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Patrick White got it wrong. European Australians have never been driven to find spiritual meaning through physical deprivation in the deserts of the interior. Their passion has been for housing and construction, matched by their devoted gourmandising. White declared that in Voss he was trying to teach a nation of timid city dwellers that there was more to life than material comfort and ‘cake and steak’. He did take himself rather seriously.

During Harry Houdini’s 1910 visit, the famous escapologist claimed to be the first person to achieve powered, controlled flight in Australia. In Houdini’s Flight, Angelo Loukakis uses these bare details as the backdrop for a modern tale about a more modest achiever, Terry Voulos. A second-generation Greek-Australian, Terry confronts, almost in slow motion, a personal crisis that initially seems caused by his own stuttering approach to life. Whereas Houdini descends into water to release himself from heavy chains, Terry must break free from his own limitations to revitalise his life, his attitudes, his marriage to Jenny and his bond with his son, Ricky.

When Rose, the narrator of Kathleen Stewart’s Men of Bad Character, first visits the bathroom of Gary Gravelly, ‘there in the toilet bowl, frayed around the edges and so long languishing that it had stained the water, was the most enormous rope of turd. That, I said to myself, is the death of romance.’ Rose soon forgets, overwhelmed by the boyish charm of her new lover, but the reader is left with an indelible image. Whatever Rose might think of Gary at any stage – and she changes her opinion many times over the next couple of years – we continue to associate that repulsive image with him. This is not just a bit of earthy bad taste designed to shock. It is a bold and nauseatingly effective way of influencing the reader’s attitude to Gary.

Tom Shapcott’s most recent volume collects nine short stories and one novella from 1997 to 2005, the period during which he was the inaugural Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Of his thirty-two volumes, eleven are novels, three are collections of short stories, and eighteen are books of poetry. Tom has received the Patrick White Prize, Senior Fellowships from the Australia Council and an Order of Australia. He has been Director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Executive Director of the National Book Council and a member of the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week Committee. Does the man never sleep?

A discussion of the outstanding albums of the 1980s might begin with the Shanachie label’s Mbaqanga compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, 4AD’s Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares by the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Choir, and American Clavé’s Tango: Zero Hour by Astor Piazzolla (all 1986), three signal moments in the packaging of global music for Western sensibilities. One could go on to cite such landmarks as Brian Eno’s On Land (1982), Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa (1984) and John Zorn’s Spillane (1987). Add to these Joy Divison’s Closer (1980), Gang of Four’s Solid Gold (1981), Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime (1984), and the decade is beginning to look superior. Australia, too, produced various near-perfect LPs – the likes of Mr Uddich Schmuddich Goes to Town by Laughing Clowns (1982), Born Sandy Devotional by the Triffids, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express by The Go-Betweens, Free Dirt by Died Pretty (all 1986), Cold and the Crackle by Not Drowning Waving (1987) and Tender Prey by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1988) while New Zealand’s The Chills deserve a mention, courtesy of their Brave Words (1987). To this fledgling list, author Jeff Apter would presumably demand the addition of True Colours (1980) and Time and Tide (1982) by Split Enz, as well as Crowded House’s self-titled début (1986) and Temple of Low Men (1988), each of which is accorded canonical status in Together Alone, his new biography of Tim and Neil Finn. This ought to be a matter of personal taste buttressed by (in the appropriate forum, such as a book like this) robust argument, but there is precious little of the latter in Together Alone. Critical analysis is promised but not delivered. Instead, readers are left to trawl through a skip-load of secondary material, including snatches from the omnipresent Glenn A. Baker and one-too-many customers at Amazon.com, in order to learn what supposedly makes this music definitive.

As Stendhal did with The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Simon Leys dedicates his With Stendhal to ‘the happy few’. In both cases, humility is the motivation, rather than affectation or coyness. Henri Beyle (1783–1842) – Stendhal’s real name – was committed to his writing, but he really had no idea that his novels would become masterworks of Western literature, or that his protagonists Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo would come to be seen as archetypal figures of the Romantic era. He would have been astonished to learn that beylisme – denoting a melding of passionate energy and cynical individualism – had become a common noun in French.

How differently would we view Australia’s postwar architecture and urban design without Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness? Such is the significance of this classic 1960 text that it has shaped debates about our cities – their planning, development and buildings – for half a century. Whether the book has helped to improve them is questionable – they probably would not be much different today, Boyd or no Boyd – but what a context and framework he gives us for analysing and discussing them. With the dramatic changes in society and tastes in fifty years, what does Boyd offer the contemporary reader?

In September last year the impressive military intellectual David Kilcullen gave the prestigious annual ‘University Lecture’ to the assembled cohort of cadets, midshipmen, officers, academic staff and senior leadership of the Australian Defence Force Academy and its partner institution, the University of New South Wales. I was especially struck by Kilcullen’s argument, to the young officer trainees, that their future responsibilities would be important because war and conflict had been perennial features of human society since ancient times, and would persist despite efforts to create a more peaceful world. Was this, I wondered, the only way to impress upon the future leadership of the ADF the seriousness of their calling?

In Under the Influence, Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor L. Jordan look at Australian history and contemporary life through the lens of alcohol use in the community. ‘How a community or nation handles alcohol may be a strong indicator of its collective character’, they suggest. While seeking evidence for this, they throw up some fascinating material.

Start with the cover, cunningly designed to provoke a double take. What at first glance appears to be a cigar-chomping Mexican bandido in an oversized sombrero proves, on closer examination, to be a grinning British soldier celebrating victory in the Falklands. All he needs to go Latin is a big hat, a bullet-studded bandolier and a cigar. Three props conjure a chuck wagon full of clichés. The sombrero speaks of braggadocio and machismo, Hugo Chavez, Manuel Noriega, Juan Peron, generalissimos and juntas. But also of laziness – a hat to pull down over your face when, slumped against the adobe on a dusty side street, you sleep off the tequila. Poverty born of sloth, whose only remedy is to slip north across the Rio Grande: wetbacks, drug runners, illegals.