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Australian historians of World War II are fast running out of time. Although printed and photographic records are more accessible than ever, the number of eyewitnesses to the war’s events is dwindling. Rescuing veterans’ insights and memories from oblivion is a matter of ‘now or never’. The subject of this book, the late Major General Ken Eather, will not be forgotten. His name will always be associated with the fighting for Bardia, Lae and Kokoda. More fragile are the invaluable recollections that living veterans have of his career and personality.

One of Australia’s most significant Modernist artists, Margaret Preston (1875–1963) is often remembered for her relentless self-promotion and her forthright opinions: in particular, for her call to develop an art for Australia, untainted by past and irrelevant foreign art. Although frequently quoted (the wonderfully titled autobiographical article ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’ being one of her best-known pieces), her writings have not previously been gathered together. Selected and introduced by Elizabeth Butel, who has written before on Preston, this book presents twenty-nine articles and one extract. These appeared in a number of publications – art journals, women’s magazines, exhibition catalogues and the like – between 1923 and 1949.

This hefty volume begins with an article on a cappella singing (ensembles with names like Café of the Gate of Salvation and Voices from the Vacant Lot) and ends with the zither, which instrument, the editors assure us, ‘can be seen as a metaphor for the present-day cultural diversity of music in Australia’. We have no lack of companions today: indeed, over the last decade they have been coming thick and fast. However the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia seems to have had a particularly troubled genesis, though the editors, John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell, make no reference to it.

What interesting times we live in. Indeed, they are likely to become more interesting. One of the major issues for the new century is China’s emergence as a great power. How will China deal with the rest of the world? Should China be contained, confronted? How will its enhanced power be shown? How will governments wrestle with that power?

Martin Stuart-Fox outlines this problem from the multiple viewpoints of China and of South-East Asia, and adopts a long historical perspective. His tightly organised book covers around 2000 years of relationships between China and the many kingdoms and countries of South-East Asia. He argues, as a good historian should, that the past will powerfully shape the future: ‘a new pattern of power relations is emerging, one that harks back in significant ways to earlier times.’

This, the first major study of Xavier Herbert’s literary journey, is a superb work of scholarship. It is written with passion, good humour and a clear acknowledgment of the faults, both personal and literary, of its subject. Sean Monahan is an enthusiastic admirer of Poor Fellow My Country (1975). According to Monahan, it is not only the quintessential Australian novel, but also ‘one of the great novels of world literature’ – an enthralling yarn as well as a symbolic vision of the difficult path to racial reconciliation. Above all, he says, it is an illuminating picture of a whole culture.

Australian football has lost its magic, a unique quality existing in the 1950s, and even as late as the 1970s. It derived from the fixed positions that players adopted and from their physical diversity. In their competing forms, they became metaphysical constructs – good versus evil, beauty versus ugliness, benign innocence versus malevolent experience – constructs limited only by the human imagination. Football, then, was more intrinsically theatrical – a physical and metaphorical war – and, in that sense, magical. In the late 1960s and 1970s players needed little ingenuity to acquire nicknames such as ‘Bull’ Richardson, ‘Whale’ Roberts and ‘Gasometer’ Nolan. How the modern game cries out for a player resembling a gas tank.

You have to sympathise with Nikki Gemmell. When she described her sense of liberation on deciding to publish The Bride Stripped Bare anonymously, she seemed to have in mind only a desire not to offend people close to her. She would also have liberated herself from the literary celebrity machine. But, once the game was up, she got even more of it than she would otherwise have done. It doesn’t seem to have bothered her too much. The profile in The Age and the appearance on Andrew Denton’s television show didn’t suggest that she was determined to salvage what she could from her original plan to stay invisible. Some of my more cynical friends have suggested that that was what she had in mind all along. But the book is written with a candour that confirms her avowals.

Miss Maude Silver, Miss Jane Marple, where are you, with your splendid and authoritative bosoms, your discreet inquiries, natural reticence, and cunning powers of deduction? Oh, a long way from these sisters in crime.

Like a series of attenuated conversation poems, Drumming on Water is a narrative in forty-five riffs. The individual poems are like extended song lyrics – spoken jazz: ‘ad lib, of course / but also well thought out.’ The words are notes to sound and repeat, scoring the brief and unmemorable career of a jazz drummer with the Lizzie Rivers’ All-Girl Band of 1938 and regular gigs on Sydney Harbour ferries, until the mysterious death of its lead singer who disappears overboard – the fulcrum of the poem.

It’s hard to overstate the sophistication of the poetry in this new verse novel (though verse narrative or novella would be more accurate). Drumming on Water sets a new benchmark in Australian poetry: smooth, elegant, vernacular and deceptively complex. It is an engaging read.