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What effect did life, does life still, exert upon Europeans in the Pacific? Does it weaken cultural bonds with Europe or does it sustain them? Does it set up alternative cultural standards by means of which European culture may be more critically assessed’) And individuals may more critically assess their own motivations? Are their lives fulfilled in the Pacific or does it destroy them’? These are among the questions which Gavan Daws has set himself, in this highly readable and elegantly written series of linked biographies of five men, Williams, Melville, Gibson, Stevenson, and Gauguin, whose fame and destiny were determined in whole or in part by their lives in the Pacific. Each of them found in the islands ‘the other side of his own civilised humanity’. The book, therefore, though it contains a great deal of factual information about the movements and lives of these men in the Pacific, is really about the romantic voyage, the voyage ‘into the self’.

The Transit of Venus has been widely acclaimed, and justly so: it is a great novel of passion and ambition, success and failure, written with elegance and wit, and magnificently structured. Still, despite the critical superlatives, few critics have attempted to come to grips with the power of Hazzard’s writing. There have been the inevitable comparisons with Jane Austen, and some attention has been paid to the symbolic connotations of the title, but little more. The prose and structure of the novel are worth examining in some detail because, seven years in the making, it is a most crafted and sculpted work of literary art.

Is there life after fifty? David Williamson’s newest play wittily affirms that love, adventure, and increasing self-knowledge are not the exclusive preserves of the young. Frank, seventy-five, retired engineer and ex-communist, is no spring chicken but neither is he ‘defunct in the physical area’.

None of the writers who emerged from the Australian bush has dealt as powerfully with its horror as Barbara Baynton, yet she is probably mainly known only for the two anthologised short stories, ‘Scrammy ’And’ and ‘Squeaker’s Mate’, the latter of which has been made into an excellent short film by David Baker.

It is five years since Rowbotham’s Selected Poems, one of that extraordinary number of summing-up volumes that has been, perhaps, last decade’s most telling and characteristic factor. The need to gauge one’s own work (and focus) from some working perspective has always been the basis of a living poet’s Selected Poems. But this decade’s perspective makers have, almost without exception, shared an additional, if implied, purpose: their selections point to a stocktaking rather than a summarising intention.

Until recently I had found that the most useful book on the history of shipping in the Australian area was the two-volume work Pageant of the Pacific by Captain F. Rhodes, published in 1936. During the last few years we have had several books devoted to single companies, such as the E. & A. Line, the AUSN, Adelaide Steamship, and smaller companies, each of which showed the difficulty of condensing a lot of ships histories into one volume. To deal with all the coastal companies, some of which extended overseas, in one volume, requires ruthless editing and carries the danger of the story being stripped of its flesh, to leave us with the dry bare bones. Two years ago there appeared the very complete work by Dr John Bach, A Maritime History of Australia in nearly 500 pages. The work under review is briefer and easier to read, being about 330 pages with 115 photographs and line drawings. A strange omission in both these books is that their bibliographies give no mention to Rhodes’ great work.

Sir Samuel Griffith was chief justice of the High Court of Australia for sixteen years, from October 1903 to October 1919; but he had effectively retired in July 1919. Sir John Latham was chief justice for sixteen and a half years, from October 1935 to April 1952; but he had effectively retired in May 1951. Thus, Sir Garfield Barwick, who last month completed his sixteenth year as chief justice, has already established a record for active service in the position; if he remains in office until 24 October this year, he will have broken even Lathams formal record.

The holder of such a record term of office as chief justice would, on that ground alone, be assured of a unique place in Australian legal history; but in Barwick’s case, the years as chief justice are only a climax – perhaps even an anti-climax – to an extraordinary career.