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The publisher did scant service to the author by putting a ‘blurb’ before the book, emphasising ideas that are neither implicit nor explicit in it. Betty Roland does not claim to be a prophet.

The old cliché ‘I couldn’t put it down’ was literally true when I read her Caviar for Breakfast, the account of her year in the Soviet Union in 1934.

We all do silly things when we are young!

The intention of this anthology is to sharpen our understanding of what was distinctive in the poetry of ‘the generation of ‘68’ (Tranter’s label).

On one of the early chaotic army days of World War II in France, I was combining the disagreeable tasks of eating and censoring letters home written by the men in my section.

In his introduction to The New Australian Poetry, reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Thomas Shapcott, John Tranter declares that this poetry has no allegiance except to itself. Some characteristics of works regarded as modernist are: ‘self-signature’ – the work validates its own technical innovations – and self-reference, where the ‘method’ is reflected consciously in the ‘medium’. He contrasts this modernism with such work as Vincent Buckley’s ‘Golden Builders’, which elicits a response of ‘quasi-religious rhetoric . . . a natural outgrowth of Australian university English departments’, and one sufficient to explain the ‘anti-academic bias’ evident in much of the work of the new poets.

This book is about the early stages of the establishment and evolution of native local government councils in Papua New Guinea. The author, David Fenbury, was in charge of the first phase of this undertaking and the objective of his book was to record the early sequence of events. He begins with an overview of the local government system in 1975 in a state of decay even while it was being extended to the few remaining areas that it had not reached by the time of independence.

On page eleven of this book, Australians are called an engagingly innocent people ‘splendidly unthinking of anything but the simplicities of affluent living.’ On page twelve, they are called ‘lazy and uncreative’. On page 311, the author writes: ‘Yet in spite of a widespread belief (mainly self-generated) that we are a nation of yahoos, we have as much capacity for some unique kind of greatness as the people of any other race and nation.’

Anyone interested in quickly assessing the scope, direction and lacunae of urban history in Australia would be well advised to read this attractively priced and presented anthology. Although only two of the ten contributions have been specially commissioned, the rest are recent pieces, mostly from out-of-print, expensive or turgid larger works. These are two general essays, an article on each of the capitals (with the exception of Perth), and three specialised pieces on aspects of city growth (sub-division of Paddington 1875-90, essential services and Melbourne in the 1880s, and East Perth 1884-1904).

Normally, Australia’s Writers could be expected to attract the special attention of critics. However, by sensible use of his preface and the quality of his book’s contents, Graeme Kinross Smith has minimised the possibility of adverse comment. Carefully, he sets out the guidelines adopted for the fifty­four essays that range from two to ten pages each, starting with Captain Arthur Phillip and closing with Rosemary Dobson. Stressing ‘the distinctive and fascinating’ tradition of Australian literature and the book’s purpose in giving an insight into that tradition, Graeme Kinross Smith writes: