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Those readers who were sympathetic to the arguments in The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft et al., will experience in Post-Colonial Transformation the pleasures of engaging with a reinvigorated friend. For others, like this reviewer, who found this influential earlier volume both theoretically and politically troublesome, Ashcroft’s new book will provoke familiar objections.

In Neil Armfield’s recent production of Dallas Winmar’s play Aliwa – about the struggle of the Davis family in Western Australia in the 1930s to avoid becoming members of the stolen generations – the character of Aunty Dot Collard, Jack Davis’s sister, was played brilliantly by Deborah Mailman. Aunty Dot herself, flown over to Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, introduced the show and then sat on the side of the stage on an old red sofa smiling benignly, and interfering occasionally, as she watched her history being performed. But which was the ‘real’ Aunty Dot was something the show left up to the audience to decide.

Clive James needs no introduction, though he asked Julian Barnes to provide one for Reliable Essays, a selection from three decades of James’s literary journalism made by his publisher, Peter Straus. The Kid from Kogarah is, as The New Yorker once famously observed, ‘a brilliant bunch of guys’ ...

In the August 2001 issue of Meanjin, M.T.C. Cronin writes of poetry: ‘The poems are not as useful as ribs but like them do protect life and when removed from the body grow certain murmurings of the mind.’ No matter how chaotic or runic her prose pronouncements, Cronin’s poems are quirky and original at best, diffuse and repetitive at worst. Cronin continues to ‘just go on your nerve’, as Frank O’Hara wrote. There is the same mock candour as well as the same, often-disjointed tones as in her first book, Zoetrope (1995): ‘I do not have the time / To transform my life into a vision.’ Bestseller, Cronin’s fourth book, does signal changing preoccupations, as its title suggests. More specifically, it centres on the life of the Poet. Although Cronin’s images can lead into perky unexpected sequences, this book would have been stronger if some poems had been omitted, especially some of the shorter ones, such as ‘Cheers’, ‘Searching’ or ‘Then, Then, Then’. Some poems fizzle out in less interesting directions than those they seem to promise; they pick garrulously but semi-consciously at random images – ‘the trees wobbling like boxers / with their ungrouped leaves / moving like sand through / my outstretched eyes’.

How to shape the fiction of one’s life? There is something to be said for the no-nonsense narrative thrust of Errol Flynn in kicking off My Wicked, Wicked Ways, one of the most readable and also self-consciously ‘literary’ of all showbiz autobiographies. ‘Detesting’ books that begin after the fashion of ‘there was joy and happiness in the quaint Tasmanian home of Professor Flynn when the first bellowings of lusty little Errol were heard’, the actor-autobiographer gets straight to what he archly calls ‘the meat of the matter’: his tumultuous film career and the associated carnal exploits that constituted his notoriety.

In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, much of the action occurs amongst the migrant clientele of the Hot Wax Club. The club is decorated with waxworks of England’s notable but unacknowledged migrant ancestors: Mary Seacole, Ignatius Sancho and Grace Jones, among others. As Leela Gandhi points out in her discussion of Rushdie’s novel, we are encouraged to read the Hot Wax clubbers as historians disinterring the nation’s past to reveal a secret history of immigration, a past which is used strategically to reshape understandings of contemporary Britain. The project of this book is similar. What happens when we examine representations of England and Englishness by writers who are travellers, émigrés and immigrants from its diaspora?

Between the two poles of first-person narration and the inaccurately named ‘third-person’ narration lies another, rarely glimpsed, possibility. This is second-person narration, and it is something of a freak: Michel Butor’s La Modification and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City are among the rare examples.

This book tells how the Irish government gradually rearranged its methods of convict transportation, from a variety of destinations in North America to a single destination on the far side of the world. The story takes place predominately between 1783 and 1791, from the independence of the United States (which effectively closed American ports to British and Irish transports) to the sailing of the Queen, the first ship to take convicts direct from Ireland to New South Wales. It is a subject that has never been properly examined, mainly because we tend to assume that the Irish point of view – as far as administration goes – was nothing more than a footnote to the British.

Don Edgar has brought his wealth of experience in monitoring Australian society and its institutions to reflect on the changes now taking place and what needs to be done about them. The Patchwork Nation summarises the key aspects of social change, identifies the challenges associated with them (specifically for government) and sets out a coherent strategy for reform built around a strengthened role for local communities in responding to the forces of global economic change. This involves covering a huge amount of material. In this regard, the book succeeds in bringing together a number of disparate trends, ideas and themes, and makes them accessible to a wide audience. The book also contains a good deal of insight into the changes taking place. Yet there are questions to be asked about the extent to which some aspects of Edgar’s analysis are as compelling as the solutions he proposes. While many of the proposals developed in Section 3 are attractive, they do not always link with the forces for change described in Sections 1 and 2, and they are not always convincing.