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That scourge of religion, Richard Dawkins, declared recently that the past year had been a bad one for God. He was probably referring to the success of his polemics against religion and to the tidal wave of kindred writings by other public intellectuals, such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. We do not know whether God would agree; and whether we should agree depends partly on how we read ‘success’. The books certainly sold and are widely acclaimed, and may even have garnered apostates. But for all their élan and entertainment, they are essentially concoctions and elaborations of arguments and observations made by earlier, more penetrating thinkers. If advancing understanding is at issue, as opposed to securing the public’s mobile attention, then we should judge that the tree of knowledge hasn’t burgeoned much lately, not on the theological branches, anyway.

Our retail establishment has never received the spotlight focused on its predecessors, the miners, pastoralists, makers and land boomers. The next wave, the shopkeepers – the Foys, McLellans, Treadways, Nathans, Morans and Coles – are mainly remembered by fading signs above grand buildings occupied by others. (For a wonderful example of history in pressed cement, stand in Prahran’s Cato Street car park and look east.) Melbourne’s glittering exception is the Jewish-Anglican Myer dynasty.

Henry Lawson epitomised the weather-beaten laconic when he said: ‘Death is about the only cheerful thing in the bush.’ A century later, Bill Bryson, in Down Under (2000), picked up where Lawson left off: he defined the ‘real Australia’ as places where ‘no sane per­son would choose to live’. Somewhere in between, Patrick White created one of those dubious entities, a sweat-stained eccentric in an undaubed slab hut who told the explorer Voss that the country ahead of him was all stones and thorns, a place where anyone crazy enough to go out there might celebrate a ‘high old Mass ... with the skull of a black­feller and his own blood’.

The award of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics to William Henry Bragg, sometime Elder Professor of Mathematics and Experimental Physics at the University of Adelaide, and his Australian-born son William Lawrence Bragg is one of the icons of Australian science. Their ‘services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays’ is mentioned in the guide for new Australians, Becoming an Australian Citizen (2007), so we can put them up there with Don Bradman and Captain Cook.

For many Australians, the Burke and Wills odyssey is a sketchy episode in our history. For Kevin Rabalais, a recent immigrant to this country from New Orleans, the fragments of the story were obviously an intriguing premise for a novel. His first novel, The Landscape of Desire, retraces this expedition and the later one led by Howitt that set out to find the missing explorers. The strange thing is that the author does not approach his work as historical fiction, but as literary fiction.

This memoir moves through points of intensity in Kate Llewellyn’s life, from an idyllic childhood at Tumby Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in the 1940s through to her leaving Adelaide to make a new life in Sydney in the 1980s. By this time she is a recognised poet, but her life is in turmoil. The book does not set out to tell a success story; rather, it describes that uneven movement from childhood innocence through adult experience, with all naïveté, self-delusion, idealism, and hard-learned lessons. It is quintessentially a poet’s book, its stories heightened by arresting images, its movement circling rather than linear.

In 2005 Simon Cleary was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for the best manuscript of an emerging Queensland author, and here it is, every bit as fresh and lyrical as the report promised. It is one of those novels that works by close-up focus on substantiating detail, leaving the main contours of the plot to emerge as they will; like a bridge, perhaps, calling attention to its line and form and even its usefulness. It takes a more careful eye to appreciate the development and assembly and the structural stresses – its very strength.

Rod Reeve manages a company that directs foreign-aid projects. Rather than flying in with helicopter-loads of rice, he focuses on ‘capacity-building’ and infrastructure. Agricultural science is his own speciality, but he has set up and run a variety of projects. He has worked to counter opium production in Pakistan, develop dryland farming in Africa, Iraq and Jordan (he had to evacuate during the 1991 Gulf War), and improve health and education in China, Laos and Indonesia. He assisted with the quarantine service in Papua New Huinea and post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh.