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It is a Pam Brown moment when, flicking through her Dear Deliria, I read of ‘historic butter sculptures’ and hear at the same time David Bowie on the stereo singing ‘yak-butter statues’. It’s a Pam Brown moment because her poetry is one of incidents and coincidence. In its interest in both the quotidian and in critique, Brown’s poetry illustrates the endless interplay between texts and contexts, between art and life. These latter categories are most vivid in Brown’s poems when they are collapsing into each other – like drunk friends at a party.

Exploration of the unknown is a universally captivating subject, and young people are not immune to its appeal. Most of their experience of other lands, peoples and times must necessarily be vicarious. These books attempt to reach this audience.

Media history is an oddly underdeveloped area. Historians who work in media history are frequently reminded that such work exists at the margins of their discipline, and media does not feature at all in many accounts of political and social history. To take one example, Alastair Davidson’s otherwise impressive From Subject to Citizen: Australian citizenship in the twentieth century (1997) contains one reference to Rupert Murdoch’s citizenship, but none to the role of media in forming the identities of Australian citizens in the twentieth century.

In his foreword to this reference work, Andrew Motion says that such books ‘exist to provoke argument’. In their preface, editors Willhardt and Parker suggest that ‘to compile such a volume as this may seem absurd; to do so successfully may be impossible’. Forewarned is forearmed, it would seem.

Despite all this, the book is useful – about the only adjective to which a reference work should reasonably aspire. Of course, it may also seek to construct an honour roll for posterity or update the canon. Or it might simply be part of a continuing battle for ‘cultural space’. In many ways, reference works like this are the counterpart of anthologies, which are also reviewed in terms of ‘who’s in and who’s out’.

In a number of guises, the question ‘why’ reverberated throughout my reading of Whatever the Gods Do: A Memoir. This book opens with Patti Miller describing her sadness at the departure of ten-year-old Theo, who is leaving for Melbourne to live with his father. We soon discover that the author has been Theo’s substitute mother for the past seven years since the tragic death of Dina, his birth mother and Miller’s friend. Dina suffered a brain haemorrhage when Theo was two years old. She spent thirteen months in a virtually immobile state before her death at thirty-eight. Why the vibrant, attractive Dina should have been struck down when she had so much to live for is a legitimate question, but, of course, an unanswerable one. Why Miller should choose to write about her own life through this incident is also worth asking. Few are more qualified than Miller to address the reasons for, and benefits of, life-writing: she has run ‘life stories’ workshops around the country for more than ten years. In her bestselling manual Writing Your Life: A journey of discovery (1994), she identifies various motivations for, and rewards of, life-writing, including healing and self-understanding, recording family and social history for future generations, remembering happiness and sharing one’s wisdom.

This books has a number of admirable qualities. In times when open subscription to a social justice agenda runs the risk of ridicule, it is a brave book. It does not shy away from identifying the universities – specifically, the sandstones – as integral to any explanation of why Australian secondary education is inequitable. And both authors work in one: the University of Melbourne. The book also builds a compelling case for curriculum and structural reform. Through the careful analysis of issues such as retention and dropout rates, the relation between poverty and achievement, and between gender and achievement, it argues potently that our education system is disturbingly riven by persistent inequalities of opportunity.

Those of us who walk across bridges in support of reconciliation, and sign Sorry Day books, do so because we feel an obligation to recognise and apologise for the destructive legacy of past practices. Sometimes we can speak directly to those people who were taken away; often we are addressing their descendants. As the prime minister continues to point out, many of us are apologising for something for which we are not individually responsible. So what is the source of this sense of obligation, and how can saying sorry make a difference?