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In 1995 Robert Birrell gave us an interesting book called A Nation of Our Own: Citizenship and nation-building in federated Australia. It traced the growth of a nationalist consciousness in the 1890s and the translation of that Australian nationalism into the forms of Federation and the early shape of the Australian Commonwealth. He argued that there was something distinctively Australian about the ideals and structures created between 1890 and 1910, that far from being a self-interested arrangement devised by lawyers and businessmen, the Australian people were actively engaged and committed to creating the Commonwealth. Now reissued as Federation: The Secret Story by ‘Bob’ Birrell, with a cover based on Arthur Streeton’s The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might, it has a new introduction and conclusion and some corrections to the text.

Australia’s bid for the atomic bomb is one of the  great ‘what ifs’ of Australian history. Until now it has also been one of the greatest unknowns. According to Historian Wayne Reynolds, a convenient fiction has arisen which holds that all that really happened was that the Anglophile Menzies government allowed Britain to test its bombs at Maralinga to no great effect, except a legacy of radiation poisoning and contamination. The truth, he says, is much more complex, interesting and profound.

Poisonous, profiteering physiotherapist Sue Mindberry is making a packet by charging seven gullible, fifty plus women $1000 per head for thirteen three-hour sessions of hydrotherapy. They are variously brain-damaged, hugely obese, psychically astray and arthritic. Sue Gough believes with Germaine that even such as these do not deserve the invisibility that age is supposed to confer. She gives them each a story – or rather, stories – invented by Beverley, a stroke victim, who hates her post-traumatic paralysis so much that she tries to disappear into the imagined lives of her fellow sufferers in the pool (its roof rolled back so that as they lie in the water supported by floaties each can identify with her own personal star or goddess).

After a three-month journey to Madagascar by steam-ship, the first thing to greet the newly married missionaries Thomas and Elizabeth Rowlands were fields of wet sugar cane. Brightly painted wooden cottages surrounded the harbour; former slaves and Arab, Indian, and Chinese traders filled the streets. ‘Rain fell heavily, but covers of rofia cloth, which swelled and thickened in the wet kept the travellers dry.’ Their granddaughter, Joan Rowlands, describes their inland journey in Voluntary Exiles. Crossing crocodile-infested rivers, bearers held the Rowlands aloft, ‘shouting and beating [the waters] with branches and poles to ward off attack’.

The main character in Renata Singer’s novel, The Front of the Family, says ‘What’s past is passed.’ We only have a brief encounter with her before she slumps over dead in her old terry-toweling dressing gown in front of the television. But, in the tradition of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the narrative continues to revolve around the present absence of Zosha Feldman, her past, her life and her complicated relation­ship with her two daughters, Felunia and Miriam. Indeed, the central question of the novel is whether the past is ever past. As another character remarks, ‘some things you can’t talk about. You can only talk about what you can think about. Better not to think about some things.’

This amusing doggerel, furnishing the epigraph to ‘On Queer Street’, the eighth chapter of this book, neatly sums up the status that Oxford Street currently enjoys as an emblem of, and shorthand reference to, the large and vibrant Sydney gay world. Its campy note evokes an older gay world of queens and drag (what in fact the US slang term gay originally meant in the 1920s and 1930s), which was how gay Oxford Street began in the late 1960s. That all receded but did not vanish with the advent of macho fashions and behaviours, clonery, leather, and Muscle Maries in the 1980s, which marked the second wave of US influence following the willing embrace of gay liberation in 1970 and after. Oxford Street is now known to the world as the site of the Mardi Gras parade, far and away the largest street celebration in Australia and probably the largest gay and lesbian street celebration in the world.

Lively and cheerful, these three books aimed at young readers are sure to persuade their potential audience that reading is fun, language can be powerful and magical, and life in books is more exciting than the lived version. What more enticing motivations to read can there be for those starting out?

Despite attempts, revived in recent weeks, to discredit the term ‘stolen generations’, what cannot be denied in the semantics of that debate are the excruciatingly painful experiences of the children involved. While the meanings of such terms as ‘removed’ and ‘abandoned’ are complicated in a racist culture by indigenous peoples’ disenfranchisement, poverty and illiteracy, the devastating nature of separation from family in childhood must never be overlooked or underestimated.

This book, John Croaker, is a work of convict biography. Its authors are of the opinion that we could do with a deal more convict biography. But convict biography with a difference. Though ‘a well-established medium’, the need is, we are told, to go beyond assessments of ‘colonial figure-heads’, for ‘it is time to examine the men and women on whom the lime­light only flickered’.