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Working-class settlements north of Sydney are the common setting for these two family sagas. Between them, they take us from the 1880s to 1951. Jack Wallis, who labours in a quarry in the sandstone country that gives Stephen Lacey’s book its title, is born in the early twentieth century; Edmund Shearer, a Newcastle miner of the coal or black diamonds of Greg Bogaerts’s title, nears his death by that time. Both novels might have been designed to answer recent calls for Australian writers to turn their attention to the lives of ordinary people. How many other recent novels explain to working-class readers how their own parents and grandparents, not those of the social élite, thought and acted? Where else, for instance, could today’s renovators read about how their progenitors built their own homes?

Anne Manne’s book Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children? arguably makes the greatest contribution to the work–family debate in Australia in years. Manne has drawn on a huge range of resources – philosophical, psychological, sociological, economic and political – to create a thesis that shows a way out of the current quagmire of work–family relations.

These novels fulfil the brief of ANU’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, where Pandanus Press was founded in 2001, by viewing Australia and Australians from the perspectives of China and a distant island. In The Tao of Shepherding, set in the 1850s, two young Chinese men are kidnapped and sold as labourers to a Riverina sheep property, where they lose all hope of returning to civilisation. The Lost Tribe is mellower, in that the Pacific is crossed in both directions in its counter-pointed narratives, one set in the present and the other in the 1860s. These second novels, by promising Australian authors with direct knowledge of the countries depicted in them, offer insights into cross-cultural interactions, myths and religion.

Jack Lang was born to a poor watchmaker’s family in Sydney in 1876. He was twice premier of NSW and founder of two breakaway Labor parties. Lang lives on in the popular imagination as that hapless figure at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, upstaged when the sword-wielding Captain de Groot of the right-wing New Guard rode in and slashed Lang’s official opening ribbon. De Groot’s ribbon-slashing wins passing notice in Frank Cain’s story of Jack Lang. Very little else in Lang’s life does. His youthful encounters with socialism during the 1890s Depression, his marriage to Hilda Bredt – daughter of feminist–socialist Bertha Bredt – or his success as a real estate agent in Auburn are not important in this story, for Cain places Lang firmly within a framework of economic and constitutional history.

So much has been said or written about Indonesia’s political changes since 1998 it might be thought that there was little original that could be added. Then along comes Angus McIntyre with his own particular interpretation of Indonesian politics. McIntyre has long been interested in the psychological make-up of Indonesia’s political leaders and has written some fine papers on the subject, the core of which are in his new book, The Indonesian Presidency: The Shift from Personal toward Constitutional Rule. His approach has been to examine the personalities of dominant individuals as a key explanatory factor in Indonesian politics. As a conceptual counter to Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz’s recent book, Reorganising Power in Indonesia (2004), McIntyre’s approach similarly begs the question as to whether it is structure or agency that shapes events. In this, McIntyre almost entirely ignores structure, at least beyond the malleable Indonesian constitution.

It is easy to understand two New York naturalists becoming fascinated with a thylacine. Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson discovered one, stuffed and mounted, in Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, and began to visit it with ‘something akin to amorous fervour’. It’s equally easy to understand how this rare specimen, with its ‘glorious Seussian stripes’ and tragically fascinating mythology, inspired the pair to travel to Tasmania to learn more about its origins. What is more difficult to understand is why, once Mittelbach and Crewdson had surveyed the existing literature on the thylacine, they pressed on to write and publish Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger instead of deciding that the story had been well and truly told. On my bookshelves are Tasmanian Tiger: A Lesson to Be Learnt by Eric Guiler and Philippe Godard (1998), and David Owen’s Thylacine (2003). Close by are two novels, Heather Rose’s White Heart (1999) and Julia Leigh’s The Hunter (1999), that pursue the tiger into fictional territory. Since these are just a fraction of the books already written on the subject, I would have thought that any new tiger book would have something significant to add to the story. Carnivorous Nights, unfortunately, does not.

The title of this biography evokes one element of Tom Hungerford’s rich and complex character, but fails to acknowledge his stature as a writer. Hungerford had long felt that he had not been given due recognition for his substantial contribution to Australian literature. Formal recognition came at last in 2003, when he was given the Patrick White Award, which was established to honour writers whose work has not been recognised sufficiently. This year, a few weeks after his ninetieth birthday, Hungerford became the Western Australian Citizen of the Year; this acknowledged his wider contribution to the community.

The tragedy of Israel is that it wishes, simultaneously, to be a liberal democratic nation, one whose citizenship is defined by universal norms, and at the same time a Jewish state, where even Palestinians born within the borders of the country are denied full equality. I still remember my unease when I visited Israel many years ago at being asked when I, a secular Jew, intended to ‘come home’.

In ‘Glenlyon’, the opening poem of his most recent collection, Tremors: New and Selected Poems, Andrew Sant provides readers with clues about his approach to poetry. ‘Glenlyon’ speaks of the ‘cool light’ of the page and ‘my shadow’s / hovering vague shape’. Certainly, Sant’s presence is invested in much of his work and his poetry prizes coolness and clarity. While he is sometimes a passionate poet, this passion is rarely overt and it is balanced by a determination to make good argument out of his poetic material and by a characteristically reasonable tone.

‘There is no pleasure in travelling,’ Albert Camus jotted in his notebook while in the Balearic Isles one summer. ‘It is more an occasion for spiritual testing.’ Pleasure, he argued, leads us away from ourselves; travel, which he considered part of the eternal search for ‘culture’, always brings us back to ourselves.