The title A People’s History of Australia is certainly a grand one. Its multi-volume predecessors have more modest titles, such as Clark’s disarmingly simple A History of Australia or the eleven-volume Australians: a historical library. The People’s History’s aspirations go beyond content to embrace audience. This is refreshing to see as many Australian scholars still regard their colleagues as the only audience that matters. The editors say in their introduction that:

John Bunting’s portrait of Robert Menzies is a book for fans. Beautifully produced, with a handsome cover, tartan endpapers, and a royal blue marker, it is an ideal gift for those who agree with Bunting’s judgement – that Menzies was ‘grand and magnificent, the best man of his time’. It will also please those who, though more reserved in their admiration than Bunting, remember Menzies with respect and admiration.

Bunting was a member of the Prime Minister’s Department for the last seven years of Menzies prime ministership, and a senior officer in that Department from the beginning of Menzies long post-war reign in 1949. He feels that Menzies suffered a bad press after his retirement and has often been misunderstood; as he can speak with the authority of experience he has taken up his pen to write of Menzies as he knew him.

Psycho politics has been a recurring explanatory option, at least in academia, since Freud’s volumes in the early 1920s, with Reich, Fromm, and the Frankfurt school building on Freud’s earlier forays, from the early 1930s onwards. Obviously, philosophers, historians, and political theorists had provided many kinds of psychological explanations of leaders’ movements and classes from Greek times onwards, but there is little doubt that Freud involved some new ways of considering political behaviour. Psycho politics has waxed and waned ever since.

Peter Goldsworthy uses the short story to examine and question elements of the kind of life he leads. There is an attractive lack of pretence in his kind of story; Goldsworthy sketches social situations clearly and succinctly so that he can move on to probe the weaknesses in his characters’ otherwise complacent lives. As the back cover tells us, and the stories reveal, Goldsworthy is a medical practitioner in Adelaide and his fiction is in a tradition which begins with social experience and reflection on it.

Soul-searching about our past is the new literary fashion. It is the period in which the breast-beaters, the moral Pharisees, are driven to tell us how, unlike their predecessors, they have political and moral virtue. The Aborigines, women and ordinary people have become the ‘goodies’, and all those who ignored them in their books or their teaching have become the ‘baddies’. The winds of change are blowing over the ancient continent.

In the The Automatic Oracle, Peter Porter’s second book since his Collected Poems (1983), this writer is at the height of his powers as a versatile, intelligent, and provocative voice of our times. He is a resistance fighter against false prophecies by disc jockeys, bureaucrats, businessmen, lawyers, academics, politicians and others. Such utterances must be scrutinised or ridiculed because they muddy the language itself, the sources of all oracular wisdom and the hero of this book.

As an ‘imagined community’, Australia ‘imagined imagining needs more that community’, most strenuous imagining than most. Post-colonial? Not really – we are recolonized over and over. Wall Street shivers, the Australian dollar gets pneumonia; Japan revises its shopping-list, and our coal industry verges on collapse. Britain’s hold began to loosen after World War II, but our cultural colonization by the United States was probably effective at least sixty-five years ago, by the time Australian cinema outlets had been secured for Hollywood, and closed off for local producers, through the nefarious block-booking system. With film and television, there never was much political will to defend ourselves; nor was there any, a year ago, to prevent the powerful American magnate Rupert Murdoch from taking over two-thirds of the press in what used to be his own country. There are moments and areas where it still seems reasonable to promote cultural nationalism, l not positive xenophobia.

Set in New South Wales during the turbulent years of 1916–19, Graeme Harper’s Black Cat, Green Field evokes the period with particularity and jaggedness. The first of the novel’s five parts introduces the central character: Sidney Nelson, recently wounded in Gallipoli, and now living in Sydney. A former art student, he is yearningly aware he could instead have been in the Paris of Picasso and Gris. He is also a ‘black cat’, a supporter of the radical industrial Workers of the World and when, in the closing months of 1916, the ‘Twelve’ I.W.W. members are sent to prison and police harassment intensifies, the organization goes underground and Nelson loses friends and contacts. Feeling jaded and devoid of artistic inspiration, he decides to leave Sydney and, after a false start, moves up to the north coast of NSW to stay near his sister May. The ‘black cat’ is going to paint the ‘green field’.