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Year 12 has become a year of vastly out-of-proportion significance and, according to Michael Carr-Gregg, the media, parents and, to a lesser extent, schools are to blame for the pressure on young students to achieve that all-important, life-determining ENTER score. Bunkum to those last two sentiments says Carr-Gregg, and so do I, having been through it twice with my children, and having taught first-year undergraduates for years, many of whom change courses or life trajectories when they are exposed to what tertiary education or the workforce can offer. In a book filled with research, anecdotes and practical information, Carr­Gregg provides students with sensible strategies for ignoring the hype and for getting on with managing a busy year in their lives. He addresses diet, relationships, drugs, exercise, managing stress, ‘smart’ studying tactics and approaches to exams in a manner that treats young people as capable and intelligent. A lively, conversational style, plus Tandberg’s witty cartoons, avert any preachy tone. Carr-Gregg advises parents to be supportive but to ‘bite their tongues’.

When faced with a new dictionary of quotations, I always test drive the section on heaven first.

This is despite the fact that the section on hell is generally longer and more engaging. My habit is a bit like reading travel porn about the ultimate destination. It’s also a good way to acquire wisdom without much effort as I wait for some kind soul to come to my rescue and publish Wisdom for Dummies, the next volume in that useful series which is still marred by some notable gaps. Parents will look in vain for Soothers for Dummies, and shopfitters won’t find Mannequins for Dummies.

Major events in histories of public institutions – museums, galleries, libraries and universities – lend themselves to publications that acknowledge and celebrate openings, building extension projects and anniversaries. This year marks the sesquicentenary of the State Library of Victoria (SLV), which, with the completion of its massive building extension project in 2003, is now able to present a souvenir book on the collections. While this is in no manner a catalogue of the library’s collection, it does serve as a guide and as a useful primary source for seeking the more unusual items – the treasures.

Classics, like policemen, are getting younger. Pastures of the Blue Crane (1964) and By the Sandhills of Yamboorah (1965), the first two books reissued by the University of Queensland Press in their welcome ‘Children’s Classics’ series, are not those Australian children’s books (strangely supposed by many of my age cohort not to exist) that I read as a child, but the next generation, published in the mid-1960s when I was a young adult.

Thurley Fowler’s books were first published even more recently, in 1985 and 1991 respectively, but, like those of Reginald Ottley and Hesba Brinsmead, they are classics in that they breathe wonderful, idiosyncratic life into the people, times and legends that have helped to form today’s Australia.

According to some bright spark at HarperCollins, Tears of the Maasai is ‘a novel as big as Africa’, while Far Horizon, in the words of a creative Pan Macmillan employee, is apparently ‘driven by an emotion stronger than love, lust or fear: Revenge’. After such fanfare, what can the reader expect? Well, the usual ingredients of putative blockbusters set in Africa (and here I mean southern Africa): a nicely digestible Manichean view of the world, unredeemable villains, brawny, good-hearted heroes, feisty, long-legged heroines and plenty of fearsome wild animals. Rider Haggard forged the tradition in 1886 with the hugely popular King Solomon’s Mines, and Stuart Cloete and Wilbur Smith, among others, have also made good use of the exotic and seemingly anarchic qualities of Africa’s people, fauna and flora. One memorable scene in a Cloete novel featured an enraged buffalo licking the skin and flesh off the lower leg of a hapless man stuck not quite high enough in a tree. Where else but in Africa could you find such abundant and exquisite contrasts of harshness and beauty along with legends of buried treasure and the possibilities of antediluvian experience? It was perhaps, in Haggard’s day, an ur-land, where clichés sprouted and were happily swallowed by a goggle-eyed imperial audience back home.

In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’s second poetry collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of the world with snippets from the poet’s personal life. In the title poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin shepherd-boy’s chance discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘There is no connection between the two events,’ she writes, ‘[…] Yet I encounter coincidence.’

Jennifer Compton creates uneasy feelings. Her monologues come from desperate people: frantic, locked out, locked in. They all have some secret and are going to tell us, if it takes subtlety or no subtlety. What saves their querulous, impossible concerns from turning into rants or whinges is Compton’s actorly control of voice. These are poems of original intent and purposive control. The shocking ideas at the centre of her poems are tempered by a voice trying to master the extreme reality they relate. Her dramatic proclivities inform her work at every tum: characters are usually in places they don’t want to be, new circumstances have to be negotiated with an old map of the mind. On occasion, Compton even writes directions straight into the verse (‘I’ll shift from my mother’s voice and just give you the gist’), an unashamed member of theatre workshops.

This intensely vivid and moving book makes a fine contribution to the burgeoning literature of Australian Jewish autobiography. There are currently about 200 such titles. They vary enormously in standard and kind – from small print run, self-published chronicles written for authors’ families, to the work of high-profile professional writers such as Lily Brett, Morris Lurie and Arnold Zable. These narratives spring from all manner of Jewish backgrounds, including ‘Anglo-Jews’, whose families had been long settled in Australia prior to the Holocaust, and central and eastern European Jews, who lived through the annihilation - in camps, in hiding, in disguise - and settled here after World War II. The majority of life writing by Australian Jews can loosely be classified as Holocaust memoir (‘loosely’ because many survivors resent being seen as merely that, and write in detail about various phases of their lives). The most sophisticated ‘literary’ examples of this sub-genre generally come from second-generation writers, who have had more sustained secular educations than their parents, closer acquaintance with the English language, and more time to write and reflect than was available to the older, refugee generation.

The cover blurb to Peter Sutton’s book announces that: ‘Native title continues to be one of the most controversial political, legal and indeed moral issues in contemporary Australia.’ The moral issue, qualified by the adverb, is perhaps the one that most strongly engages the general reader, but it is not the central concern of these books that are mainly for the specialist reader. Morality, ‘indeed’, is something that the social scientist must keep at bay, in order to do the work that, as a native title expert, he or she is qualified to do. The expert, usually an anthropologist, provides evidence within the terms of the various native title acts, translating the knowledge of indigenous informants so that it can count in the courts.