I approached this collection of essays with some sense of anticipation, thinking ‘Do David Williamson, Beatrice Faust, Jamie Grant, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, and Christopher Pearson have something in common? If so, what?’

When I read Peter Coleman’s introduction with its language of battle lines and militarist imagery, I was certainly aware of an Us vs Them program, with the demon as Political Correctness. ‘There have been many victims of this bazooka conformism’, Coleman the strategist asserts, though he does have the good sense to concede that ‘The political correctors could never have the field entirely to themselves in a country with democratic traditions. Inevitably there were voices from the Resistance, even if they were confined to magazines with a small circulation.’