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Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly (1946), and the Ramingining artists’ Aboriginal Memorial (1988), are the only two Australian works in a new and highly commercial picture book, 30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity across Time and Space. The Ramingining installation of 200 painted hollow-log poles, the kind used as containers for human bones, was categorised as ‘Aboriginal Culture’. Nolan’s painting was categorised as an example of ‘Surrealism’, but the caption concluded, sensibly, with the concession that he was more than a Surrealist: ‘Ultimately Nolan never adopted a single idiom, instead exploring different moods and techniques to portray his themes of injustice, love, betrayal and the enduring Australian landscape.’

'Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it,’ wrote Watkin Tench of his companions on the First Fleet. Governor Phillip’s 1786 Commission had instructed him to build castles. Fitting their vision of the new into the old, settlers named the rocky outcrop above Middle Harbour as ‘Edinburgh Castle’, below which, in 1905, Henry Willis built ‘Innisfallen’, one of many would-be castles strewn around the continent. The newcomers’ lament that the local flowers were scentless and the birds songless had its parallel in the regret that settler Australia would never support a literary culture because it lacked ruins

At the time of his death in March 2006, Slobodan Milošević had been on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (the ICTY) for more than four years. Greeted initially as a victory in the ‘struggle against impunity’, the progress of his trial was soon hindered by thickets of procedural argument and by the cunning of Milošević himself. Diverting attention from events in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo – the subject of his trial – Milošević manipulated every legal avenue available to him, giving the impression that, like the farcical and chaotic litigation in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of his Own (1994), the trial was meaningless, ultimately ‘about itself’.

'I want to be buried on top of Connor’s Hill, the mountain at the head of the Tambo Valley in East Gippsland.’ These were the words that came into Barry Heard’s mind as he faced death in the jungle in Vietnam in August 1967, an episode recounted in his first memoir, Well Done, Those Men (2005). Later in that book, Heard recalled another near-death experience, when his mind turned again to Connor’s Hill: ‘I was in a warm, soft place that was bright, peaceful and beautiful, like the top of Connor’s Hill. It was where I wanted to be.

Addition is a trojan horse of a novel. It has a cutesy cover (featuring amorous toothbrushes), a kooky love story and a ‘hot’, wisecracking blonde heroine. There is a ‘hunky’ Irish love interest, Seamus O’Reilly, and a push-pull attraction of opposites between the romantic leads – whose first meeting, of course, is a witty war of words. But the heroine, Grace Vandenberg, is no ditsy Bridget Jones everywoman. She is an obsessive-compulsive counter who lives on a dis-ability pension; her only friends are her mother, her sister and her niece. And she is devastatingly smart.

Ninety years after the Great War, the bones of those who died are still rattling the consciences of succeeding generations. Two years ago, there were frantic diplomatic exchanges between Australia and Turkey as the possibility emerged that the remains of Anzacs may have been disturbed as a result of road widening – ironically, to enable contemporary pilgrims to ‘pay their respects’ to those very bones. A complex bureaucratic tug-of-war has also been simmering over the whereabouts of the bones of approximately 170 Australians who died behind German lines at the battle of Fromelles on 19–20 July 1916.

Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell famously deplores Ernest’s loss of not one but both parents. The great polymath would approve of Peter Temple’s easy mastery of not just two but three popular literary genres. In the Jack Irish series, Temple created a likeable rogue who approximates a Melbourne private eye, and with The Broken Shore (2005) he won crime writing awards for a disciplined police procedural set in rural Victoria. In the Evil Day is an international thriller that moves mainly between Hamburg and London. Again, Temple’s control is strong and deft.

Gary Catalano was, by profession, a writer about art. But he was also a fine poet with a distinctive style. On no account was he neglected – he appears in most anthologies that ought to include him – but he often seemed to be writing in an entirely different idiom from that of his contemporaries. He was difficult to place and thus, perhaps, difficult to appreciate.

Competition, free enterprise and globalisation are regularly criticised today for a range of sins. A counterbalance to such criticism, Alan Greenspan’s view is that continuing the current free-market approach to managing economies is the only way to ensure prosperity in ‘The Age of Turbulence’ in which we live.

Greenspan, now in his eighty-second year, has been a significant participant in, and student of, the global economy for the past sixty years. Based on that experience and the positions he has held, with arguably unique access to information and the best economic minds, his clear view is that the continuous rise in prosperity and living standards in the United States and globally is a direct result of competition, free enterprise and flexible economies, with minimum government interference.

'Why read Emile Zola?’ asks one of the contributors to this volume. ‘Because his representation of society’s impact on individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world.’ The publication of The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola, edited by Brian Nelson, Professor of French Studies at Monash University, will be of great assistance in reading and rereading this realist writer, and will doubtless become an indispensable tool for researchers and students.

What do these essays reveal? The fascination which the naturalist novelist Zola (1840–1902) still exercises on his readers because of the profoundly organic nature of his writing. Despite the meticulous planning and the scientific method and framework underlying his enterprise to describe the social and familial milieux (the subtitle of the twenty novels [1871–93] comprising Les Rougon-Macquart is The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire), Zola’s art stems from its evocative power, its descriptive force, in a word, its ‘excitement’.