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When five Chinese set themselves ablaze in Tiananmen Square in January 2001, Falun Gong made world headlines. Horrified disciples of the spiritual and qigong (like t’ai chi) organisation claimed that none of the five was a member and dissociated themselves from the tragedy, in which one person died. Today, Falun Gong still sees itself as a victim of a government conspiracy to discredit its 100 million faithful. Sydney-based Jennifer Zeng asks: why did police, some thirty fire engines and cameramen arrive within a minute? How did they get distant, mid-range and close-up images of the self-immolation from so many different angles unless it had been prearranged? Zeng suggests answers to these and other questions in Witnessing History.

Like many a portentous new (electronic) media advocate today, the US photographer Paul Strand opined in his 1922 essay ‘Photography and the New God’ that photography unified science and art and therefore offered a new creative path. God talk was not inappropriate, because the period also saw the widespread sway of vitalism, the metaphysical doctrine that living organisms possess a non-physical inner force or energy that lends them life.

Two of Kathleen Riley’s aims are clearly, if somewhat grandly, spelt out in her prologue: to redress the omission of Nigel Hawthorne ‘from theatre histories of the latter half of the twentieth century’; and to ‘present a new appraisal of post-war theatre by focusing on the personal journey of one of Britain’s finest […] actors’. Another, unspoken explicitly, is to articulate the ‘deep passion for the theatre’ aroused in her by Alan Bennett’s writing and Hawthorne’s portrayal of The Madness of George III. She manages in the first, fails (as anyone might) in the second, and succeeds only too well in the third. Riley’s book is little short of a 380-page fan letter, with all the substantial virtues and vices of such an exercise: undeniable zeal, energy, and commitment, but a lamentable lack of critical distance.

In the 1740s a little-known English excise officer and master of a charity school published a frank memoir of his life. John Cannon wrote extensively of his partnerships and his marriage, and also of his sexual exploits. Beginning at the age of twelve, he was taught to masturbate by a school friend and he continued with this until his early twenties. From this time, he had regular sexual contact with a variety of women, including one relationship of ten years. Yet he rarely had sexual intercourse. Instead, his very active sexual life was filled with kissing and erotic fondling: for Cannon, penetrative sex was saved almost exclusively for marriage.

These first novels by Joel Deane, the Victorian premier’s speechwriter, and Merle Thornton, a former academic who famously chained herself to a male-only bar in Brisbane, focus on radically different social groups. Deane’s Another is about two unemployed adolescents living in an outer Melbourne suburb bypassed by a freeway where the local McDonalds is the town’s nucleus. In After Moonlight, Thornton presents a bookstore-browsing, duck-eating, macchiato-sipping, Carltonish academic. (The novel is replete with such portmanteaux.) That both novels are set in the same city is a shock. Another commonality, more poignant, is a concern with the personal and the enduring effects of tragic pasts.

Wesley College, Melbourne, has a long and intriguing history. Established in 1866, Wesley was off to a slow start that left it, for much of its history, trying to foot it with slightly older, considerably wealthier and rather more prestigious rival public schools (as they were then known, distinguishing them from schools run for profit by private individuals). In its first ‘heyday’ in the opening decades of the twentieth century, under the charge of the colourful L.A. Adamson, Wesley epitomised the Australian public school system. It embodied the transfer to Australia of the values of England’s élite schools, preaching conservative social values, and combining a love of sports with a devotion to intellectual pursuits and a commitment to a national agenda that emphasised imperial loyalty and martial willingness.

Robert Ingpen is one of Australia’s best-known and most distinguished artists. Throughout his long career, he has illustrated scientific publications and numerous books for children and young people. He is the only Australian illustrator to have been awarded the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Children’s Literature. He has designed bronze doors, stamps, and murals, and has acted as designer for Swan Hill Pioneer Village, one of Australia’s first open-air museums. His recent work includes the design of a tapestry celebrating the sesquicentenary of the Melbourne Cricket Ground; illustrating a centenary edition of Peter Pan and Wendy; and holding an exhibition at the 2002 Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Diane Armstrong should have stuck to the facts. The many surprising particulars that illuminated her two fine histories of the Jewish refugee experience (Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, 1998, and The Voyage of Their Life, 1999) have been replaced, in her first novel, by clichés and banalities that turn to soap opera her account of an Australian forensic scientist unearthing the secrets of her own past.

In a recent feature article in the Guardian Review, William Boyd proposed a new system for the classification of short stories. He constructed seven stringently categorical descriptions and ended his article with a somewhat predictable – that is to say, canonical – list of ‘ten truly great stories’, among which were James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Spring at Fialta’ and Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’. Most of the writers cited were male, and the classifications were confident demarcations in terms of genre and mode (‘modernist’, ‘biographical’). It is difficult to know, and no doubt presumptuous to speculate, what Boyd would make of Frank Moorhouse’s edited collection The Best Australian Stories 2004. Garnering them ‘at large’ by advertisement and word of mouth, Moorhouse received one thousand stories, from which he selected ‘intriguing and venturesome’ texts, many of which display ‘innovations’ of form. Of the twenty-seven included, six are by first-time published writers and twenty are by women. This is thus an open, heterodox and explorative volume, unlike its four predecessors in this series in reach and inclusiveness. It is also, perhaps, more uneven in quality: a few stories in this selection are rather slight; and the decision to include two stories by two of the writers may seem problematic, given the large number of submissions and the fact that the editor claims there were fifty works fine enough to warrant publication. A character in one of the stories favourably esteems the fiction of Frank Moorhouse over that of David Malouf: this too may be regarded as a partisan inclusion.