David Clunies-Ross came under notice last year with Springboard, a darkly intriguing thriller about power, corruption and murder in Hong Kong at a nervous time in the colony’s history, with the Chinese takeover looming. In White Guard he seems to have used the same ingredients to assemble a similar scenario about Australia on the brink of becoming a republic as the year 2000 approaches. Domestically, the country’s politics are in disarray, bringing to mind the constitutional crisis of 1975. Couldn’t happen again, could it? Simultaneously, superpowers are competing in a deadly game of brinkmanship that shows up the threat to this country’s very existence in the form of US communications bases at Pine Gap, Nurrungar and the North West Cape – But Skinner’s position is clearly untenable: he has put the US offside by threatening not to renew leases for its tracking bases, right on the eve of a major joint military exercise in the outback; the Opposition is hugely popular with voters and Skinner has a sex scandal hanging over his head which will destroy him if it gets in the papers. Something’s got to give, but Skinner’s determined to hold on to power no matter what, as politicians invariably are for some reason.