castigated Robert Hughes in 1988, when he published The Fatal Shore, was because he had ‘occupied their territory’. Is there any other professional group in Australia so childish, irresponsible, parasitical and useless as the professional historian? Judging from remarks like this, appearing weekly in the press over the last few years, apparently not. And why is it, at a time when the number of living professional historians probably outnumbers the total of their deceased predecessors since time began, we supposedly manage to work as a tiny clique? Someday an historian, maybe even a professional one, will explain this unlikely phenomenon. Allegations such as these are linked somehow with the overwhelming anti-intellectualism of early twenty-first-century Australia, but exactly why historians, among all the others, are hit so hard and so often is a puzzle.