A few years ago I was teaching an anthology of Australian short stories to a group of very bright Spanish honours students at the University of Barcelona. As one would expect, some of the stories were written by Australia’s most famous and highly regarded writers but at the end of the course the students voted unanimously for Serge Liberman’s ‘Envy’s Fire’ as the finest story they had read on the course.

The British exploration of the Pacific Ocean between 1764, when Byron sailed, and 1780, when Cook’s third circumnavigation concluded, and the colonisation of New South Wales from 1788 onwards, effectively set agendas in discovery and settlement which France and Spain had to emulate if they were to continue as Britain’s imperial rivals.

Spain’s effort to match the British agenda was spectacular, but short-lived. The expedition under the command of Alejandro Malaspina that it sent to explore in the Pacific and to report on the state of the Spanish empire (1789–94) was perhaps the best equipped of all the grand eighteenth-century voyages, but its commander fell victim to political intrigue on his return; and oblivion settled over its results. (Only now are its journals, artwork and collections being fully analysed and published.)

Cultural criticism at the end of the twentieth century, says Darren Tofts (at the end of 1999), is suffering from a kind of amnesia. Interactivity is not an invention of Playstation games or electronic mail, but has been a crucial constituent of avant-garde art throughout the century: neglect this history and risk collapsing culture into fin-de-siecle, commodified monotony. Both those who rhapsodise and those who malign the anarchic non-linearity of current hypermedia as if it is an unprecedented cultural phenomenon ought to recall, Tofts advises, Marcel Duchamp’s bewildering, ludic work of art, The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Hypertext archives and libraries, he notes, are only now beginning to manifest the scope and complexity of James Joyce’s textual systems. Hypermedia, Derrida once observed, simulates ‘joyceware’, and Tofts adds that it has ‘a lot of catching up to do’. Indeed, hypermedia is a term that he considers far more descriptive of the radical artistic inventions of the modernist vanguard in the first half of the twentieth century than of our contemporary ‘interactive culture’.

Douglas Kirsner’s new book has been a long time in the making. Based on extensive interviews with US East Coast and West Coast psychoanalysts over some ten years, it started out as an encyclopedic study of Freud and Freudianism. At one stage of its evolution it was called The Culture of the Couch but later, when Kirsner and his editor realised that he had assembled almost one million words of interview material, he decided to radically scale down the scope of the book and to completely alter its focus. He had been very impressed by a very brilliant book on contemporary French psychoanalysis (French Freud as it was called) by Sherry Turkle at MIT in Boston and he decided to use her quasi-ethnographic style. It is now basically a study of the four main psychoanalytic institutes in the United States – New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles – and one is reminded irresistibly of the contentious early Christian Church communities in Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, and Corinth. Kirsner makes a great deal of play with the analogies between the psychoanalytic institutes and sectarian religious groups but, knowing something about both, I think that the religious sectarians were models of peace and sweetness and light compared with the Freudian institutes.

Ken Bolton recommends this: ‘What is most valuable in these poems, and what is rare, is Keneally’s avoidance of metaphor and of the conventionally poetic in favour of intelligence and educated plain-speak that, of course, isn’t so plain, so unitary ...’ This well-meant blurb could create some problems, as the volume is actually as metaphoric and conventionally poetic as most modern collections. ‘Plain-speak’ also has an Orwellian feel, particularly with ‘intelligence’ and ‘educated’. Many poetry conventions and metaphors are aids to communication, including their use in general speech.

While less is usually more with poetry, there’s no denying the power and even magnificence of longer pieces produced in Australia in recent years by Les Murray, Luke Davies, Geoff Page, Dorothy Porter and others. Susan Hampton’s ‘The Kindly Ones’ belongs firmly on this A-list. The title-piece comprises the second half of the book, but the shorter poems that precede it, while standing separately, can be seen as a kind of preface in their concerns. The ‘Kindly Ones’ are the three Furies – Tisiphone, Magaera and Alecto – on holiday from vengeance in contemporary Australia. Tisiphone’s narration is incisive, pacy and always underscored by irony. It is this balance of sentiment and the ironic eye that is a masterful achievement in this and various of the shorter poems. Hampton’s constant juxtaposition of the deeply disturbing and the ordinary also results in irony that ranges from the charming to the razor-edged. Much of this is achieved by her excellent control of voice. Her finely tuned ear for the vernacular sits comfortably next to layers of classical erudition, and exposition on the nature of tragedy – ancient versus modern. Hampton matches her free verse form to content quite effortlessly and Tisiphone is convincing as she seeks her better self. ‘On the Bright Road’, a shorter poem, foreshadows Tisiphone’s quest: ‘The vast erasures of the self / contain somehow in their deep hold / the – I hesitate to call it a god – / the second self, a post-colonial god, / no longer a queen or king but an acting subject / in the realm of subjectivity, where / your best god is met after your worst self.’

Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism sets out to cover the history of feminism in Australia during the period between 1877, when Charlotte Elizabeth McNeilly unsuccessfully petitioned the Sydney court for a divorce from her abusive husband, and now when Helen Osland is currently serving a gaol sentence for the murder of her husband after a married life of brutal abuse.

Judith Rodriguez deserves a guernsey for this book. It’s one of the best collections to appear in a long while. I think it’s more interesting than its companions in the UQP Selected/Collected series which is now three-all with Shapcott, Taylor and Rodriguez standing as our Living Treasures, and Dransfield, Buckmaster and Rankin among those freed from earthly care. Two chaps and one lady in each category, one observes. There must be logic in it? Poets don’t actually have to die before they get notices. But in the case of Buckmaster and Rankin it will push the reputation up a few notches. I know that’s callous, but you want the truth, don’t you?