Bantam

We expect memoirs to be true – it is one of the main reasons we read them – but we have also grown accustomed over the years to the idea that, while the memoir may be true in spirit, events may not have happened exactly as described. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memoirist to include some prefatory remarks to that effect. Such caveats seem fair; we have come to see them as no more than acknowledgments of the way things are.

Ignored by literary historians, consumed quietly by the reading public, Australian crime fiction has been evident enough to readers of Miller and MacCartney’s classic bibliography, and restates its bloodied but unbowed presence in two forthcoming reference tools: Margaret Murphy’s Bibliography of Women Writers in Australia, many of whom write thrillers, and in Allen J. Hubin’s near-future third edition of his international bibliography of crime fiction, in which Michael Tolley of the University of Adelaide will exhaustively update and correct the Australian entries.

What is it that so fascinates us about lost children? Whether fact or fiction, their stories keep surfacing: Azaria Chamberlain, Jaidyn Leskie, the Beaumont children, or the schoolgirls Joan Lindsay dreamed up for her 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Indeed, those girls have wafted through so many subsequent incarnations ...

Dominic Knight’s début novel chronicles a life on hold. Its narrator, Paul Johnson, is a twenty-five-year-old law graduate from Sydney University. Single and living off his parents, he detests his job as a mobile DJ, yet also loathes the prospect of working in a legal firm like his friend, Nige, whose life ‘is a corporate T-shirt saying “work hard, play hard”’. Paul’s comic struggles to overcome indecision and inertia shape the narrative, and the inner-city culture of Sydney’s young professionals provide its backdrop.

Until recently, more Australians got their news and information from Channel Nine than from any other single source. For nearly thirty years, what Gerald Stone describes as ‘Kerry Packer’s mighty tv dream machine’ was the dominant force in Australian media and popular culture. Channel Nine was, as its promos used to say, ‘The One’.

Katherine Summers’ memoir of her childhood and Kris Olsson’s biography of Debbie Kilroy have in common histories of violence and abuse against women and children. Summers writes of her early childhood of desperate poverty in London’s East End in the 1960s and of her subsequent time in private boarding schools in a way that emphasises the powerlessness of the child in an inscrutable adult world. In contrast, Olsson traces Debbie Kilroy’s journey from an angry and rebellious adolescence in Brisbane in the 1970s to becoming a battered wife and mother who was imprisoned in the infamous Boggo Road prison after being convicted of illegal drug trafficking. From these beginnings, Olsson recounts the process by which Kilroy becomes a powerful activist and leader on behalf of imprisoned women and troubled teenagers.

With the recent Tony Abbott paternity saga unfolding in spectacular fashion, adoption is back in the news. Not that it ever really went away. Adoption was such a common practice in postwar Australia that there is a ready-made constituency for reunion stories. Many birth parents, especially birth mothers, hunger for details of successful reunions. Adoptees search out familiar patterns in the biographies of other relinquished adults. But more than that, there is something primal about separation, loss and reunion that attracts a wider audience to adoption narratives. It is not simply that almost everyone over thirty knows someone who was adopted. There is something about postwar adoption experiences that sharpens our sense of human relationships as both fragile and resilient.

I’ve always been interested in trying new things,’ Tim Jarvis declares disarmingly in the opening  line of The Unforgiving Minute, ‘and I’m not sure I know exactly why.’ Unlike Scott or Shackleton, Jarvis has no literary aspirations but is a knockabout bloke who gives motivational talks on his adventures and who believes in a gospel of personal effort, physical challenge and – trailing these two by a long margin – the wonder of the natural world. This account of a series of polar journeys is self-consciously structured using the effective journalistic device of plunging the reader into an intense situation at the opening of each chapter, and finishing each chapter with a teaser for the next. Like most accounts of polar exploration, it is a weird blend of numbing dullness and compulsive interest. Jarvis has taken the lessons of his public speaking and turned them into a pleasing book, firmly in the self-help genre, with gripping accounts of the many crises that inevitably beset extreme adventure expeditions, not to mention the prurient details of toilet habits, tooth decay and muscle wastage.

What’s a nice girl called Anastasia doing in the Whangpoa River? Maybe she’s the daughter of the last tsar who everyone thought was dead, or maybe it’s just a girl who looks like a Russian princess and happens to have the same name. If the proposition sounds familiar, be assured by Colin Falconer that Anastasia Romanovs were thick on the streets of Shanghai after the White Russian diaspora of 1917–18.