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Thirty-four years after the former colony of Portuguese Timor experienced the horrors of invasion by the Indonesian army, the story of the killing of the five television journalists known as the Balibo Five – a persistent subtext of that history – has found new life in the forthcoming feature film Balibo, directed by Arenafilm’s Robert Connolly. In reviewing Tony Maniaty’s related book, I must declare a vested interest: his book Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in East Timor has appeared on bookshelves two months earlier than a book of my own, on which that film is based.

The sixteen volumes of The Oxford History of England provided the authoritative synthesis of English history for two generations of students. A few volumes of this reminder of my undergraduate days, some still in their austere pale blue dustcovers, sit on my bookshelves. The first volume, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, was published in 1936, and the series was completed thirty years later with the publication of A.J.P. Taylor’s path-breaking English History 1914–1945.

John Brack (1920–99) is one of the most remarkable of Australian painters, and a salient figure in the generation that included Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams, John Perceval, Leonard French, and John Olsen, of whom only two survive. Many viewers would see him as the imagination that made our suburbs viable as art; others have been in two minds about his clarity and perfectionism. Hard edges can make for tough responses.

Kate Middleton’s accomplished first book, Fire Season, begins with ‘Autobiography’, where the child kicks against the perceived constraints and ambiguities of her sex: she could ‘make a half-decent boy’ only if the books she read were ‘full enough of war / or gunrunners, or treasure, or spies, or spoils / of piracy. No, I didn’t know how to hold a hammer.’ Middleton constructs a version of self defined by negatives: the narrator was not a ‘boy’, but does not explain why she sees ‘boy’ as the norm or as a preferred sex. Much of Fire Season explores some historical and mythical women, often in light of this shadowy definition (‘You once said // the visible and the invisible imply each other’, ‘Essay on Absence – Journal (with Judy Garland)’). In particular, Middleton invokes several movie stars – Lana Turner, Barbara Stanwyck, Doris Day, Clara Bow, Lauren Bacall, as well as Judy Garland – measuring her distance from these fabled figures, as well as investigating them as alternative lives.

Amnesia about writers of the past, even the not too distant past, is one of the besetting ills of our culture. How many readers of poetry under forty have more than a nodding acquaintance with the work of A.D. Hope, Francis Webb, Douglas Stewart or Vincent Buckley? All are fine poets, remembered now (if at all) through a handful of anthology pieces, partly because their published volumes usually disappear from print within a few years. Poets are particularly susceptible to the culture of forgetting, but the malaise extends to novelists and others who have made major contributions to our cultural, political and social life.

Too many specific years in the twentieth century were said to be ‘pivotal’, but 1968 was clearly a standout. In the United States, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; there were student protests in Paris; and Russian tanks signalled the end of the ‘Prague Spring’. In January 1968, on the other side of the world, in an area once known as French Indochina, the army of the National Liberation Front (the Vietcong) invaded the imperial city, Hué, and all other major cities in South Vietnam. This was the infamous Tet Offensive.

‘It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place,’ declared Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament in April 1653. ‘Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government … In the name of God, go!’

Leo Amery, a Conservative backbencher, brought Cromwell’s final six words into the House of Commons on 7 May 1940. He was unsure whether he would use them in the debate over Norway, where British and French forces were withdrawing from the first major land confrontation of the war. Colonial Secretary in the Conservative governments of the 1920s, Amery was a passionate advocate for the British Empire and strongly anti-communist. In the 1930s he became a tough critic of his own party’s appeasement of Nazi Germany. Speaking late in the debate, Amery felt the House was with him, and he ended his speech as Cromwell had done. Neville Chamberlain survived the division, but not the collapse in support from a fifth of his backbench, galvanised by Amery and others.

On the inside of the title page, we learn that this is a work of fiction to be shelved alongside other books about horse whisperers. Together with the schmaltzy subtitle, this is a less than promising start. Not that I am fundamentally opposed to animal stories. But horses? I distrust whatever parades as noble, whether beast or human. Horses are for viewing from a distance.

In this novel, young Tag Wardell becomes renowned for his marvellous way with horses, both in his native Gippsland and later in the army. I am none the wiser about what exactly he does, or why he is so exceptional. He treats animals decently, talks to them and doles out oats from his pocket. Give him the chance, and he’ll brush them down. Once he even gives a nurse the same treatment. There is no magic in this. What it translates to is that everything and everyone has their price.

The appearance of an idiosyncratic scholarly text addressing the work of a major European film-maker such as Dušan Makavejev is timely, given our increasingly fraught condition as subjects of a world that becomes more convolutedly politicised with every nanosecond. This is a highly political and indeed humanist analysis of a significant body of cinematic work.

Lorraine Mortimer’s introductory assertion that Makavejev’s 1960s and 1970s work is ‘an international touchstone of radical, transcultural and political cinema’ sets the bar high. Mortimer – an academic at La Trobe University – goes on, in this thoroughly researched and heartfelt study, to set an even more daunting goal for herself, stating that her aim is to examine Makavejev’s films ‘historically, locally, politically and aesthetically, highlighting [no less than] their implications for our understanding of the contemporary world’. This is quite a claim, yet, by and large, Mortimer’s text keeps to its word.

The prospect of discovering another work by a favourite author is always a pleasing one, even if the reality, when it is actually encountered, is sometimes disappointing. With a writer like Jane Austen, with only six published novels, who would not wish for some further delights to be unveiled? When Austen died, her sister, Cassandra, was left with the unpublished manuscripts of a number of juvenile writings and later works. After Cassandra’s death, members of her family had them in their hands (or perhaps one should say ‘on their hands’, given their subsequent feeling that the possession entailed a level of somewhat burdensome responsibility).