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Why are there so many books about death and dying appearing at the moment? Is it about the baby boomers facing up to their mortality? It is certainly a subject that interests me, and Debra Adelaide’s novel should be compelling. Unfortunately, I found its determined flippancy laboured and grating. The first-person narrator, Delia, a writer of household guides, is not yet forty. Given a bad prognosis for her breast cancer, she decides that her last work will be a guide to dying, in which she will record her physical and emotional journey.

Written by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, of Macquarie University, this is essentially a text for both students and teachers studying ‘historiography’, which, according to my dictionary, is writing about history, rather than historians ‘making’ history, as is sometimes said here. Enthusiasm for the first edition of Fifty Key Thinkers on History (2000) has brought forth this new edition and shifted its emphasis more towards ‘historiography’. Indeed, a new introduction – ‘What Is Historiography?’ – suggests four different approaches to the subject.

When it came to Iceland, Monty Python, as always, had the properly irreverent idea. Their version of Njal’s Saga was a horrendous case of interrupted narrative. It took ten minutes for their ‘very exciting Icelandic saga’ to get started, bogged down as it was in endless biblical begetting, and when things did kick off, the whole sketch unwittingly collapsed into an extended advertisement for a sleepy British town named Malden.

In the years between the two world wars, the young Soviet Union was, for socialist intellectuals and many liberals in the West, a social laboratory, one that held the promise of a new world order. Inspired by the transforming power and promise of the October Revolution of 1917, some were drawn to admiration of the great Socialist Experiment ‘in a land where revolutionaries were trying to create a socialist society based on the principles of central economic planning’.

The world bank’s 1993 report, The East Asian Miracle, conveyed the quasi-religious awe prompted by the economic progress of many East Asian societies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. While somewhat self-serving (it was funded by Japanese money), it set the tone for much of the political and economic analysis of East Asia in the 1990s and its prospects. With few exceptions, we were told that the future belonged to Asia, that export-oriented industrialisation and selective liberalisation were the keys to growth, and that Asian societies had certain cultural features which furthered their comparative advantage and questioned the universality of Western notions such as democracy and human rights. This suddenly ended in July 1997 when the collapse of the Thai baht prompted a series of currency crises that produced political and social turmoil across the region. The Asian financial crisis, borne of bad investments, dodgy government–business relations and that favourite of the press, ‘crony capitalism’, raised questions about the foundations of Asia’s strength and the ‘Asian century’.

On a first reading, the accomplished poetry of Tracy Ryan seems spiky, colloquial, earthy and enjoyable. But the more subtle accomplishments of the poetry lie in wait on a second reading: the musicality, the careful crafting, an honouring of the traditions of poetry, the rhythms and experiences of the everyday and the bodily. To name her themes draws us into the poetry: motherhood, the vicissitudes of the body, childhood and parenting, work, love, poetry, death. But it is in beginning to hear the musicality of Ryan’s metaphoric language that a second step can be taken. Alliterative, demotic, formally playful, morally serious, the poetry of Scar Revision is craft and presence finely balanced.

Gerry Wilkes has done the state a great deal of service, and he should get full credit once again, as the eclipsed terrain of Australian literature emerges into the sunlight: which it seems to be doing right now, to judge from some recent movements in publishing. So let’s keep abreast of our language, all the while: that is to say, of our dominant or mainstream language, amid whatever others we have to offer.

Murray Bail’s fiction inhabits a curious space. Despite its attention to the detail of the rural landscape, the ‘endless paddocks and creaking tin roofs’, it is not, in any meaningful sense, realist, either in its intention or its execution. Instead, against carefully created backdrops, it weaves something closer to fairy tales, looping meditations on the power of story, and love, whose affinities lie – for all that many of Bail’s world of pastoralists who dress for dinner and unmarried daughters wilting in the Australian emptiness sometimes might not seem out of place in Patrick White – with distinctly un-Australian writers such as Calvino, Borges and, though less obviously, Rushdie and Marquez. It is not for nothing that the narrator of Eucalyptus (1999), Bail’s best novel, bemoans the ‘applied psychology’ that ‘has taken over storytelling, coating it and obscuring the core’. Yet, where the baroque outcroppings of detail in the magical realists of the 1980s serve to highlight the artifice of their creations, the detail of Bail’s fiction does quite the opposite, providing instead a framework for his fiction’s very particular reality.

Lucy Dougan’s recent collection of poetry, White Clay, demonstrates a considerably wider range than her first collection, Memory Shell (1998), while reaffirming how centrally preoccupied her poetry is with the potency of lost time, and also with finding the truth behind appearances, locating what is hidden or marginal and tracking down family ghosts.