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Each day I commute with Melbourne’s wage slaves on a privatised transport system that is invariably overcrowded due to cancelled or delayed trains. Dark thoughts whirl as I read Sebastian Mallaby’s The World’s Banker, a tale of ambition multiplied by ambition. In recent weeks, I have edited countless business stories, many of them half-year reports boasting profits of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, some increased by more than 100 per cent. Meanwhile, in the Third World, the raison d’être of the World Bank, children die for the want of mosquito nets worth two dollars. So what has James Wolfensohn achieved at the World Bank, and what has the World Bank achieved? According to Mallaby, there has been a real decline in world poverty. But one of the greatest achievements is the housing, feeding and clothing of thousands of the world’s neediest economists.

Alice Garner asks us to ‘dip our toes’ into the history of the shifting shore of the Bassin d’Arcachon, but she is being coy. Her study of sea change and social conflict in the nineteenth century (for the most part) in this particular part of south-west France demands that we need to wade with her into the deep waters of exhaustive primary sources. As a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, she is indefatigable and meticulous. This presumably well satisfies the requirements of academe, and shows her to be a fine historian, but it tends to dampen some of the liveliness that might have more easily seduced the general reader to the stories of ambition, progress, counter-attack and conflict that resulted in a resounding win for development and tourism in an age when industrialisation and railways, architectural conceits and money turned a coastal fishing and oyster-fishing area into a ‘bathing resort’.

To the west through the windows of my primary school in Terowie, I could see wheat fields, farmed by solid, middle-class farmers who sent their children to the local schools. To the east, if I squinted to the distant hills, I could make out the start of the station country, run by ‘squatters’ who sent their children to private schools in Adelaide. In between, the land was neither one nor the other and the strugglers who farmed it were often obliged to take work in the railways or as labourers on the lands to the east or west. It was all due to Goyder’s Line, I was told. There was always a lurking implication of guilt when Goyder’s Line was mentioned. Anyone who hadn’t the foresight to buy, or inherit, land sufficiently inside or outside the Line probably deserved to struggle.

At the start, Catherine Jinks’s teen novel Evil Genius resembles a local edition of ‘cult’ blockbuster phenomena such as Harry Potter and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer – wish-fulfilment fantasies about misfits initiated into a hidden élite. On page one, we are introduced to Jinks’s protagonist, Cadel (Welsh for ‘battle’), a brilliant but barely socialised young boy obsessed with computers. His adoptive parents are named Stuart and Lanna Piggott, which should tell you all you need to know. Aged eight, this outwardly placid but potentially vengeful nerd learns from his psychologist mentor that his true father is a mad scientist named Phineas Darkkon, who has made millions through scams such as a line of shonky vending machines, and who subsequently bankrolls a secret University of Evil located in central Sydney, where, a few years later, Cadel precociously winds up. Among the subjects on offer are Basic Lying, Forgery, Assassination and Guerrilla Skills; the other students include a Goth chemist who is trying to turn himself into a vampire, and a pair of bitchy, telepathic twins.

When I first heard that Tom Frame’s latest book was about the Voyager disaster, I wondered if the author had come down with amnesia, for he had already published a book on this subject thirteen years ago. However, if the federal government required two royal commissions to come to a conclusion about this naval accident, it is surely appropriate that Frame, having written Where Fate Calls: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy, should write a second book – The Cruel Legacy: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy – to revisit and reconsider this complex and controversial event.

John Curtin was recently voted Australia’s best prime minister by a panel of nine scholars of political leadership (The Age, 18 December 2004). He narrowly won over Robert Menzies (by one vote), but easily beat the likes of Bob Hawke, Ben Chifley and John Howard – in that order. Given that Curtin was prime minister for less than four years, while Menzies ruled for eighteen years, and given that most of Curtin’s policies were tough austerity measures of wartime preparation, his enduring reputation as Australia’s best prime minister is surely remarkable. Then along comes economist and former Keating adviser John Edwards, who says that Curtin’s deification has been pronounced for all the wrong reasons.

On 15 February 2005 the Labor Opposition launched a ‘matter of public importance’ (MPI) debate on ‘truth in government’ in the House of Representatives. An MPI debate is really only an invitation to comment on a ‘matter for discussion’, with no vote taken, as would be the case in a censure motion. The parliamentary discussion is simply timed out. But it is a useful opposition tactic for getting arguments and evidence on the public record.

Dreams of leaving can be a powerful force in the lives of young people. These four novels are each touched by the desire for other places. The idea that a more authentic self lurks beyond our familiar zones shapes these books, three of which are written by Australians, and one by an American writer who spends half his time in Australia and half in New York.