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Raimondo Cortese’s debut collection of stories, The Indestructible Corpse, contains ‘amazing stories’ in the true sense of the term, in that they produce amazement. The definitions of amazement in the Macquarie Dictionary include ‘overwhelming surprise or astonishment’; ‘stupefaction’; ‘perplexity’; and’ consternation’. Many of the stories are also maze-like, ‘a confusing network of intercommunicating paths or passages’; ‘a labyrinth’; ‘a state of bewilderment or confusion’.

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The title is not provocative: The Brisbane Line Controversy, but Paul Burns’s subtitle flags the partisanship that will mark his study. This is a case, he contends, of ‘Political Partisanship versus National Security 1942–45’. His conclusion is unobjectionable: ‘belief in a “Brisbane Line” was our barometer of fear about the vulnerability of our own continent which no Australian Army could negate’. In political demonology, the Brisbane Line signifies the intention of the Menzies–Fadden conservative governments of 1939–41 to abandon all but the south-east corner of Australia to the Japanese, should an invasion come. Burns is keen to absolve Menzies and his colleagues of blame and to find where, and with whom, the notion of the Line originated. In the process he indicts Labor front-bencher Eddie Ward, whose allegations about a Brisbane Line led to a Royal Commission in the election year of 1943.

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Veronica Brady is a highly respected critic with long and distinguished experience in the academic and literary worlds. She understands as well as anyone, I am sure, the mysterious workings of the imagination – how a feeling, an image or an impression may strike a spark capable of igniting a flame that fuses often contradictory thoughts and experiences into the ‘little room’ of a memorable poem. So it must have been a deliberate, though to my mind regrettable, decision that made her concentrate on Judith Wright’s life as a conservationist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights almost to the exclusion of everything else – poetry included – in this ample and painstaking biography.

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‘This is the most urgently needed book of our time’, says the back cover of this short, non-fiction work of advice to adolescent males, whose subject is how successfully to become a real man. (This boast contrasts strangely with the counsel given not to brag.) My son, the one aged twelve, described the book as being about ‘the need to grow up into little John Marsdens’.

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From John Tranter

Dear Editor,

You may not be aware of it – indeed, the readers of ABR have hardly ever been made aware of it, for some reason – but over the last twenty years John Tranter has published the following books:

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Gleeson is an award-winning novelist for young readers, winning the 1991 Australian Children’s Literature Peace Prize for Dodger and the 1997 Children’s Book Council Book of the Year for Younger Readers with Hannah Plus One. Her other novels include I am Susannah and Skating on Sand, and her picture books include The Princess and the Perfect Dish and Where’s Mum. She is an accomplished writer, which is reflected in her latest novel for older readers, Refuge.

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The landscape has been seen (and continues to be seen) as a potent ingredient (the most potent?) in the construction of a national myth, in the determination of an identity which we can call ‘Australian’. The question of identity is a difficult area in which to delve but it is one which has elicited much critical debate and as many views as there are voices. Lying About the Landscape is exemplary of this.

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Last month’s editorial on reviewing and its ailments in Australia seems to have touched a few raw nerves. Various reviewers have enquired nervously about whether I was referring to them, for instance. On the other hand, as a result of the editorial, I have held a number of valuable conversations about the state of reviewing in Australia. Alas this is not reflected in the Letters pages of this issue. It seems with such a long break between the December/January issue and the February/March issue, the letter writers think of other things. Letters in this issue are few, fewer than any issue for several years.

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Oscar and Lucinda is the next best thing we have to that gleaming oxymoron a contemporary Australian literary classic. It won a swag of prizes (not least the Booker); it is a long vibrant narrative, including history full of the rustle of Victorian costumes, but with a whisper of the horrors on which this country was founded with a brief ghastly moment representing the murder of Aborigines.

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Since its initial publication in 1906, Who’s Who in Australia has dominated the market for contemporary biographical information in Australia. Founded by Fred Johns, an Adelaide journalist and Hansard reporter, it began as Johns’s Notable Australians, changed to Fred Johns’s Annual, became the Who’s Who in the Commonwealth of Australia for the sixth edition in 1922 and settled on its current name in 1927. After Johns died in 1932, the publication was taken over by the Herald and Weekly Times, and Who’s Who was issued every three years from 1935 to 1991.

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