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This book seeks to bring together two late-twentieth-century obsessions: the language of human rights as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II and the so-called boom in life writing. The most obvious sites at which life narratives and human rights come together are the various tribunals and inquiries that some nations have recently held into aspects of their troubled pasts, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and our own Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry into the removal of Aboriginal children from their families.

Tony Harrison is a man with a passion. The evidence is the Australian Film & TV Companion. Meticulously researched and compiled, Harrison has listed every sound feature film made in this country since 1930 and every nationally broadcast television drama series, mini-series, television movie, documentary series, comedy series and current affairs show since 1956.

In 1936, West Australian MP Leslie Craig stated in parliament that the (then) current figure of Aboriginal ‘half-castes’ in Australia – approximately 4000 – would soon number 40,000 if something were not done to stem the tide of this growing problem. Seventy years later, in 2006, a federal member of parliament has suggested that Australia is in danger of ‘aborting itself out of existence’ and becoming ‘a Muslim nation in fifty years’ time’ – and this only a few months after the Cronulla race riots. It is clear that race-based fears are still prevalent in our predominantly white Australia. Henry Reynolds’s latest book, Nowhere People – like most of his books – is as much an analysis of our contemporary society as it is an historical examination of how international theories of race shaped Australia’s identity over the past 218 years.

Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed begins, ‘… such is the realm of water. It cradles yet suffocates. Warms and cools us. Sustains, nurtures and kills us.’ Indeed, the bonds and binaries of the element are central to this narrative – not simply the presence or lack of literal water, but also fierce emotional currents that threaten to submerge its main characters.

Set in contemporary South Australia’s Murraylands, Watershed centres on ex-champion swimmer Eve Buenetti, who is lost in a barren psychological terrain following the presumed drowning of her son, David. The novel also explores her husband Marconi’s response to the tragedy, and the tangled rivalry and sexual tensions between Eve, Marconi and his brother Victorio, the womanising town mayor. As in many explorations of rural communities, tangential storylines evolve, providing a break from the Eve–Marconi narrative and insight into other town dwellers, such as cryptic newcomer Jasmine.

Like Monaco, journals are sunny places for shady people. Black sheep and dark horses have often found a first sanctuary there. Precarious principalities, they are built on the shifting sands of subsidies, sponsorships and subscriptions. But their lifeblood is won or lost at the roulette wheel of submissions and commissions.

Geoff Page’s third verse novel – a form which, if we are to believe the cover puff, he has ‘made utterly his own’ – takes a broad and topical look at the problem of reconciliation in Australia. Reaching back to the 1840s, his narrative opens with an English settler’s account of establishing a successful cattle station on the Clarence River. Edward Coaldale is a liberal with an en-lightened attitude towards the local indigenous people. Employing natives as stockmen and learning their language, he soon earns the suspicion of neighbouring pastoralists, who regard such behaviour as ‘soft’. Prematurely ill with cancer and lacking an heir, Coaldale attempts to bequeath ‘Kooringal’ to the Bundjalung tribe, but is thwarted by regulations insisting the property be left to a single person. He dies leaving it to the talented Jimberoo, who, before long, sells it on to a white family.