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It doesn’t take much to realise that John Hartley admires the work of Richard Hoggart, the famous English literary critic and founder of the field of Cultural Studies. The titles of several of his books are tributes to Hoggart, including this one. As Hartley explains on the first page, The Uses of Literacy (1957) set the agenda for educational and disciplinary reform in schools and universities. Hoggart’s strong views on the abuse of literacy, especially in the entertainment media, found much public support. This interest in literacy lay in what ordinary people did with it as part of everyday culture rather than as an instrumental skill for business, civic or religious purposes.

Over the last two decades, Ross Gibson has earned an outstanding reputation for ground-breaking investigations into cultural memory, image and place, and for his strikingly innovative films and installations, his curatorial work on the Photographic Collection of the Sydney Justice & Police Museum, his foundational directorship of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and, of course, his highly imaginative non-fictional writing. With its eponymous allusions to William Empson and to Jonathan Raban, his Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) announced its own haunting by earlier explorations of the pastoral and of the irreducible ambiguities in history’s traces.

The Best Australian Political Writing 2009 is a collection of articles about the political climate in Australia over the course of twelve months. In 411 pages, a range of prominent Australian writers analyse the events that made headlines in this country during what editor Eric Beecher describes as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime-year’.

Towards the close of the second section of The Red Highway, Nicolas Rothwell is driving across the Kimberley Plateau towards Wyndham with a hitchhiker, an Aboriginal girl. When she asks why he has come back, he tells her that while he was a reporter in the Middle East he heard stories about places in the Kimberley that reminded him of people he knew there and of how much he missed the country. He tells her that ‘people who come to northern Australia come here because they’re lost, or searching, or on the edge of life, and silence, and they’re chasing after some kind of pattern, some redemption they think might be lurking, on the line of the horizon, out in the faint, receding perspectives of the bush’. He turns on the radio and picks up a station based in Kununurra. The announcer is chatting about strongyloids, a parasitic worm which causes heart and kidney problems in outback communities. ‘“I’ve got that,” said Cherandra proudly.’

Recently I engaged in an act of bad faith as a teacher. I set my second-year Shakespeare students a ‘research essay’ as a final piece of assessment, and insisted that they engage with primary scholarship – hardcover monographs and scholarly articles – if they wanted to do well. The problem is that industrial-strength literary criticism is almost unintelligible to undergraduates, and that is not entirely their fault. I knew this, but went ahead and set a criterion I knew would benefit only the tiny minority who might go on to a higher degree. The bulk of my students, who will be teaching adolescent South Australians Romeo + Juliet for decades to come, may never get around to thanking me.

Australia’s major galleries, with the odd exception, have generally conducted their exhibition programs to show that fanfare for blockbusters is reserved for exhibitions that come from somewhere other than Australia. The die was cast long ago. In the past thirty years, temporary exhibitions have increasingly consumed the lives of public galleries – and blockbusters represent the embodiment of this phenomenon.