Bronwen Levy

A crucial clue is given right at the beginning in the form of a lavender plant punningly sent to Claudia Valentine, our detective heroine. Like just about everything else in the novel, it turns out to have been put there by the novel’s Mr Big, Harry Lavender. And finding out the extent of his influence is what keeps us going through the back alleys and one way streets, more often than the smoothly flowing highways, of a clever detective narrative.

As Meena Blesing explained in an interview on Sixty Minutes, writing an autobiographical account of her life during the Combe-Ivanov Royal Commission was something she needed to do. Writing the book allowed her to discuss the events of 1983 and their consequences in a way that gave expression to and ordered her anger. For the reader, Blesing’s very personal story provides a perspective on the Combe Affair which has not been canvassed in the other published material: media reports, the Hope Report, David Marr’s The Ivanov Trail. That the book concludes on a note of somewhat ironic hope is but one indication of the emotional complexity of the material story, she covers. For, in telling her own story, Blesing also presents us with what can be read as a rare discussion of the impact on private, family life of state actions and policies.

‘There are not many Australian academics whose conversation shows awareness of the main intellectual dilemmas of the age. (These are nobody’s specialty.)’ So wrote Donald Horne in The Lucky Country, yet Horne, variously academic, editor, journalist, writer, administrator, and Chair of the Australia Council, in his writing himself might be seen as a happy exception to his rule. His latest book, The Public Culture: The triumph of industrialism, continues in the tradition he established previously not only of demonstrating an awareness of intellectual and political dilemmas, but of making these the chief focus of his scholarship.