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The poet John Ashbery, now a considerable force in American poetry, has said: ‘I think that any one of my poems might be considered to be a snapshot of whatever is going on in my mind at the time…’ Like John Ashbery – and Frank O’Hara (who was involved with the Abstract Expressionism scene in New York before being killed by a dune buggy in 1966) – John Forbes and Gig Ryan are, in Australia, poets who must be linked to the broad automatic writing phenomenon which gained strength with so-called Action Painting (or, to use its other name, Tachisme). The foundation of that art movement was surrealist painting, sculpture, and writing; and these were made familiar to young American artists when writers and painters such as Max Ernst and André Breton escaped from Europe before Hitler took over.

The only woman in The First UQP Story Book is the naked one on the front cover. She is sitting in a kind of beanbag chair with her legs crossed and a floppy straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She is reading a book called The Possession of Amber which is by Nicholas Jose. Nicholas Jose is a man and so he was allowed to be actually in The First UQP Story Book.

Don’t judge Donald Horne’s books by their titles.

Despite the title of the parent program, the aims of the Commonwealth Writers Series are not small. These paperback editions propose:

… a panoptic survey of a writer’s work, assessing its significance and merits, and conveying the critic’s enjoyment of the writer concerned, within a total length of between 96 and 176 pages. Each book will have a Survey chapter, placing the major works and events in the author’s life and times.

Gary Catalano’s book, which I admire greatly, is a readjustment. His standpoint, so far as I can tell, is an ideal he has of what might be the suitable creative situation for artists, and he reviews the 1960s with this in mind.

Rites of Passage qualifies for a notice in ABR because, although it is written and published in Britain, it is among other things an account of the adventures of one Edmund Talbot who has taken a passage to Australia sometime during a lull in the wars with France, towards the end of the eighteenth century.

For any who may suffer under the delusion that the production of good histories is easy, these three books offer some valuable lessons. The first, J.0. Randell’s Yaldwyn of the Golden Spurs, is the work of a Gentleman (i.e. amateur) historian, the other two are very much the labours of mere Players. William Henry Yaldwyn (1801–66) was a Sussex squire, (in Burke’s LandedGentry by the skin of his teeth), who turned Australian squatter to boost the family’s dwindling fortunes. He was certainly ‘in’ on some of the most significant historical action in midcentury Australia – pioneering Victorian squatter, a Port Phillip Gentleman and founder of the Melbourne Club, a visitor to the gold fields in 1852, and a few years later a pioneering squatter again, this time in Queensland. It was only Queensland that amply rewarded him, both financially and personally. He served two brief terms in the Legislative Council where, Mr Randell informs us, his ancestors’ Cromwellian sympathies encouraged him to propose a motion, finally passed by both houses in 1862, which established the elective nature of the upper house at the expense of the power of the Crown. As one of the few Queensland farmer politicians to have advanced the cause of Democracy, he is indeed a raraavis.