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‘Anecdotes’ meant originally ‘the unpublished’ – sometimes, no doubt, the unprintable. Nowadays we think of them as being tales which have something or other up their sleeves: a morsel of irony, a pinch of encouragement, a gesture of affectation. Anecdotes are yarns which have had a couple of drinks.

Ever since I heard Amy Witting speak at the recent Melbourne Festival, I have been thinking about her name, which is a chosen not a given name and therefore may be considered for its meanings. It occurred to me that there may be conscious artistry in her name as in her work. Amy: that must mean love. And Witting will be knowledge, awareness. The two an expression of the novelist’s desire. Her new book has both in good measure. Even more strongly here than in her earlier work, I have the sense of Witting’s voice speaking to us. Of course her medium is the characters through whom her plot works itself out, and the wise things spoken are the words of these characters, but I had an intimate sense of their being hers as well. You could extract her bons mots, her reflections, her epigrams, and make a nice little volume of the wit arid wisdom of Amy Witting. But of course you would lose a part of their power, and all the poignancy that context gives.

If I were inclined to draw connections between books and food, Joy Dettman’s first novel would have to be a hamburger: it’s big, it’s juicy, it’s relatively quick to consume and it’s packed with all the generic trimmings of which a good meaty mystery is made. And while certainly Mallawindy’s characters are thus rather stereotypical and the quality of Dettman’s writing a little clumsy at times, this book is worth sampling if you’re ever so slightly addicted to narratives with gusto. It’s the kind of book you could easily enjoy on the plane, on the tram, or, yes, even on the couch and forget where you were – and this is apt given that one of the primary concerns of this book is not so much food (although a portion of it has made its way into Michael Gifkins’ 1994 extravaganza, Tart and Juicy) as memory loss.

In a recent history of punishment in Australia, Mark Finnane observes that there is a ‘seemingly inexhaustible vein of convict history’. This has been especially true most recently of the history of convict women and the increasing number of accounts which are now being published in this field is to be welcomed. These studies offer a corrective to histories which have relegated convict women to a footnote, and, perhaps more significantly, some historians have attempted to reconceptualise and recast our understandings of colonialism, gender, power, and sexuality during the nineteenth century.

A white-haired, white-bearded Captain George Bayly peers benignly out at us from the 1885 photograph frontispiece of A Life on the Ocean Wave. With epaulettes to his black uniform jacket, braided sleeves, a sword at his side and a ceremonial captain’s head-piece on the table beside him, Bayly looks the quintessential retired man of the sea. He looks like a man Charles Dickens should have been describing. We should be meeting him in some sea-side parlour, in some sailortown tea-palace. He looks as if he has a story to tell.

On the evening of 14 November 1984, the body of young mother and housewife Jennifer Tanner was found by her husband Laurie slumped on a sofa in their farmhouse at Bonnie Doon, a tiny hamlet near Mansfield, in Victoria’s high country. It looked as if she had shot herself: there was a gunshot wound in her forehead and a bolt-action .22 rifle between her legs. One of her hands was partly around the barrel. Uniformed police on the scene declared it a suicide, detectives were not called in, no photographs were taken, no forensic tests were done, the place was cleaned up next day – and that was that.

A title like Duckness summons expectations of the quirky, the paralogical, and the obliquely enigmatic, and this collection delivers all three – though somewhat unevenly. It traverses imaginary heterotopias which both are and are not Melbourne, and which centre, for the most part, on disturbing and difficult questions of simulation and authenticity.

What do we talk about when we talk about Helen Garner? About her writing, that is, about such a consummate novella as The Children’s Bach, about extraordinary stories such as ‘A Vigil’, in Cosmo Cosmolino, about the eponymous ‘Postcards from Surfers’, and a dozen others? We talk about domestic realism, we talk about fiction that encompasses not merely the present supposedly self-obsessed Baby Boomer generation but children and grandparents also, we talk about discipline, control, and the assurance that more is less.