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Much current debate on crucial issues facing Australia – the economy, race relations, foreign affairs, for example – is conducted in the opinion pages of metropolitan daily newspapers. And ‘opinion’ pages they now are – with a vengeance. It is a symptom of the times that opinion-page editors have less and less recourse to disinterested authorities ...

For those who haven’t yet discovered the riches of New Zealand poetry, this anthology should provide an appetite-whetting introduction. Edited by one of New Zealand’s finest poets, the late Lauris Edmond (1924–2000), it bears the stamp of a thoughtful mind and a judiciously discriminating sensibility, evident in her own work as in her selection from that of others. For she has neither lost her nerve and opted out of inclusion nor claimed any undue space. Yet her own work is central to the nature of the volume. When I came to write this review, after reading steadily from page one to page 257 and closing the covers, I knew that there were certain phrases, images and poems that had struck root, were memorable for me, and were shaping my responsiveness to the volume. Interestingly enough, I didn’t always remember which poet was responsible – for the structure of this anthology (of which more later) is such that it is an anthology of poems first, and poets second.

‘The characters which survive,’ wrote Hilary McPhee at seventeen in the copy of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native that she studied in her tiny matriculation class at Colac High in 1958, ‘are those who make some compromise with their surroundings ...

This book, My Other World, is in Margaret Whitlam’s words, ‘the story of my travels as the leader of group study tours around the world’ in the 1990s. It is also another episode in the life journey of a remarkable woman who has the capacity and the vitality to go on inventing new lives. Previously a swimming champion, social worker, suburban mother, prime minister’s and ambassador’s consort, advocate for adult education, Margaret Whitlam in her seventies embarked upon a new career as a travel guide, leading her companions not only into Britain, France and Italy, but also into China and Central America and the Russia and Siberia of the early 1990s. Now in her eighties, she has begun another life, writing her first book.

Forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia: this is a five-star title for a three-star book of essays. Several of the essays are slight and pedestrian, and overall the subject of gold gets a patchy treatment; the contributors write about their specialties and we are not given much help to reach a new understanding of the whole phenomenon. But there is much that is interesting here; and some of the material is arresting. The editors have fulfilled their modest intention – ‘to illustrate, amplify, complicate or update’ well-traversed themes.

Neither the agapanthus nor the tango is native to Australia: their juxtaposition, when an Argentinian man and the Austrian woman he possibly loves dance amongst the plants on a remote property in the Riverina, suggests the kinds of familiar patterns we are dealing with here. Like their dance, the dancers are displaced; they find the Australian bush alien; they have endured disappointments in getting here, and one of them is going to go mad as a result. ‘Agapanthus tango’ is a conceit, a contradiction that represents the nonsensicality (to foreign sensibilities) of Australia.