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Levin’s God is a two-part epic. The first half is a take on the Australian rock scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Singer-guitarist Levin Hoffman, on the strength of what people say are ‘great songs’, rapidly takes his band the Barking Dogs to the top of the charts. Levin – believe it or not – finds that success is hollow and that not even his devoted Indian-Australian girlfriend, Shelley, or his long-time friend-cum-manager, Lawrence, can rescue him from his indefinable angst. The second half of the book sees Levin in Thailand, where, lying low at a monastery after witnessing a horrific murder, he becomes a devotee of meditation.

As Roger Hart, Roger Wells was the male lead in the group Little Heroes (not to be confused with their contemporaries, Little Murders), a Melbourne band that spent the first half of the 1980s making interesting rock records. They had a top ten hit, ‘One Perfect Day’, in 1982, which complemented the ‘new wave’ without alienating fans of more established music. Wells now works as a counsellor and has written a book on meditation, so one assumes that Levin’s God is built on a skeleton of experience, though much of the experience seems casually remembered. Tellingly, it is the travail of meditation and Levin’s struggle to purge his own desire and pain through meditative enlightenment that are most credible.

In 1984 British feminist Rosalind Coward published a collections of essays, Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today, which had considerable impact because of its explanatory power, and because it made available a particular interpretation of feminist approaches to everyday cultural forms, from food porn to astrology, fashion to romance novels. At that time, media representations and popular understandings of feminism were distorted and often stereotypical. They had not caught up on the more nuanced and diverse critical thinking filtering through the activist networks and academy. Coward’s book charted new directions in thinking through feminism and thinking about feminism.

The Anglican Church worldwide is currently facing the gravest threat ever to its international unity. Where the vitriolic debates over the ordination of women failed to shatter the Anglican Communion, the ordination of an openly gay bishop in the US in late 2003 may well succeed. Conservative bishops have demanded that the American Episcopal (Anglican) Church’s leaders be disciplined. If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not oblige once an international report has been tabled later this year, the break-up of the Anglican Communion is highly probable.

On his sixteenth birthday, Peter Hithersay discovers that his father is not his father. His mother’s husband, Rodney, has wanted to dispel this misunderstanding for a long time, but it has taken years for Henrietta to say what has needed to be said.

In 1960 Henrietta was sent as a substitute to compete in a Bach festival in Leipzig, one of the most musical cities in the world. Bach lived there for twenty-seven years; Wagner was born there; other musical notables, such as Grieg and Schumann, have been associated with the city. But Leipzig, two hours from Berlin, spent forty years last century at the heart of the GDR, the police state of East Germany. Leipzig was the hub of one of the most unmusical régimes imaginable, and became a stronghold for the notorious secret police, the Stasi.

Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, the name Morrison seemed to be almost everywhere I looked. Scraping and stumbling through Geelong College, I attended assemblies in Morrison Hall, was a member of Morrison House, and daily passed a trophy cabinet in which was exhibited a copy of Morrison of Peking (1967), Cyril Pearl’s biography of George Ernest ‘Chinese’ Morrison (1862–1920), a scion of the founding family in whom its pride was visible.

It would be nice to say that the example of Morrison’s life spurred me to tackle journalism, what he called ‘the noblest of all the professions’, with its emphasis on ‘energy, courage, temperance and truthfulness’. But truth be told, he was at the time a little too exotic to take in – as Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin put it in their new biography, ‘a Scot by breeding, an Australian by birth and experience, British imperialist by choice and a Sinophile by compulsion’. Only later did I find myself bewitched by An Australian in China (1895), the vivid pedestrian’s panorama that Morrison wrote about his foot slog from Shanghai to Rangoon, which became, as it were, his successful job application to The Times.

The history of fifteenth-century Florence is indissolubly linked to the Medici, the political bosses and patrons of the arts who presided over the city-state’s Renaissance. The names of Cosimo, Lorenzo and Giovanni, known to God and the world as Pope Leo X, immediately come to the fore in any discussion of Renaissance Italy. Rarely heard are the names of their female kin: Contessa de’ Bardi, wife of Cosimo the Elder and republican matron; Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and vernacular poet; Lorenzo’s daughters; Lucrezia Medici Salviati and Contessa Medici Ridolfi; his daughter-in-law, the despised Alfonsina Orsini Medici; or of his granddaughter, Maria Salviati Medici, who worked so assiduously to secure the future of her son, Cosimo, Grand Duke of Florence.

In The Medici Women, Natalie Tomas seeks to explore the political and cultural influence of these Florentine matriarchs who, by birth or marriage, were at the centre of the Medici clan. She investigates why and how certain Medici women were able to utilise power and influence contemporary perceptions and representations of their authority.

One sun-filled Saturday in spring 2000, I wandered through Salamanca market, in and around the historic sandstone buildings on Hobart’s waterfront. After a long absence, I expected the arts and crafts, antiques, and books amid tourists and the local caffe latte set. What surprised me were stalls of beautiful fresh fruit and vegetables, grown and sold by smiling ethnic Hmong. The bright front cover of The Hmong of Australia zooms into that image of my memory.

It is pleasing to learn from sociologist Roberta Julian that, for Tasmanians, the Hmong ‘symbolise a new openness to Asia’. Yet it is disconcerting to be told: ‘Insofar as the Hmong are accepted as Tasmanians, however, their identity has become commodified, trivialised and marginalised … a superficial Hmong identity.’ Any more so than that of the Han Chinese and Italian vendors, who draw camera-clicking busloads to Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market? Or that of the colourfully clad Hmong minority in China’s southern Yunnan province, ancestral homeland of the Hmong?