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Empire is everywhere. You can see it in the shanty towns of São Paulo and on the coffee tables of the well-heeled in Boston and Sydney. It made us, in its British form, in the antipodes via the expeditions of Cook and Banks, and all that followed. Now it dominates our newspapers and television screens in the form of war.

This beautiful book showcases the botanical orchid illustrations of John Riley, a retired shearer whom some regard as Australia’s finest living botanical illustrator. Riley started drawing Australian orchids in the 1970s, and this volume includes subjects that date back to 1992. It lists 150 works. Those who take book titles literally will assume that this volume contains illustrations of all our native orchids. This is not the case. We have a rich flora of about 1,200 species. This, therefore, is the first in a planned series intended to describe and illustrate all our orchidaceous flora.

After Ned Kelly, the story of Burke and Wills ranks high among Australians’ favourite tales of heroic failure. Simpson and his donkey are on the list, followed closely by any number of stories from the locker rooms of sporting clubs both great and small. There are strict conventions governing the telling of these stories. However pointless, futile, and even bloody they may have been, they are handed down as stories of romance. Kelly, Simpson, and Bradman all had a final stand. The hero, in his final stand, is alone on a pedestal. The other people around at the time are reduced to the role of extras. It’s a pity. Arthur Morris, the man at the other end when Bradman was dismissed for a duck in his final innings, went on to make 196. Nobody much remembers. Joe Byrne, Kelly’s closest ally and confidant, happened to speak Cantonese. An addict, he had picked it up among the opium traders of Beechworth. Byrne’s acquisition of a Chinese language is far more interesting than the dreary question that has been provoked by yet another movie version of the Kelly story – whether or not Ned spoke with an Irish accent.

If you like business bodice-rippers, these are blissful days. After the host of books that emerged from the dot com Götterdämmerung, another wave of cautionary tales has hit the shelves. I reached for Mark Westfield’s HIH after reading my third book about Enron, Mimi Swartz’s Power Failure, and was struck at once by a casual coincidence: that both Enron’s Ken Lay and HIH’s Ray Williams insisted on being referred to as ‘Doctor’. In Lay’s case, this was on account of his PhD in economics. Williams laid rather flimsier claim to his honorific, after Monash University rewarded him for various endowments with an honorary doctorate in laws in 1999.

Renée Goossens, born in 1940, is the youngest daughter of the composer and conductor Sir Eugene Goossens. Married three times, he had three daughters with Dorothy Millar, and two more with his second wife, and Renée’s mother, Janet Lewis. His third marriage, to Marjorie Foulkrod, was childless. It is characteristic of this memoir that Renée Goossens remarks early in the narrative that she never met one of her half-sisters and that it was decades before she met the other two. Her life seems to have been marked or scarred by a series of disappearances on the part of significant family members and by unexplained absences.

Marion Halligan’s latest novel should be a success. It is a continuation and concentration of themes, characters, and settings that have consistently engaged her in a considerable body of work. The Point is full of Halligan favourites: food, art, love, literature, hubris, Canberra, Séverac, and the Spensers. It is a novel with currency, exploring the IT industry, the business of food, and the perceived distance between those with and those without. Halligan has a reputation as an intense and original writer, but The Point is a disappointing novel.