Lilith Norman’s exquisite novella was first published in 1978 and was an IBBY Honour Book in 1980. Set in a lovingly realised Bondi, the archetypal seaside suburb, the book packs a huge amount into its seventy-eight pages: life, death, love, grief; a question of focus; and, drawn in spare and beautifully controlled strokes, the disparate two worlds that touch at the shoreline.

This book is full of sadly ironic observations, such as: Most adult sons have no memory of telling their mother to stop kissing them; decades later they are simply anguished and resentful that she has shown them no affection.

In her previous Phryne Fisher instalment, Blood and Circuses, Kerry Greenwood took advantage of her knowledge of circus and carnival life to weave an intriguing tale spotlighting a whole host of oddball types. Now in Ruddy Gore she uses her insider’s familiarity with the precious world of the theatre to similar effect. Greenwood always handles her material with a deft, almost disdainful assurance, and this book is no exception. The year is 1928, and a special performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera Ruddigore is being staged at Her Majesty’s to honour the famous aviator, Bert Hinkler. On her way to the theatre Phryne intervenes in a fight involving a Chinese man, then during the show two of the actors are poisoned, one fatally, and Phryne’s services are engaged by Management to solve the mystery.

We have been blessed in this country with an oversupply of spiritual writers – analysts of and speculators about the spiritual dimensions of our life and culture. We have had a certain amount of history and pop sociology about the Australian temperament and character and much cultural cringing and self-laceration, but not much about the Australian ‘soul’. This is an odd situation since much of our recent literature – Patrick White, Rodney Hall, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Vincent Buckley, Kevin Hart, the later Helen Garner – is deeply concerned with affairs of the spirit and not just with manners and affairs of the heart. Again, there is a large interest in spiritual issues in Australia, no doubt some of it rather dotty or flaky in a Californian mystical kind of way, but a good deal of it real and serious, though disenchanted with what the ‘institutional’ churches have on offer.

For over twenty years Bob Connell has been a leading figure in the development of an Australian sociology, and his move from Macquarie University to the University of California several years ago was a significant loss to Australian academic life. I wish I could write Australian public life, but our press, which is fond of academics with far less to say than Bob Connell, has largely ignored his work. Nonetheless Connell’s work in class, sexuality, gender, and education is arguably the most distinguished body of social theory written in this country, and deserves far greater acknowledgment.

The river town is Kempsey on the north coast of New South Wales, 300 miles from Sydney. It is the new year and, we soon learn, just around the turn of the century, immediately before Federation. Once more Keneally has plundered Australian history in order to explore his concern with Australian identity.

‘There was nothing in particular to write about either yesterday or the day before, as, indeed, there is not today.’ Fifteen-year-old Arthur Clarke speaks, in 1868, for many of us whose diaries didn’t live up to our hopes of them. Why do we write them?