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Early in the 2003 AFL season, Peter Rohde, the new coach of the Western Bulldogs, announced as one his initiatives that players should either find parttime work or some similar engagement consistent with their club commitments, or embark on a TAFE, university, VCE or other study programme. This mildly sensational proposition was designed to reduce the aimless hours spent by many players, especially the young and unencumbered, loitering in malls, coffee joints and other haunts.

Perhaps Rohde, whose fairly disastrous first coaching year belies his articulate and intelligent approach to the game, had in mind a problem more serious, less graspable, than simple time wasting. Perhaps he was observing that modern professional footballers risk becoming more and more disjoined from the people who come to see them play; that the upper echelon members of a homegrown and still highly parochial sport can easily become exotic, rarefied, a different breed; and that, worst of all, they might come to believe in their own fancied difference, a condition known at ground level as ‘believing your own bullshit’.

Australian football has lost its magic, a unique quality existing in the 1950s, and even as late as the 1970s. It derived from the fixed positions that players adopted and from their physical diversity. In their competing forms, they became metaphysical constructs – good versus evil, beauty versus ugliness, benign innocence versus malevolent experience – constructs limited only by the human imagination ...

Zoltan Torey’s Out of Darkness begins dramatically in Sydney. On a winter’s night in 1951, Torey, a refugee from Hungary studying dentistry, is on night shift at the battery factory in which he works to support his studies. When he moves a drum of acid, the plug blows off, ‘sending a massive jet of corrosive liquid at my face’. The acid eats into Torey’s eyes, blinding him for life. In addition, he swallows some acid, damaging his vocal cords. Torey describes this event twice: the second time, he emphasises how the event was experienced. ‘The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint of light in the flood of acid that was to engulf my face … It was a nano-second of sparkle, framed by the black circle of the drumface, less than a foot away.’ As this suggests, Torey’s prose has moments of extraordinary power.

James Stirling’s naval career was helped by having an uncle who was a Rear Admiral. The other side of his family was involved in trade, and some have argued that his proposal for the Swan River colony was based on personal ambition and family influence. This is true to some extent. However, in a deeper sense, he was shaped by his family’s involvement in two of the mainsprings of nineteenth-century British imperialism: naval dominance and worldwide trade.

Stirling was the founding governor of Western Australia for ten years, but the major part of his career was with the Royal Navy. A strength of this biography is that it is the first full account of that career. There is too little space in this review to deal fully with this part of his life, and Australian readers will be more concerned with his governorship. Like most colonial Australian governors (and post-colonial ones), Stirling has had his admirers and detractors. The author, obviously an admirer, argues persuasively in his favour.

With the world apparently going to hell in a handbasket, the flood of contributions to ideas of global governance shows no sign of abating. There is something dizzying about immersing oneself in such far-reaching and ultimately – necessarily – optimistic works about the possibility of a just global civil order at a time when the most basic liberal democratic rights and freedoms are being traded away willy-nilly at the national and local level. From national security laws to nightclub curfews, nothing seems easier to knock over than liberty, and nothing more difficult to resist than cultures of fear and repression.

Nevertheless, there is no reason not to project into a future that may offer scope for a reversal of this process. John Keane is an Adelaide-born heavy-hitter in the area of studies of civil society and democracy, and also a political biographer – most recently of Vaclav Havel. He is thus ideally placed to write a book that is both accessible to the general, well-informed reader, while sacrificing little in the way of academic smarts. He goes a long way towards succeeding, but that is in part because the political questions to which the answer is ‘global civil society’ by their very nature exclude certain dimensions of human beings whose character would complicate the picture.

Australian historians of World War II are fast running out of time. Although printed and photographic records are more accessible than ever, the number of eyewitnesses to the war’s events is dwindling. Rescuing veterans’ insights and memories from oblivion is a matter of ‘now or never’. The subject of this book, the late Major General Ken Eather, will not be forgotten. His name will always be associated with the fighting for Bardia, Lae and Kokoda. More fragile are the invaluable recollections that living veterans have of his career and personality.

This hefty volume begins with an article on a cappella singing (ensembles with names like Café of the Gate of Salvation and Voices from the Vacant Lot) and ends with the zither, which instrument, the editors assure us, ‘can be seen as a metaphor for the present-day cultural diversity of music in Australia’. We have no lack of companions today: indeed, over the last decade they have been coming thick and fast. However the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia seems to have had a particularly troubled genesis, though the editors, John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell, make no reference to it.

You have to sympathise with Nikki Gemmell. When she described her sense of liberation on deciding to publish The Bride Stripped Bare anonymously, she seemed to have in mind only a desire not to offend people close to her. She would also have liberated herself from the literary celebrity machine. But, once the game was up, she got even more of it than she would otherwise have done. It doesn’t seem to have bothered her too much. The profile in The Age and the appearance on Andrew Denton’s television show didn’t suggest that she was determined to salvage what she could from her original plan to stay invisible. Some of my more cynical friends have suggested that that was what she had in mind all along. But the book is written with a candour that confirms her avowals.

Miss Maude Silver, Miss Jane Marple, where are you, with your splendid and authoritative bosoms, your discreet inquiries, natural reticence, and cunning powers of deduction? Oh, a long way from these sisters in crime.