A decade ago, former Prime Minister Paul Keating made a telling comment on the treatment of speeches in modern politics. ‘If Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address in 1992,’ he said, ‘the chances are the journalists wouldn’t report the speech but the “doorstop” that followed it. And the first question they’d ask is, “How come you’re talking about democracy and freedom when there’s a war going on?” And there’d be learned articles at the weekend about whether it had been a lapse of political judgment for Mr Lincoln to deliver the Gettysburg Address in Gettysburg instead of Philadelphia.’

In his introduction to this collection of academic essays about different aspects and types of contemporary Australian masculinity – or, as the authors prefer, masculinities – R.W. Connell notes that: ‘It is now a familiar observation that notions of Australian identity have been entirely constructed around images of men.’ This is a familiar observation. Another old chestnut that better sums up recent discussions of masculinity and men, including this book, is that masculinity is in ‘crisis’, and that, at least in part, the solution lies in ‘problematising’, ‘deconstructing’, ‘destabilising’, and then collapsing’ it. It’s all, as such language makes clear, terribly sociological and cultural studies in approach. Which is not beyond interest, once one swims beneath the dense disciplinary jargon to the ideas below.

Douglas Mawson died in 1958. Unlike Ernest Shackleton, Mawson was not charismatic, and his descriptions of the Antarctic lack Shackleton’s poetry; unlike Roald Amundsen, he did not reach the South Pole; unlike Robert Scott, he did not perish tragically; but it is no exaggeration to say that the scale and achievements of his Antarctic expeditions dwarf those of his three famous contemporaries.

Mawson was two years old when he arrived in Sydney with his family from England in 1884. As a young man, he studied mining engineering and geology at the University of Sydney. His interest in the glacial geology of South Australia led to his investigation of the highly mineralised Precambrian rocks of the Barrier Range, extending from the northern Flinders Ranges through Broken Hill, work for which Mawson obtained his doctorate from the University of Adelaide in 1909.

For those of us at the centre of the storm, Sharleen – the demonised HIV-positive Sydney prostitute, the tragic Eve Van Grafhorst – and ACT UP and its often surreal activities are all familiar memories from the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in Australia. All feature in this first book-length account of Australia’s response to the AIDS epidemic. National histories of the epidemic have already appeared in Britain, the Netherlands and the US, and Paul Sendziuk’s work bears comparison with them. Indeed, in the breadth of its sympathies, the sophistication of its conceptual approach and its focus on the working out of policies on the ground, it is the best national study I have read. For a book that originated in a PhD thesis, it is well written, with challenging illustrations, mostly drawn from AIDS campaign material. I should, of course, confess an interest, since this book provides an eloquent defence of the policies I pursued on AIDS during my period as the Commonwealth minister for health.

The official account of James Cook’s first voyage in the Endeavour (1768-71) was published in 1773. The account, being an edited version of Cook’s journal, occupies the second and third volumes of John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere. The first volume includes voyages by Byron, Wallis and Carteret – all seminal voyages in the history of the British Empire. We need to remember that Cook represents the culmination of the scientific discovery in the southern hemisphere, beginning with William Dampier in the late seventeenth century.

When Martin Boyd returned to Australia in 1948 after twenty-seven years in England, he set about restoring the Grange, the derelict former home of his mother’s family, the à Becketts. He had been disappointed to find how little known his novels were in Australia and he had difficulty in re-establishing himself with the Boyd family. Nevertheless he persevered with his impulsive scheme until he could draw ‘the curtains at night in the little sitting room ... [and] indulge the illusion of being in an English manor house.’ Among the à Beckett portraits and eighteenth-century furniture were his nephew Arthur’s biblical frescoes. In trying to be an English squire in the Australian countryside, surrounded by the artefacts of two continents and centuries, Boyd presents the image of a man who never quite found himself wholly at home anywhere.

Jessie Street’s autobiography should be compulsory reading for anyone who seeks political change. In the dedication to her mother’s book, Belinda Mackay writes that she hopes ‘the women of today will be inspired by the spirit of Jessie Street and her visions’. To describe this autobiography as inspiring is an understatement. It is an extraordinary record of a remarkable life. Indeed, it is difficult to know how to explain Street’s immense contribution to women’s right welfare economics, social justice and peace studies.

It has long been claimed that women were the backbone of the pre-World War II Australian Liberal Parties and a crucial strengthening agent for the new Liberal Party that Robert Menzies formed in 1945. Labor supporters said this was because women were conservative, easily led by their husbands, and didn’t understand much of the world outside the home. Liberals argued that it was just because they did understand the importance of domestic life that they supported the party best able to protect it. Margaret Fitzherbert has written the story of these Liberal women and, in so doing, has added to our knowledge both of the history of the Liberal party and of Australian women’s political activism.

Haunted Earth is Peter Read’s third book in his series on Australian attachments to place. This work began with Returning to Nothing (1996), which explored how Australians feel about ‘lost’ places. Belonging (2000) investigated how non-indigenous Australians claim to belong and how they negotiate issues of cultural difference. It was overtly concerned with the ramifications that the establishment of Aboriginal history has had on national identity.

Leo Tolstoy and Georgia Blain share an understanding: ‘Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ In each of her four novels, Blain has written about families in various states of unhappiness. Her first novel, Closed for Winter (1998), was the story of Elise, an ‘unobtrusive and unnoticeable’ twenty-eight-year-old, struggling to come to terms with the unresolved disappearance of her sister twenty years earlier, hindered by her pompous partner and her deranged mother. Candelo (1999) was the tale of the more outgoing, but no less unhappy, Ursula, whose story is heavy with the connections between a recent suicide, memories of her dead sister and the ongoing depression of her brother. The Blind Eye (2001) was narrated by Daniel, a morose healer, who is haunted by the consequences of his own deceptions and the memory of a tortured patient from a wealthy, detached family. And Blain’s new novel, Names for Nothingness, is the story of Sharn, Liam and Caitlin, an unhappy family battling with issues that are both everyday and overwhelming.