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Exactly one hundred years before this new edition of The Evolution Revolution, by Australian palaeontologists Ken McNamara and John Long, the Rationalist Press Association promoted the first English version of The Evolution of Man (1907), by the great German biologist Ernst Haeckel. In his preface, Haeckel’s translator, Joseph McCabe, pointed out that, since the first German printing in 1874, only fifteen years after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), ‘fresh facts have come to light in each decade, always enforcing the truth of man’s evolution’. Thus, ‘evolution is not a laboriously reached conclusion, but a guiding truth in biological literature today’ and, as such, ‘is accepted by influential clerics ... and by almost every biologist and anthropologist of distinction in Europe’.

In the late twentieth century, museums throughout the world faced a number of challenges. Confronted with a plethora of flashy new technologies, they struggled to overcome a perception of irrelevance and fustiness. Bureaucrats demanded that museums pay their way, entertain the masses, and meet the growing expectations for instant gratification and information without effort.

The first official postage stamps of a British colony were produced on the small island of Mauritius. In 1847, seven years after Rowland Hill’s ‘Penny Black’, the Mauritian postmaster issued 500 orange-red one penny stamps and 500 blue twopence stamps. In size, shape and design, they are utterly conventional. Depicting Queen Victoria in profile, they lack the charm of the 1850 ‘Sydney Views’ stamps of New South Wales or the peculiarity of the 1854 ‘Inverted Swan’ of Western Australia. They are, however, inscribed ‘Post Office’, whereas all later stamps are inscribed ‘Post Paid’. They are instantly recognisable and ever since the 1860s, when philately first became respectable, they have been sought and prized by kings, schoolboys and other collectors.

‘Westering’ is a resonant archaism which makes a wittily ironic title for Peter Kirkpatrick’s new volume. This is work which has a decidedly début du siècle flavour in its hard-edged urban perspective on ‘out west’. The dialectic of city/bush, with its history from Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to Les Murray, is voiced in several registers through these finely crafted and sharply literate poems.

These are the final lines of a poem entitled ‘Endings 111’ in Tom Shapcott’s recently published collection of poetry, The City of Empty Rooms. The poem is included in the final two sections of the book devoted to memories of a Queensland childhood, more particularly recollections of growing up in the inland town of Ipswich. As David Malouf suggests in the blurb, ‘this is a late book that sometimes sharply, sometimes forgivingly looks back, but always with the freshness of things felt and seen anew in a living present’.

I recently went back to New England. It is a long drive from Melbourne, but as I passed through Coonabarabran and Tamworth and began the ascent up the Moonbi Ranges, my gaze responded to the strange and familiar landscape. I periodically wound down the car window to smell the air – crisp but still warm for autumn. I grew up in a few different New England towns – Inverell, Glen Innes, Armidale – so I am familiar with the territory covered in the fascinating essays in High Lean Country. The high elevation of the Tableland makes the winters cold, summers mild. The dramatic landscape is dotted with granite mounds and monoliths. It is edged to the east by the escarpment and the gorge country of Judith Wright’s poems.

At about the time that he was preparing the final drafts of The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot was preoccupied by a separate, but no less overwhelming question: when to sell his shares in the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. In October 1922, the month the poem was published in the periodical he edited, the Criterion, Eliot wrote to his brother, Henry: ‘For myself, the important point is that Hydraulic should rise and give me an opportunity to sell when Sterling is low: it looks as if Sterling might fall a few points before very long. Do you think that Hydraulic will continue to pay dividends for the next year or so?’