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Jordie Albiston’s latest collection opens with a remarkable poem about a woman falling from the Empire State Building and falling, at the same time, through the story of her life:

In the air, a moment can take on the time centuries span.
She falls through former selves above a thousand heads.
No one looks up. No one looks towards the bright sedan.
Within a handful of time, it will be her crumpled bed.

The perils of a certain kind of historical writing are painfully demonstrated in The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, billed as ‘the life of Australian whaling captain, William Chamberlain: a tale of abduction, adventure and murder’.

According to the limited information available about Chamberlain, he had an exciting life. Born in Australia in 1803, he was for some reason taken away from his hometown of Port Jackson in 1811 on the Frederick. The French captured this whaling ship on its way back to England, and killed the captain. Chamberlain was taken prisoner with the rest of the crew, and was rescued by the British navy. He was cared for by a naval surgeon, who eventually sent him to school in Scotland for a couple of years. Later, he was on board one of the battleships that participated in the Battle of Algiers in 1816, where he was wounded. It was only then that it occurred to anyone to return the boy, now thirteen, to his family in Australia. After a few years, Chamberlain went to sea again, first on a sealing ship and then on a whaler. He worked his way up to become captain of a whaling vessel, married and had several children. He and his family settled in Hobart, where in 1856 his youngest son was raped and murdered by a ticket-of-leave convict. Chamberlain died in Hobart in 1870.

If it is inadvisable to judge a book by its cover, perhaps it is equally unreliable to judge one by its title. But The Complete Book of Great Australian Women set my teeth on edge before I’d turned the first page. What qualifies a woman for greatness? Great deeds? Great courage? Great neighbours? And wasn’t the point of feminist history not only to open up the list of historical actors but also to challenge the very principles of historical gatekeeping: professional merit, political influence, public stature? The subtitle certainly doesn’t contribute to more inclusive notions of historical agency and achievement. Like a human hydroelectric scheme, de Vries’s women struggle to overcome the many ‘natural’ barriers to female success, and, like the nation itself, emerge triumphant.

To an outside observer of the Australian literary and cultural scene, the Ern Malley hoax is one of those spin-offs in the Australian experience that keep on conjuring up Mark Twain’s famous dictum of the nature of the country’s history: ‘It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies ... 

Readers who share Helen Nickas’s view that Antigone Kefala’s fiction forms ‘a continuous narrative which depicts and explores the various stages of an exilic journey’ may be pleased to find more instalments in her fourth book of fiction, Summer Visit. The first of the three novellas is an account of an unsatisfying marriage, told with a controlled detachment that makes its title, ‘Intimacy’, seem ironic. In contrast, the third, ‘Conversations with Mother’, contains a series of elegiac apostrophes of the deceased; the connections with Braila and other congruities with a figure familiar from previous writings again encourage an assumption of autobiography.

At a recent Australian Broadcasting Authority conference, federal communications minister Senator Richard Alston conceded that the early adoption of digital television in Australia had been ‘modest’. More impartial observers of the transition to digital broadcasting in Australia have been less restrained. ‘A digital dead-end’ and ‘dismal failure’ are representative of recent media commentary on the subject.