HarperCollins

When it was reported in 2005 that nine Australians had been arrested in Bali on charges of trafficking heroin, the public response was scornful and incredulous. In the wake of the media saturation of Schapelle Corby’s trial, such blatant attempts to flout the severe drug laws of Indonesia, with quick cash the only apparent incentive, seemed incomprehensible. As the story filtered through the press, a division appeared in ‘The Bali Nine’, as they were swiftly dubbed, between the mules – Martin Stephens, Renae Lawrence, Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj – who were apprehended with more than eight kilograms of heroin strapped to their bodies, and other members of the group, most of whom had not left the country before. These were Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, identified as the ringleaders of the operation, and Matthew Norman, Si Yi Chen and Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, who were arrested in their hotel room with more than 300 grams of heroin. The mules claimed that Chan and Sukumaran had made repeated threats against their families should they not co-operate; and that they and Matthew Norman were innocent victims of an international drug-trafficking ring.

There’s a joke that comes up in westerns about the book that saves: a thick volume in the chest pocket that takes a bullet. Bem Le Hunte introduces her second novel about a small band of World War II refugees: ‘This book was written as a prayer for those people who could not live to tell their tales. It was written, too, as a prayer for the future of our world, in the hope that stories like this have the power to save us.’ Certainly, this is a book that teaches hope against the odds, but when you consider how human cruelty has survived even the greatest stories, Le Hunte’s prayer sounds forlorn – unless she was thinking of saving us from boredom, in which case both There, Where the Pepper Grows and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon work most effectively.

It would be difficult to write an uninteresting life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94). There is the progression from the young Stevenson, so often sick and confined to bed, to the intrepid traveller full of life and vigour as he sailed the South Seas. There is the move from cold and chilly Edinburgh to the ‘warm south’ of France and to the even warmer south of the Pacific. There is the dash across the Atlantic and America to claim Fanny Osbourne as his wife. There is the spectacular popular success of works such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). There is Stevenson’s death at the age of forty-four and his burial on the top of a Samoan mountain. There is even, for us in Australia, the interest of Stevenson’s visits to Sydney. On top of this wealth of incidents, biographers can draw on eight packed volumes of hugely quotable letters and a treasure trove of photographs from the earliest ones with his parents in Edinburgh to some iconic images in the South Pacific.

Rene Rivkin was one of those unorthodox characters who was irresistible to the Sydney media – and the feeling was mutual. ‘I never feel really alive unless I am in the newspapers,’ he remarked to one journalist at the peak of his fame.

Rivkin loved being rich, and he loved talking about it. His father’s generation may have regarded it as deeply improper to talk about one’s money, but to Rene it was a reason for being. Why not flaunt it. At a speech night in 1988 for his alma mater, Sydney Boys’ High, he was invited to talk about the lessons he had learned at school. Instead of taking the usual path of exhorting the boys about the merits of thrift, hard work and selflessness, Rene extolled the virtues of being rich. It was a message that endeared him to the wallets of many during his time as the nation’s most famous stockbroker. He not only loved making money, he loved spending it as well. He was generous to his friends. He had dozens of expensive cars, a sumptuous residence in London, a $10 million house in Sydney, and a luxury motor yacht. He once bought an employee a $20,000 Harley Davidson motorcycle as a reward for the man kissing his feet.

In Dudley McCarthy’s volume in the Australian official history of World War II, subtitled Kokoda to Wau (1959), there is a wonderfully evocative passage that sets the fighting in Papua New Guinea in context:

In 1964 the Australian television show Bandstand set up an annual talent contest called Bandstand Starflight International. In its first year, one of the national finalists was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called Robyn Smith, who later changed her surname to Archer. The following year, the contest was won by a 24-year-old professional singer called Helen Reddy.

Accounts of past child abuse and the inability or unwillingness of those in positions of authority to confront its reality are amongst the hottest of topics in today’s media. Generally, the story is about the perpetrators and their punishments, or about the impact of disclosures on church leaders forced to retire because of their negligent or political mishandling of cases brought to their attention. But what about the victims? Rules of privacy generally mean that we never learn at firsthand what it must be like to live with the knowledge of a childhood tainted by sexual abuse on the part of some adult with authority. Still less are we likely to know what that knowledge must be like when the abuser was also a much-loved family relation, such as, or especially, a father. For that reason, memoirs such as these are valuable in that they initiate the reader into the long-lasting effects of abuse with graphic emotional immediacy.

The Anglican Church worldwide is currently facing the gravest threat ever to its international unity. Where the vitriolic debates over the ordination of women failed to shatter the Anglican Communion, the ordination of an openly gay bishop in the US in late 2003 may well succeed. Conservative bishops have demanded that the American Episcopal (Anglican) Church’s leaders be disciplined. If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not oblige once an international report has been tabled later this year, the break-up of the Anglican Communion is highly probable.

Crime fiction offers various pleasures but rarely those of innovation, and that is the case with these three very different books from three veterans of the genre – familiar pleasures. Degrees of Connection is a police procedural featuring a series character; Earthly Delights is an amateur sleuth cosy in which Greenwood breaks away from her series character, Phryne Fisher; and Blindside is a hardboiled who’s-got-the-loot thriller in which the police and the criminals are morally indistinguishable and largely interchangeable. Each solves some crime problems, of course; each devotes considerable time and energy to documenting their home city: Sydney, Melbourne and environs. And each uses films and film viewing as a lingua franca, a cultural currency exchanged among its characters (and readers).