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To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

For a man who was supposed to have a shot memory, Alan Bond has a remarkable power of recall. In the mid­1990s, facing fraud charges concerning his dealings in Manet’s painting La Promenade, he – or rather, his barristers – successfully argued in court that a series of minor strokes had left him with brain damage and a memory so defective he couldn’t possibly be expected to answer prosecution questions. Those Australians who reckoned all along that he faked the forgetfulness, the shuffling gait, and the vacant stare at the television cameras outside court will doubtless be confirmed in their view that he’s a shameless liar.

London seen through a haze of smoke and fire in J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, is the evocative cover image for Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited novel. The Great Fire comes twenty-three years after Hazzard’s brilliantly composed, witty, and ultimately tragic work ...

For many Australians, Patrick Dodson is the guy with the land rights hat and flowing beard. With Paddy’s Road: Life stories of Patrick Dodson, Kevin Keeffe ensures that Dodson will also be remembered for being the first Aboriginal priest and for his contributions to the reconciliation movement.

In the bitter federal election of 1917, Labor’s member for the marginal seat of Corio fell victim to dirty tricks. As a quartermaster sergeant in the AIF’s 3rd Division, A.T. Ozanne shouldn’t have been opposed. But Prime Minister Billy Hughes became electorally desperate, and he published a cable from General Monash, the division’s commander, which portrayed Ozanne as a deserter. Ozanne was indeed not in France with the AIF volunteers, but it was because he had been given medical leave, quite authentically. Monash was careless with the facts, and perhaps misled by officers who disliked Ozanne. Hughes’s ruthless use of the cable destroyed Ozanne’s political career.

Chandani Lokugé’s second novel touches on a theme common to such varied texts as Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2002) and Alex Garland’s The Beach (1997): the Western fascination with, and exploitation of, the communities of beautiful Asian beaches.

Turtle Nest takes the postcard-perfect idyll of a Sri Lankan beach as the setting for a far from idyllic tale about exploitation and family tragedy. Aruni journeys to this beach from Australia in order to find out more about the history of her mother, Mala, but her pilgrimage does not give her peace.

An author who calls his book Wonderful is asking for trouble. He is either very confident or unusually foolhardy. Andrew Humphreys’ second novel has some ‘wonderful’ things in it, but it is ultimately too much of a good thing: it is too long, and tries to cover too much ground. I know nothing of his first novel (The Weight of the Sun, 2001), but one thing that strikes this reader is that few Australian novels betray as little of their author’s country of origin as this does. Wonderful could as easily have been written in California or Hungary, to choose two of the novel’s locations. This seems to me to be a matter for praise; there is no reason why Australian novelists should be doggedly bent on explaining their country to their readers. In a grown-up country, authors, like filmmakers and artists, should locate their work and their themes wherever inclination leads them. Nationalism is one of art’s corsets.

It had to be the black metaphor of the season. On Boxing Day, Radio National ran a short, sharp-edged conversation on Australia’s changing relations with the Pacific island-states. One contributor, Professor William Maley, said that the Australian government’s bribery of the destitute statelet of Nauru made him think of ‘the caddish squire seeking out the most wretched prostitute in the village’. Responding. Richard Ackland commented that those who devised the appalling Pacific Solution seemed extraordinarily unconscious of the connotations that still attend that word ‘solution’.