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On the 7 January 1934 in the Dutch town of Hilversum, a child was born and named Jopie Houbein. From her earliest days she felt that neither her face nor her name really fitted her. On the outside she was white, but all her feelings of kinship went out to people of alien races – a Chinese trader, travelling gypsies, school-friends from the East Indies, even a child disguised as St Nicholas’s black helper. One of her early fantasy playmates was the beautiful Indian actor Sabu, the Elephant Boy.

Louisa Lawson’s journal, The Dawn, probably wasn’t as politically influential as we would like to think, despite reliable evidence of a substantial subscription list and a fairly far-flung readership. Its championing of major issues of the day such as Female Suffrage and Marriage and Divorce law reform was relentless, unswervingly logical, and resounding, but the momentum which would bring victory in those and other campaigns for womens’ rights did not come centrally from The Dawn. And, when Louisa was saluted as Mother of the Suffrage, it was at least as much for her personal efforts – her speeches, public appearances, debates, and formidable public example – as for her ringing editorials and ideological feature articles. Indeed, Louisa’s very first image for the journal (‘phonograph to wind out audibly the whispers, pleadings and demands of the sisterhood’) with its haunting suggestion of Aeolian Harp mixed in with the latest amplification technology, was peculiarly apt in that The Dawn was less a shaper and leader of feminine political opinion than a fearless and unequivocal announcer of it. And, in the early stages at least, it was a more or less solitary voice – which greatly enhanced its importance.

In his scientific foreword to Descent of Spirit, E. J. Steele, currently a Visiting Fellow at the John Curtin School of Medicine in Canberra, asks:

In this new book, Beverley Farmer quotes George Steiner: ‘In modernism collage has been the representative device.’ The blurb calls A Body of Water a montage. Well, it’s a difficult book to describe. It’s not a pasting together, there’s no smell of glue about it. Nor is it put together, plonk, thunk, like stones. It’s rather, in her own words, an interweaving.

Anyone interested in Aboriginal history or race relations will probably be familiar with the work of Henry Reynolds. His books include The Other Side of the Frontier (1982), Frontier (1987), and The Law of the Land (1987). This latest book is a collection of documents, ones that provided much of the source material for Reynolds’s earlier works. In this book, he tell us in the preface, ‘our forebears speak for themselves and speak in many voices’.

The morning ABC radio program AM is not a book program. But occasionally we’re pleased to take the opportunity to broadcast the story of a new book, particularly when it comments on Australian public affairs. When John Pilger’s A Secret Country was published, AM ran an interview with the author which was unusually long for us, some five or six minutes. The response was remarkable. In my two years as presenter of the program, I can’t recall as much listener interest in any item, judging by the number of telephone enquiries about the book we received in subsequent days.

Professor Mulvaney’s thematic history of encounters between outsiders and Aboriginal Australians is developed through a discussion of events located in specific places. He has selected places which are in the Register of the National Estate (many of which he initially nominated) or are being considered for inclusion. The places, then, are by definition part of Australia’s cultural heritage, and an important focus of the book is to illuminate some of the types of events which have shaped Australian society.