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There’s a joke that comes up in westerns about the book that saves: a thick volume in the chest pocket that takes a bullet. Bem Le Hunte introduces her second novel about a small band of World War II refugees: ‘This book was written as a prayer for those people who could not live to tell their tales. It was written, too, as a prayer for the future of our world, in the hope that stories like this have the power to save us.’ Certainly, this is a book that teaches hope against the odds, but when you consider how human cruelty has survived even the greatest stories, Le Hunte’s prayer sounds forlorn – unless she was thinking of saving us from boredom, in which case both There, Where the Pepper Grows and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon work most effectively.

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, to take a random example, indicates the challenges facing anyone undertaking a definitive and detailed account of modernism. According to the Dictionary’s author, J.A. Cuddon, modernism is: ‘A comprehensive but vague term for a movement (or tendency) [that] pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.’ As he notes, it is a matter for debate as to whether modernism, ‘as an innovative and revivifying movement’, was essentially over by the late 1940s or persisted well beyond that period. The ‘vagueness’ of the term ‘modernism’ and of its definitions reflects the diversity of artists, works and ideas that it encompasses; and the implicit contradiction of Cuddon’s pairing of the adjectives ‘innovative’ and ‘revivifying’ is suggestive of modernism’s emphasis on both radical originality and engagement with (rather than uncomplicated rejection of) the past.

Of late, there has been a welcome surge in the study of British migrants in Australia. James Jupp’s The English in Australia (2004) provided one of the first overviews since the 1960s. Andrew Hassam followed migrant Britons from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and younger scholars such as Sara Wills, Carole Hamilton-Barwick and Lorraine Proctor have begun to explore the local intricacies of settlement and identity. Given both the subject – numerically the largest of the postwar migrant groups – and the growth in historical and sociological accounts of immigration and multiculturalism since the 1970s, the surge has been a long time coming.

Roy Ward Baker is quoted as saying ‘realism is my forte’. But Geoff Mayer’s book reveals that over a fifty-eight-year career in film and television, Baker was much more than just a ‘realist’. Baker began as a ‘gopher’ at Gainsborough Studios in 1934, but he is best known for directing what is perhaps the definitive film on the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember (1958). He also directed horror productions for Hammer Films, including The Vampire Lovers (1960) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He ended his career at seventy-two with an episode of the British television series The Good Guys (1992). It is due to this long and diverse career that Baker has not been embraced as an auteur, a filmmaker who is able to project a consistent personal vision across a range of films. However, in Roy Ward Baker, Geoff Mayer, of La Trobe University, situates Baker as an auteur, tracing the vicissitudes of his career to provide a comprehensive and intriguing study of the filmmaker and his films, as well as his industrial, social, and political contexts.

Beyond Belief is yet another account of the atomic tests that were conducted in Australia between 1952 and 1962. It does not deal with nuclear strategy, the technical aspects of nuclear weapons or their delivery systems. It is weak on secondary sources, and there is no reference to archival records. The absence of footnoting makes it of limited use for detailed scholarship. It relies to a great extent on the 1984-85 McClelland Royal Commission for a discussion of the reasons behind the bomb tests, the so-called ‘Black Mist’ incident, the undeclared use of Cobalt in the trials and the poor oversight of the Australian Atomic Weapons Test Safety Commission. The section of the book, based on the writing of Alan Parkinson, dealing with the problems in cleaning up the test sites is useful, but hardly new.

Peter Russell, a distinguished Canadian student of the politics of the judiciary, asks if ‘my people’ – the English settlers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US – can live honourably. Is their authority defensible against indigenous people’s charge that ‘my people’ bullied them out of their sovereignty? Because European colonial power has been shadowed by a sense of moral unease, interpreting the colonists’ laws matters. ‘There is a lot of leeway in the law,’ Russell observes, ‘and no more so than in legal cultures based on the common law.’ The High Court of Australia’s decisions in Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) – making native title recognisable to the common law – seemed to Russell to confirm judges’ potential to be the conscience of liberal constitutionalism.

Picturesque Pursuits is a pioneering survey of a neglected area within Australian cultural history: the lives and works of colonial women artists. Caroline Jordan places her analysis of this subject within a broader social, political and historical frame. This approach allows her to reveal the multifaceted importance of an art tradition that was often interwoven with women’s daily domestic life. Evidently, colonial women’s art does not conform to traditional notions of a studio based ‘high art’, and its significance extends beyond the limited definitions of this category. As Jordan points out, most women artists produced works that were confined to the lower-value genres of miniatures, botanical studies, picturesque sketches and scrapbook collages. Their works were often small-scale mixed-media pieces of varying technical proficiency. The fact that the majority of colonial women’s art is found in libraries and archives rather than in the major galleries has further con- tributed to its virtual exclusion from the high-art canon.

Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson – partners in life and work – made three documentaries in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: First Contact (1983), Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1989) and Black Harvest (1992). These films have won several awards which is fitting, given that each exemplifies what is possible in the medium of observational filmmaking, where the drama evolving from real situations outdoes anything that could be imagined in a Hollywood studio. Of course, they were shrewd in their choice of subject. With its mixture of cultures and traditions, PNG offers plenty of conflict, the essential salt in the documentary pie. Anderson and Connolly had a special taste for salt – who else would have recognised local mayoral elections as a site of grand drama as they did for Rats in the Ranks (1996)?

More so even than The Age, the New Yorker is a journal shaped and defined by its illustrators and cartoonists. For many decades it did not include photojournalism at all, and it only appears these days under sufferance. The cartoons contribute crucially to the ethos and style of a magazine that depends a lot on ethos and style. To think of the New Yorker is almost inevitably to think of the famous cover by Saul Steinberg that shows the cars, buildings, and people of Ninth and Tenth Avenues filling the foreground, then the Hudson River marking the edge of the real, figurative world, beyond which New Jersey, Nebraska, Japan, and the Pacific Ocean are just names on a vaguely conceived map. Parochial universalism fuelled by an ironic sophistication is the ethos of this famous image, and a thread of continuity in the work of the four New Yorker artists profiled in Iain Topliss’s fine and sensitive book.