Non Fiction

Until the last decade, there has been very little serious scholarly interest in Australian book publishing. Indeed, when I began lecturing in this discipline in 2001, there was no historical or contemporary overview that could be recommended to my students beyond the entry in the Australian Encyclopedia. However, with the recent dramatic growth in Communications courses, and spurred on by projects such as the History of the Book in Australia (HOBA), this situation has suddenly changed. UQP has already published two of the three promised HOBA volumes on the history of Australia’s print culture. Now we have, from the same publisher, a new collection of scholarly articles, which is undoubtedly superior to Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946– 2005 (2006), the HOBA volume that dealt inter alia with contemporary publishing. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing is less impressionistic and more systematic in its approach.

Peter Doherty, an Australian biomedical researcher, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996 and accordingly has substantial credibility among members of the international scientific community. This book, however, has been carefully crafted for a more general audience, and might well be enjoyed while sitting (hatted and sunscreened) on a beach. The blurb suggests that the contents provide an entertaining, albeit informative, account of the ways in which natural resources such as air, water and hydrocarbons have been harnessed by human ingenuity. But Doherty has a more serious intent, which he deliberately takes time to unfold. The subtext to his light-hearted explanations of how candles, light bulbs and refrigerators work, and how we use a variety of fuels to heat, cool and light our lives, is that this planet is running out of non-renewable energy sources. He suggests that we need to use brainpower and research to find alternatives sooner, not later, if we are to ensure the survival of our children.

In 1994, I stood at the foot of the mighty Athabasca Glacier in the heart of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. At places more than 300 metres thick, the ice was treacherous, riven by great fissures and studded with rocky debris carried down from the Columbia Icefield, seven kilometres away. We had parked our car outside the chalet, a kilometre or so behind us, and traversed the moraine stretching across the treeless valley. As I waited for a break in the clouds before taking a photograph, it was disconcerting to consider that, one hundred years earlier, my vantage point would have been compressed under tons of slowly flowing glacial ice. Indeed, the glacier then extended beyond the site of the current Chalet carpark. This was my first direct experience of global warming. With such compelling evidence of climate change, it is not surprising that award-winning photo-journalist and environmentalist Gary Braasch begins his book on global warming with matched images of the Athabasca Glacier taken in 1917 by A.O. Wheeler, and in 2005 by Braasch himself.

William Willshire was Officer in Charge of the Native Police in Central Australia from 1884 to 1891, when he was charged with the murder of two Aborigines. He was acquitted, but was regarded by his superiors from then on as something of a liability, ending his career in an uneventful posting in Cowell on the Yorke Peninsula. He wrote three books about his life as an outback hero, glorifying himself as an anthropologist and sentimental champion of the people he had policed with ignorant brutality.

Of the many damning revelations contained in this book, the fact that Allan Dulles, the CIA’s longest serving director (1953–61), would assess the merits of intelligence briefings by their weight is among the most startling. Coming in at 700 pages, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is sufficiently hefty to have commanded Dulles’s attention. Were he alive today to read this searing indictment of the institution he did so much to construct, however, it is doubtful that Dulles would find much cause for cheer.

The planning history of our cities is one that has received surprisingly little attention. While the catalogue abounds in detailed studies – Adelaide and Canberra between them account for the bulk of this literature – national overviews, much less international contexts, are thin on the ground. In this rarefied atmosphere, Robert Freestone has been a generous contributor. His earlier Model Communities: The Garden City movement in Australia (1989) provided a comprehensive overview of urban planning in the period here under review (1900–30). Designing Australian Cities now provides a complementary overlay.

Bob Burton is not one to pull punches: early in Inside Spin he describes the public relations (PR) industry as one dominated by a ‘culture of secrecy’ with its practitioners operating ‘on the basis that they are most successful when they are nowhere to be seen’. That the industry is largely unregulated adds to the sense of unease that many Australians feel about its activities.

In the early seventeenth century, the German princely territory of the Palatinate burst on to the centre of the European political stage. In August 1619 the Elector Palatine Frederick V – ruler of one of the most prosperous and culturally vibrant territories of the Holy Roman Empire, and a leader of Protestants throughout Europe – was elected king of Bohemia. This put him in opposition to the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, an Austrian Hapsburg and leader of the Catholic forces, who had been deposed a year earlier by the same rebellious Bohemian estates which then elected Frederick. These events quickly fuelled what has come to be known as the Thirty Years War (1618–48), one of the most ferocious in Europe’s bloody history.

This is Agnes Nieuwenhuizen’s third guide to teenage reading: Good Books for Teenagers (1992) was followed by More Good Books for Teenagers (1995). Thankfully, this latest instalment is not Even More Good Books for Teenagers, but the much less prescriptively titled Right Book, Right Time: 500 Great Reads for Teenagers. Whereas ‘good’ collocated all too easily with ‘a good breakfast’ – as in bran – ‘great’ communicates a certain quality of excellence or a joyful exclamation. Either way, we immediately understand that when there is chemistry between young people and books something exciting, of both literary and personal significance, is going on.