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These stories are well written and rather depressing. That makes them, I guess, rather representative of what one might call the current state of short-story writing by urban males. One thinks immediately of recent collections by Garry Disher and Nick Earls. There seem to be a few basic starting off points, the most notable being in the delineation of defensiveness and insecurities that give the male characters, who are often the narrators, a sensitive but decidedly uptight response to, well, almost everything. Women, parents, children (their own), and particularly the drab world that has snuffed out some early spark of liveliness or vitality (which is usually rubbed for sympathetic magic in moments of nostalgic recall).

Morphy’s monograph is an instance of a problem in anthropological writing about Australian Aboriginal people, a problem of audiences. The public this book will reach (and please and enrich enormously) is international, made up of several thousand mostly Anglophone anthropologists students of art, particularly those researching or teaching about the contexts in which the art of non-Western peoples is created and first consumed. Yet the art of North East Arnhem Land (the Nhulunbuy/Yirrkala region) appeals to a much larger and more heterogeneous public than this. It is likely that Australians comprise a majority of this second public. Morphy, adviser to the Australian National Gallery in the later 1970s and early 1980s, can take some credit for that. And there is a third and even larger public still: those Australians who infrequently go to art galleries (they might spend a few hours in the ANG on a Canberra trip) but who are susceptible to a more informed perception of the subtlety, beauty and (most important) resilience of the classical heritage of Aboriginal culture.

Herb Wharton’s first novel is a highly readable account of the lives of three stockmen in far west Queensland. Sandy is a white man, Bindi a Murri, and Mulga related to both of them through his parents.

Janine Haines’s book, Suffrage to Sufferance is a good read. For women who are in public life and who insist on equality, it is a realistic and often humorous read. For those women who aspire to public life or simply equal rights, it is an entertaining – lost journalistic – account of where women’s aspirations might lead them. For men who understand or want to understand women’s drive for equality, there is an idea of the barriers, seen and unseen, that women face. And there is some sense of women’s struggle for political influence and recognition.