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Nothing divides people as much as the idea that history is a text and, in many cases, a fiction. It’s the sort of notion – more or less accepted by academics in the Humanities – that really annoys ‘among the barbarians’ public intellectuals. Point out that history is written by the victors, that much of what we think of as gospel was written decades after the event from secondary sources (the Gospels, for example), and that the bulk of tradition, from Scots tartan to Christmas, is a nineteenth-century confection, and their anger becomes tinged with panic. It’s vertigo, but one of time rather than space – the sudden realisation that you are standing on nothing but the present, with the texts and living witnesses (whose memories are texts) inhering in the present.

I remember reading a book entitled Deeds That Won the Empire at primary school. Mainly, it seemed to be about the slaughter of various groups of native races by the superior technology and organisation of the West, always personified by focusing on an intrepid leader called Carstairs or Hethington-Bloggs, or some such name. Even in the 1950s, the book had a desperately old-fashioned feel to it. This type of writing, one felt, could not last.

Five of Laurie Moore’s ancestors were in the party that finally captured Jimmy Governor in October 1900, ninety-nine days after his murderous onslaught on the Mawbey family. He and his wife have assiduously traversed the terrain of the manhunt for Jimmy and his brother Joe. Moore’s book, The True Life of Jimmy Governor, written in conjunction with Stephan Williams, is an admirable amateur labour: loving, painstaking, yet never without a tinge of irony about fashions of remembering folk anti-heroes in Australia. As the authors remark near the end of their story: ‘the brothers held up, or were fed by, everyone’s great aunt or grandfather’.

Although her work is often surprisingly varied, there is no doubt that when you read a Gwen Harwood poem you enter a highly distinctive poetic world. If it comes from her first twenty-five years of productivity, there is a good chance that you will be in a landscape of psychic melodrama. Everything will be liminal. The setting will be a sunset, the late sun will be flaring a dangerous gold on some intertidal stretch, the protagonist will have awoken from a menacing dream or, pace Kröte, be moving backwards and forwards across the threshold of one. The history of her poetry may be the way this scene increases in intensity as the voices that communicate in dreams increasingly come from figures in Harwood’s own past.

Peter Goldsworthy, doctor and poet, is a writer of significant style and concision. This new selection of his lyric poetry lives up to its jaunty, graffitied, lavender cover; it bespeaks lightness. And lightness is damned hard work. You don’t get there just by smiling and going to book launches ...

Contemporary Australian fiction continues to lean on the national past. Perhaps that’s a comment on the present, or the future, for that matter. It seems to be not so much a matter of the past being experientially ‘another country’, but a more engaging version of the literal one ...

The privileges of artistic ambiguity have been stretched a little by the publishers in choosing such a broad subtitle for this work. So, as the author does, let’s clarify what Erotic Ambiguities is about: ‘While focusing on the female body in art, this book considers the way in which visual art produced by women was informed by feminism.’ This statement, as it turns out, is also not entirely true, as some works by male artists are discussed and the author does not limit herself to literal depictions of the human form. Furthermore, feminism is acknowledged as too loose a term and McDonald clarifies her territory by adding ‘contemporary feminism is a coalition of various conflicting feminisms that are neither co-existive nor independent’.