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It is impossible to look cool studying youth culture. Researchers can’t help being uncool, whether they’re explaining every little term to their readers, as if to a High Court judge, or shoehorning the ‘in’ lingo into their otherwise conventional academic texts. However advanced their self-awareness strategies or their desire to avoid seeming preachy, nothing can stop them coming off like T-shirted versions of the social surveyors of a century ago. Instead of the slums or Samoa, it’s some kind of sweaty, fertile, animalistic netherworld of tribal signs and tracksuit brand logos.

Poetry is a form of resistance to loss, death and oppression. But, like any communication channel, it has its own resistance. Poetry does not simply communicate experience or presence. This resistant quality of the medium has often attracted attention. The opening of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Man Carrying Thing’ is a famous example: ‘The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.’

Lawrence Bourke’s A Cold Touch begins with a poem called ‘Advice to a Failure’. Expressed with such force as to render grammar a secondary consideration, its argument is hard to grasp al first, but the poem is only technically meaningless: it contains, I think, an important truth:

The committee can stick
their mate with medals until the man’s all brass
but his brilliant chest will never help him frame
a line to shine like those of poets who came
to nothing but writing well writing for themselves
and us the simple truths some call fiction.

The line that shines, in other words, is a prize that outshines the brass and medals. Few, I suspect, would disagree with Bourke on this specific point. But why is something so uncontroversial expressed with such conspicuous force? Is Bourke, I wonder, as baffled as I am as to why certain books get medals at all?

For many Australians, Patrick Dodson is the guy with the land rights hat and flowing beard. With Paddy‘s Road: Life Stories of Patrick Dodson, Kevin Keeffe ensures that Dodson will also be remembered for being the first Aboriginal priest and for his contributions to the reconciliation movement.

The Blue Mountains glimmer on many horizons. For Sydney-siders, they are a blue haze that promises a weekend away among the gums and spooky grand hotels. For visitors from further afield, they offer wilderness supported by tourist kitsch: statues made from chicken wire; bogus Aboriginal legends; 3-D movies; and, best of all, the scenic railway, a sardine can on a high wire that sways across the valley beneath Echo Point.

The mountains are a place of beginnings and endings. In 1813 three white men made what they called, in their blindness and arrogance, The First Crossing of the mountains. Convicts tried to cross them, too, searching for China or for colonies of whites who were free and happy. A century later, the mountains were becoming a place for final steps and breaths. People leapt to their deaths from beauty spots. Descendants of the first inhabitants of this breathtaking place, including the Darug and Gundungurra people, still live there, although in public discourse the Aboriginality of the mountains is more often inscribed in inanimate objects such as The Three Sisters or the Orphan Rock.