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Political biographies are renowned as being notoriously difficult to write. Given the peculiar role of authorisation this is not surprising. The ‘authorisation’ – the act of writing – of a political biography is diminished and crowded out by a subject who not only defines the work’s content, but can literally refuse to authorise the text. In this context, Tony Parkinson’s biography of Jeff Kennett, Jeff: The rise and fall of a political phenomenon, runs up against a subject who is particularly adept at controlling the manufacture of his personal and public self. Parkinson’s biography is unauthorised, but has survived its subject’s scrutiny.

In last year’s Cat Catcher, Caroline Shaw established her detective heroine, Lenny Aaron, as one of the most original characters in recent Australian crime (Cat Catcher was runner-up for the Australian Crime Writers Association Ned Kelly Award for best first novel). Gaunt, weird looking, an obsessive compulsive with a phobia about being touched and a serious addiction to over-the-counter drug cocktails, Lennie is in the tradition of dysfunctional and damaged investigators muddling their way through recent crime fiction.

I have always been puzzled by society’s readiness to send their young men into battle, and that the young men go, and then tell such lies when they get home about what they saw when they looked on the face of battle. I hadn’t wondered about women, except to be glad that they were exempt from combat. Now comes Mischa Merz’s Bruising, which is about fear, aggression, and courage, and written out of her experience of one-to-one combat in the boxing ring.

No more critically acute or challenging collection of essays on the subject has been published than Ken Stewart’s modestly titled Investigations in Australian Literature. Yet the author’s personality is not similarly subdued. The Stewart known in person to many readers of ABR emerges unselfconsciously: erudite but undogmatic, rueful and witty, a touch dishevelled, one of the most beguiling and persuasive of teachers about Australia and its literature. We are fortunate that – through the agency of the admirable Shoestring Press – this volume exists to demonstrate the coherence, conceptual clarity, and spirit of delight that imbues Stewart’s criticism of much that has been written here, at least to the middle of the century.

Mark O’Connor is a poet who has been in the news lately. Following in the steps of the ancient Greek poet, Pindar, he was appointed (by the Australia Council) as ‘official’ Olympic poet – though it seems inevitable that much of his work will concern only the Olympic flame on its way to the Games and the events to be seen on TV since neither SOCOG nor the Australia Council saw fit to give him a journalist's pass. Unfortunately, all this Olympic fuss has tended to obscure his work of three decades up to this point, a journey well represented in his recent The Olive Tree: Collected poems.

The new books from Ron Pretty’s Five Islands Press are impressive début collections. Importantly, where are the poets taking us? Are there discernible trends? Without generalising excessively, violent themes recur and the poets are interested in how societies transgress their limits. The collections have a narrative or developmental thrust often well served by the ordering of the poems. There is forthrightness; the language is clear, attentive, and contemporary. Best of all, the poems aren’t dull.

‘We had always been close’ is the first sentence of Kim Mahood’s beautifully crafted memoir. She is speaking of her father who was killed in a helicopter crash while mustering cattle on his remote Queensland property. Craft for a Dry Lake is about the journey she made through the outback country of her childhood following his death.