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There is every reason to admire this novel’s intent, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t recommend the result. Linda Jaivin’s current affairs comedy about the Villawood Detention Centre is so conscious of its pedagogic goals that it fails to offer a decent story. And it’s not funny. Believe me, I wanted to like it. Jaivin is a terrific writer with an enviable range, capable of the witty, surrealist smut of Eat Me (1995) and the kind of nuanced cross-cultural analysis that underpinned The Monkey and the Dragon (2001), her undervalued biography of Chinese rock’n’roll dissident Hou Dejian.

Steven Lang has a fine sense of the Australian vernacular and creates believable characters. This novel forges a new genre (maybe it’s just new to me): the environmental thriller. Protagonist Kelvin was a street kid and rent-boy in Kings Cross. Now twenty-one and beautiful, he fetches up, after years of aimless drifting and casual work in remote locations, in his home town of Eden, which he fled eight years before. He joins the labourers setting up a commercial pine plantation after the area has been clear-felled, but then becomes involved with a group of hippies who live on a commune – ‘the farm’. Here he falls easily into a sexual relationship with Jessica, an environmental activist and writer. She is older, educated and politically sophisticated, in a way that engages Kelvin’s imagination but compels him to hide his past.

The name of Sir John Wilton would be unknown to the vast majority of the Australian public, to the defence community as a whole, and even, I suspect, to many of those now in the army. Such is the transitory nature of military prestige. David Horner’s biographical study seeks to correct this, and to explain the centrality of Wilton’s career to the development of Australian defence policy and operational deployment in the postwar period. This is more than a biography: while Wilton the man is not neglected, the emphasis is rather more on Wilton the professional, steadily climbing through the officer ranks in a series of appointments that culminated in his tenure as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from 1966 to 1970.

What role should international law play in the domestic legal sphere? The author of the Institutes of Justinian stated that ‘[e]very community governed by laws and customs uses partly its own law, partly laws common to all mankind’. Nevertheless, a certain view propounds that international law is an unstable or subversive intrusion into the processes of democratic sovereignty and the pedigree of national law. Such a stance, while persistent, denies social fact; the reach of international legal regulation is unprecedented and national bureaucracies increasingly operate beyond state boundaries. Such is the reality of the ‘Fluid State’ which, the editors of this volume suggest, will alter orthodox understandings of the interrelationship between international and national law.

This is an auspicious time to reissue a book by a Cypriot-Australian in a bilingual edition. Awareness of Cyprus in Australia, and of Australia in Cyprus, is at unprecedented levels following the spectacular performance in the 2006 Australian Open Tennis Championship of both Marcos Baghdatis and his colourful crowd of supporters from the Cypriot subset of the Melbourne Greek community. Bilingual (even trilingual) editions are the hallmark of Owl Publishing, but this fifteenth volume in its ‘Writing the Greek Diaspora’ series represents a new departure in its inclusion of high-resolution artwork: section four of the collection comprises sixteen photomontages, mostly statuesque combinations of objects and body parts.