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Patrick McCaughey’s Fred Williams is a rare event in Australian publishing, a substantial and scholarly monograph on a living Australian artist. Fred Williams, born in 1927, belongs to the so-called ‘heroic years’ of modern Australian painting (1940-65), yet his reputation as ‘Australia’s leading painter’ was made during the decade that followed. Unlike his contemporaries – among them Charles Blackman – who made their reputations before going overseas, Williams spent most of his formative years (1951-56) in England. The works from this period are mainly figurative and shaped by his experience of London life music hall and other genre subjects.

This volume is subtitled ‘A novel About The Nature of Truth’ and thus marks Frank Hardy’s continuing concern with basic concepts, the source matter of philosophical and theological debate, rather than with the social immediacies tat inspired and formed the texture of his earlier fiction. As with But the Dead are Many, his previous novel, a tour de force of considerable proportions in which Life and Death were set forth as interchangeable terms rather than irreconcilables, the present work is intricately structured in recognition of the complexity of the issues which is being debated, or, put otherwise, the evasiveness and obduracy of the daemon with which the writer-character is wrestling. There is certainly some sense in Hardy of being more than just interested in narrative formulae, modi operandi, recapitulative tactics. (Appropriately enough, since he writes of men in the grip of obsessions which gnaw at their intellectual vitals, and, as suggested, he stands on extraordinary intimate terms with them.)

Virtually every book examining the whole or part of Australia’s postwar foreign policy has taken the American connection as its focal point. Camilleri, a prolific scholar and well-known commentator on international politics, however, shifts the emphasis and integrates some new dimensions. Instead of centring his study on the isolated aims of Australian policy-makers, he assesses the relationship within the framework of the major partner’s global strategy. The first critical factors to isolate are the changing needs and capabilities of the world’s leading capitalist nation; how have the Americans perceived their interests and responded in a dynamic global environment?

This book of a dozen essays, with a foreword by Sir Kenneth Weare (his last substantial piece of writing before he died), concentrates on various aspects of the changing Anglo-Australian relationship.

It is an enlightening collection, for most of the essays test and in some cases challenge the ‘conventional wisdom’ which pervades recent analyses of Australian life. This is especially useful to this reviewer who, as an immigrant of two years’ standing, discovered on arrival a veritable industry of writers in various disciplines all concerned with the search for an Australian identity. Two essays, for a start, provide the leaven in reassessment of George Johnston’s literary quest for ‘the way home’, as well as Donald Horne’s ‘Lucky Country’ theme and Alan Renouf’s ‘Frightened Country’ analysis. The first is interestingly dealt with by Alan Lawson in his ‘Acknowledging Colonialism: Revisions of the Australian Tradition’, which challenges several half-truths which have become maxims. Horne and Renouf immediately spring to mind in J.D.B. Miller’s ‘An Empire That Don’t Care What You Do’. This essay is a ‘must’ for those people who view most past (and some present) Australian leaders as supine in their dealings with British counterparts.

In one of the pieces that make up this collection, Manning Clark recalls how he first encountered Barry Humphries in the late 1950s and recalls the shock of recognition that he was in the presence of a man of genius. Clark wants to defend that judgement against those of us who find today’s Edna Everidge tedious and offensive. He identifies the great gifts of the satirist, the timing, the ear for a phrase, the emotional extravagance, the ability to conceive and execute a range of outrageous characters. This technical virtuosity is important, Clark maintains, because it enables Humphries to hold up a mirror to Australian society and show us what we are. No matter that we are offended by the mounting vulgarity of Edna or the wilful misrepresentation of Whitlamism: Humphries is merely showing us ourselves in an age of ruins. His is the madness of a man possessed by a love-hate relationship with the people, a man impelled to confront us with our inner emptiness.

I found Murray Bail’s novel Homesickness a work of brilliant and resonant artistry, which despite many unlikely incidents, succeeds in being thoroughly credible in all its parts. It is also a desolating book, a comedy, but a very black one.

This book is a useful and lucid account of Australian foreign policy since the very beginning. It does not purport to be an authoritative or a particularly analytical account of the evolution of external policy but is one which senior secondary school children could find helpful in achieving a sense of perspective. As its author concedes, to grasp the essentials of Australian foreign policy this book read in isolation would not be enough, and some general knowledge of world events is necessary.

Inland explorers and their discoveries form a vital part of Australia’s historical consciousness and the tracks they made on maps of exploration and settlement are part of the learning process of every Australian schoolchild. All too often, though, the image of the explorer is two-dimensional and the men and their motives seem less interesting than the patterns of dotted lines in the huge expanse of the Australian continent in schoolbook maps.

One notable exception has been the Prussian explorer and naturalist, Ludwig Leichhardt, who came to Sydney in 1842 to study the land and to collect geological and botanical specimens, and who became the leader of expeditions in Northern Australia, to explore the inland rivers for new lands and routes across the vast territory to the north and west of the settled eastern coast.

Douglas Stewart has pointed out that James Joyce and Henry Lawson, opposites in art, and living at opposite ends of the earth, once wrote the same story and, each in his own way, made a masterpiece of it. The funeral of Dignam in Ulysses is the same story as Lawson’s ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’. In ‘Dublin and the Bush’ (The Flesh and the Spirit) he persuasively developed this argument.

As I write this, the Aboriginals have been forced to capitulate at Noonkanbah. The Western Australian Government is hell-bent that Amax should drill on the Blacks’ sacred site, and the National Aboriginal Conference is in Geneva to state its case at the United Nations. Patterns of Australia, funded to the tune of $120,000 by Mobil, one of the most powerful trans-nationals the world has ever known, could not have been published at a more appropriate time. Although author Geoffrey Dutton deals dutifully with the Aboriginals in the course of this book, Noonkanbah or what it stands for – energy resources, land rights and the exploitative activities of trans-nationals – is not one of the ‘patterns’ (along with many others) discussed in this smooth coffee table creation.