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Roger McDonald seems never to do things twice in the same way. To be solemn about it, he has a mind which is both capacious and vivacious: events, experiences, things at large flood in to stock its territory, and become the livelier from their environment. Refreshed himself by Australia, he refreshes some of it in return.

The Tree in Changing Light is a case in point. This is a meditative work whose attention moves easily from the world’s physicalities and fluctuations to the appraising mind itself and back again. It is fluently, but not trivially, dialectical – an example of well-schooled attention which is itself a kind of schooling. Here, for instance, is an early passage:

Tom Gilling’s first novel, The Sooterkin, was an engaging and self-conscious oddity. Set in early nineteenth-century Tasmania, it had at its centre the striking conceit of the Sooterkin itself, a child born to a former convict and who is, to all intents and purposes, a seal. The Sooterkin was a critical success, inviting comparison to Peter Carey for its Dickensian energy and its playful engagement with the slippery rudiments of the Australian imagination.

‘I felts as if I had fallen into hell,’ reflects the Keeper of the President’s Clarinet of his visit to the city of Baha. The statement is almost redundant. The sun cannot penetrate the toxic pollution of this city; he has just passed a group of children betting on the imminent death of a fly-infested man; and he is there to kidnap an hermaphrodite child-prostitute. However, his words could be voiced by most inhabitants of the fictional land of Abaza; this novel is filled with such baroque, nightmare imagery.

We read that 100,000 displaced persons will arrive in Australia in the next eighteen months. Is there no way that the people of Australia can have some control over these sweeping invitations to displaced persons. Surely there is no room in Australia for hordes of foreigners …’ reads a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. Does it sound familiar? However, the date is 18 November 1948, a time when aggrieved readers were bombarding the papers, protesting against the influx of postwar refugees.

How seriously do we take an author who, in her mid-forties, writes about ‘street cred’, calls a department store ‘humungous’ and, discussing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, asks: ‘Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo.’? Linda Jaivin studied one of the world’s most difficult languages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, and, as a scholar and journalist, published perceptive analyses of China. Then she turned to fiction and biography.

Sydney, as everybody knows, is Australia’s world city, always has been. It offers the urban metonym – Opera House sails – which, together with Uluru, is Australia to the outside world. And it generates, or generated, a particular kind of intellectual, the Sydney larrikin, rogue male. These books claim to cover two such, Bobs Hughes and Ellis. How might we receive them?

The Russian theorist Yuri Lotman said: ‘Plot is a way of understanding the world.’ On this basis, texts with plots – novels, for example – do more for us than texts without plots. The telephone book, for example, a plotless text par excellence, may promote aspects of communication, but adds little to our attempt to make sense of life. However, Igor Gelbach, a Georgian Russian now living in Melbourne, has challenged this concept with his thought-provoking but virtually plotless novel, Confessions of a Clay Man, which may be narrative in shape but is highly poetic in procedure. At first reading, it is rather mystifying, the story so fabulised that you tend to lose it and concentrate on the word-pictures, which manage to make a completely unknown place hauntingly evocative, as though you had once dreamed about it. Like Goethe’s ‘Land wo die Zitronen blühn’, we can’t know it, but we feel as though we do. Gelbach’s seaside town resonates with a similar, impossible familiarity.