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Twenty years after the publication of their ‘inclusive Australian literary history’, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman have returned with a ‘sequel’, After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007. One leaden title succeeds another, although the tone of the second book is angrier. More of that later. As the authors note in their preface, The New Diversity was published by McPhee Gribble, an independent outfit that would largely be subsumed by Penguin in 1989, the year in which that book appeared. This observation prepares for the consistently impressive aspect of After the Celebration: its detailed, incisive, intelligently informed account of the changes in the circumstances of publishing, and especially fiction publishing, in Australia during the last two decades. One might take counsels of hope or despair from their analysis (particularly if one were a novelist), but still be grateful for it.

Judith Clarke’s new novel for young adults, The Winds of Heaven, is a moving story about the strength and difficulty of friendship, and how accidents of birth, family and situation can combine to overwhelm the brightest spirit.

On her first trip to Lake Conapaira in 1952, ten-year-old Clementine meets her cousin Fan for the first time. Fan is a whirlwind: beautiful, impulsive and imaginative. Clementine is entranced by Fan’s strength and liveliness, and the two girls quickly become friends. But Fan’s childhood is a world away from Clementine’s cautious but loving family home. Stranded with her violent mother amid the prejudices of a country town, the beautiful Fan is labelled ‘stupid’ at school, and regularly beaten and emotionally abused by her depressive mother. Her sister has left home, and her father disappeared long ago. Fan fights for happiness, and fights hard. She has her miyan, or spiritual guardian, an elderly Aborigine who lives in the bush and tells her stories. He calls her Yirigaa, ‘Morning Star’, and is the only positive adult influence in her life. Clementine wants to stay with Fan, but the holiday draws to an end and she must return home, leaving Fan with her mother in the house that smelled of ‘anger and hatred and disappointment and jagged little fears’.

In early 2001, several Roman Catholic nuns stood trial in Brussels for crimes against humanity for their part in the genocide in Rwanda. Rwandan nationals, they were charged with violating new provisions of Belgian national law, which make participation in genocide and crimes against humanity anywhere in the world a violation of the law of that country. Unlike the case of Slobodan Milosevic, who awaits trial before an international tribunal in the Hague, or recent well-publicised proceedings in England against Augusto Pinochet, which were based on an extradition request from a Spanish judge investigating the former dictator for crimes against Spanish citizens in Chile, the Belgian law grants jurisdiction against anyone, who commits certain types of crimes against anyone regardless of citizenship, anywhere. In other words, the Belgian system has nationalised international crimes and international criminal law jurisdiction.

In one way, this is a book to unnerve the teaching academic: it is so eminently cribbable. As a ‘handbook’ of Wright’s poetry, it ranges widely rather than intensively, offering lucid expositions and firmly delivered judgements. If these latter are sometimes, by the nature of the book, more asserted than demonstrated, they nonetheless seem usually sound and sensible: the lines quoted from ‘The Watcher’ do indeed ‘attempt, and fail, to wrest a response from the stereotyped symbols of the matriarchate’; ‘Christmas Ballad’ is banal; Fourth Quarter does represent ‘a newer and more vigorous poetic world’ than Alive.

You will never guess from reading these two books that Australia is generally regarded by the rest of the world as the best place to seek information on scientific sheep management and efficient wool production.

For more than thirty years Australian scientists have successfully led the search for a better understanding of the biological workings of a sheep, the structure and growth of wool fibres and of the ecological intricacies of pasture management. During the same period wool technologists have made tremendous strides in the preparation, handling and measurement of wool, while economists have made their own important contributions to the more efficient management of sheep and the more efficient marketing of wool.

Peter Ward’s stunningly inadequate review of Passenger in the Weekend Australian has at least the virtue that it compels a reply. The first came from Keneally himself, who finished his account of the novel’s favourable reception in other English-speaking countries by saying ‘I just don’t want people to avoid Passenger because of any antipodean twitches. So don’t miss it. Believe me.’

In a talk she gave recently at Writers’ Week in Adelaide, Dorothy Hewett praised Gwen Harwood as:

Working in isolation as the woman hero, charring like a cartographer the uneasy, shifting, violent, broken world of Australian women and finally, in the teeth of all opposition. proclaiming the right to love and be a hero.

Dorothy Hewett identified several other roles or figures for women writers of poetry in Australia, most particularly:

The woman as loser, lover, bleeder, the victim figure, at once perverse and self-exacting, who refuses to be second-best.

But it’s clearly Harwood’s heroic proclamation of ‘the right to love’ that Hewett admires.