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So much has been written about Language One in various English teaching journals that there is little to add. What has been written has usually been critical – often very critical – ranging from ‘not only is it a bad book, but it is misleading’ (Idiom) to ‘buy one for your barbeque. soon’ (Opinion). Language Two will doubtless produce a similar response – from theorists, book reviewers, and the occasional highly competent teacher.

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Australian children’s literature has its own established heavies, writers whose work is well enough known both here and abroad, frequently in translation, and whose names would be well up in the Public Lending Right cheque lists. Some are so much in demand these days, that the time taken in preparing and giving speeches at conferences of librarians and others leaves them little time for the actual business of writing. However, they continue to dominate; each new work from them is eagerly awaited, read, reviewed and avidly discussed, if not by children then certainly by the growing adult following.

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Small Business in Australia: Problems and prospects by B.L. Johns, W.C. Dunlop, and W.J. Sheehan

by
June 1979, no. 11

This book has emanated from the University of Newcastle based upon the much needed research into the plight of Australian small businesses by the staff there. The book is intended to make such research findings available in a digestible form and the publication definitely achieves that goal.

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Few families in Italian history have enjoyed a fame greater than the Medici whose name has become inseparably linked with the Renaissance. It is paradoxical, therefore, how little has really been known, until recently, of how Cosimo, the founder of its predominance in Florence, paved the way for the establishment of the power it was to exercise over that city. Nicolai Rubinstein, some years ago in his Government of Florence under the Medici, showed how its ascendancy was maintained through a complex system of electoral controls, but it is only now, with the appearance of Australian historian Dale Kent’s study, The Rise of the Medici, that a clear picture is beginning to emerge of the process by which the Medici first issued from the ranks of the Florentine ruling class to the position of dominance which they gradually consolidated over the six decades following Cosimo’s triumphant return from exile in 1434.

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Aeschylus, they say, was killed when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a smooth, shell-cracking rock, dropped a tortoise on him. Ever since then translators have been dropping translations on the head of his plays with comparably fatal results.

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One late afternoon in early summer I went to the launching of Helen Arbib’s Looking at Cooking (Helen Arbib Publications, $3.50, 80 pp) in a beautifully restored and reanimated old house in the Rocks area of Sydney. On the way to Lower Fort Street I’d indulged in one of my favourite meanderings past sentimental landmarks. Among these is a section of Windmill Street, and the Hero of Waterloo Hotel.

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This is an attractive book with its colourful dust jacket, clear type and layout, and delicate line drawings of individual herbs. The body of the book is an alphabetically arranged treatment of forty-two herbs, giving growing requirements, history, how to harvest and store and uses in medicine, toiletry and cooking. The recipes are original and include such interesting combinations as Pork au Santolina (which I tried and found worthy of a dinner party), and Lavender Beef.

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This is the jubilee history of a unique Australian institution. Legacy, initially a club of World War I veterans, aiming to help each other re-establish themselves in civilian life, quickly became an organization concerned to assist the dependents of dead or incapacitated servicemen. Though the age of legatees is rising, the number of elderly widows increasing, and the number of dependent children declining, this remains its raison d’être. Forty-seven Legacy clubs today spend nearly $3,000,000 annually on some 100,000 widows and children in addition, personal assistance – leading youth groups, acting as advisers to bereaved families – continues the paramount part of Legacy’s service.

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Given the measure of promise in Archbishop Booth’s formative years, what this memoir calls his ‘golden years’ seem sadly unproductive of lasting substance. The outward flourish of his last years in public office, and the great farewell at the Olympic Pool, do not conceal but rather emphasise the feeling the reader has that he did not nourish his diocese at the spiritual depth it needed to face the sixties.

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Perhaps no other social attitude has changed so markedly in this century as the prevailing public reaction towards the question of the limitation of population growth and the use of birth control devices.

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