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An ancient grammarian who had pondered Horace’s remarks on whether a good poem is the product of natural aptitude (ingenium) or acquired skills (studium) opted for ingenium and produced what was to become a much-quoted aphorism: poeta nascitur non fit, ‘a poet is born, not made’. His privileging of ‘nature’ over ‘art’ is favoured by those anxious to preserve the mystery of poetry by deriving it from an inscrutable faculty called ‘genius’. Others, eager to unscrew the inscrutable, favour the rival and demystificatory claim that poets are made, not born, which enables human interventions to overcome biological determinism.

This is a stylish book, and is rich with illustration which includes material quoted from the work of a whole range of writers as well as colour photographs that call up an immediate sense of place. It is a unique way to an understanding of Australia’s capital cities – historically, geographically, and culturally, and at the same time to an acquaintance with writers whose work is offered in the context of these cities. The material is essentially descriptive. Eclectic in content and often benign, it offers an alternative approach to our history in terms of landscape and literature. It would make an appropriate gift for readers who are curious about Australian literature/landscape and whose present knowledge is limited. It would also be a useful inclusion in familiarisation packages for diplomatic and political representatives from overseas countries.

Mr Rolls has written an extraordinarily detailed history of the Chinese in Australia, interspersed with much additional related and unrelated matter. It is indeed a labour of love, written over a period of some twenty years, and the author has uncovered a large amount of fascinating and amazing information not readily available elsewhere. Much of this new material relates to the vibrant popular culture the Chinese brought with them: their food, cricket fighting, cock fighting, and other sorts of fairly harmless gambling; their diseases, living conditions and relations with their non-Chinese neighbours. A certain amount of the book concerns immigration acts and other forms of discrimination, of course, but the stronger impression one gets is a more positive one: the Chinese as hard workers and major contributors to Australian life.

The first thing to be noted about this collection of essays is that it is aimed at a quite specific market – HSC/VCE students. There is a list of ‘Study Questions’ at the end, and the language of the essays is consistently pitched at an upper secondary school level. Readers who want more complex responses to My Place would be better served by consulting the eclectic bibliography to the text as a starting point.

Sandra Holmes’s Yirawala: Painter of the Dreaming is not a picture book or a ‘pretty story’. It does not tell balanda (white people) what they want to hear, nor does it euphemise the truth. The book is an inspiring, if harrowing account of Yirawala’s life and death, his religion manifest as art, and his struggle with balanda officialdom to regain title to his Dreaming country, Marugulidban.

Suzanne Falkiner’s Wilderness is a garden of delights. This is one of the most imaginative, innovative, and useful books on Australian literary culture to emerge for some time. The book represents the first volume of a two-part series entitled The Writers’ Landscape, and Wilderness traces the influence of Australian landscape on Australian writers.

Douglas Kennedy is one of that group of travel writers who are annoyingly good at getting an angle on a story but never really making a point. He whisks us around the world, in this case around the money markets of the world, observing, picking up quotable quotes, telling tidy anecdotes, and in the end, back home, he snaps the lid on his collected experience and calls it a day. Easy listening, but perhaps a bit too easy.

Stephen Muecke’s Textual Spaces offers both new material and versions of some of the essays he has published on Aboriginal and cultural studies published through the 1980s. Many of these have already been very influential, but the welcome appearance of the book invites consideration of the continuities in Muecke’s arguments, the programme they suggest.