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The opening sentence of Norman Davies’ blockbuster Europe: A History (1996) notes that ‘History can be written at any magnification’. Yet the superlative asserted in the title of John Hirst’s latest book does bring one up, well, short. Its claim is plainly contestable – how about ‘Plato to NATO’ (the irreverent shorthand for once-fashionable US undergraduate ‘Western Civ.’ survey courses)? Moreover, Hirst makes no pretence of giving us Europe from go to whoa. Commencing with the ‘Ancient Greeks’ (omitting Minoans and Myceneans), he concludes around 1800 with the French Revolution and Napoleon, because the lecture course at La Trobe University from which his book derives went no further. These lectures were first offered ‘to students in Australia who had had too much Australian history and knew too little about the civilisation of which they are a part’. This is a remarkable statement from a distinguished historian of Australia, even granted the growing recognition that what usually passes for ‘Australian history’ cannot in and of itself meet all the cultural, educational and intellectual needs of Australian students.

How does one review a serious academic study of 950 pages that covers two thousand years of political history? In this case I shall be upfront and declare that I am only reviewing part of Keane’s thesis, and will leave it to historians to discuss the remainder of his book. If I concentrate on the last 300 pages, this is because they contain more than enough material for even the keenest reader, let alone a harassed reviewer.

Hailee Moxie, aged seventeen, has just left high school. On New Year’s Eve her boyfriend dumps her, by SMS – not an auspicious start to the year but a good opening for Ruth Starke’s new novel, Fill Out This Application and Wait over There. Hailee records the events of the next twelve months in her diary as she applies for jobs intended to augment the paltry balance in her ‘Escape to Asia’ bank account.

Back in 2007, his academic cap firmly fastened, David Sornig wrote in the pages of Antipodes: ‘Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city [of Berlin] has, more than any other, become thought of as the place where, in Fukuyaman terms, history actually ended. In this sense it is the eschatological city par excellence.’ It is a curiosity of sorts that Australian writers have been in the front stalls documenting this apocalyptic vision.

In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applied not just to the physical world but to ideas, reading, poets, music, politics and history. He is, paradoxically, a neighbour to himself and his own writing.

At the end of her insightful critical study David Foster: Satirist of Australia (2008), Susan Lever quotes several rather despondent-sounding letters from her subject. In one, he claims to have lost his taste for satire; in another, he declares that he is ‘over’ literature. Yet he also expresses a continuing desire ‘to write books that are strange and beautiful’, and reveals he is at work on a new novel, his first since The Land Where Stories End (2001), one that draws on the framing tale of Arabian Nights and explores his ‘twin obsessions’: sexuality and mysticism.

The migration process makes you adept, Kim Cheng Boey remarks, in coded language. The first poem he wrote after settling in Sydney recalls an exhibition in the Queen Victoria Building about the Chinese tea entrepreneur Mei Quong Tart, whose clan name is the same as the Boey family’s. His daughter, pointing with her small finger, decodes the character mei, meaning ‘nothing’, a negative prefix that also signifies bad luck.

It takes nerve to create three self-absorbed characters, set them in dingy inner-urban Sydney over one summer, give them booze, cigarettes and tattoos, and locate the drama in a share house without resorting to a He Died with a Falafel in His Hand fiasco of bad manners. But with this scenario Emily Maguire, in her surreptitiously brilliant third novel, has instead created a riveting emotional composition which plays out with the basso of a tragic opera, the discipline of a stage play and the authenticity of real life. The book sucks us into its melodramas and subtleties; we enter both a plausible and dynamic depiction of contemporary dysfunction, and a carefully crafted parable on the gifts and hazards of caring for one another.

War aims to achieve essentially political objectives through the use of organised violence. It is a tricky business because the means we try to use – the violence itself and the way we organise and inflict it – exert a powerful fascination which often overshadows the objectives we have set ourselves. We so easily focus on the fighting itself and forget why we are doing it. Afghanistan today shows how the resulting muddle can distort contemporary strategic choices. But it also affects our view of past wars, which matters because past wars so strongly shape the way we see ourselves today. We tell and retell the stories of our soldiers’ heroism and tragedy, but hardly consider what they were fighting to achieve. As a result, we come to see our military history as a series of heroic exploits shorn of strategic purpose, so that war’s violence and sacrifice becomes self-validating; an end in itself. Almost, as Peter Weir suggested, like a sport.

To many Australians, the Queen Mother, who died in 2002, was largely an unknown quantity. The wife of George VI and mother of the present monarch, she periodically visited this country to cut ribbons, open hospitals and wave to schoolchildren who had been bussed to sporting grounds and given flags to wave. But Australia loomed large in her private life, as evinced in this well-researched ‘official biography’ by William Shawcross, who enjoyed unfettered access to previously inaccessible royal documents. As an historical document, the book has no peer and for years to come will be an absolute necessity for political and royal researchers and biographers of the period. For such a substantial tome, it is an impressively compelling read.