‘To paint’, Ian Fairweather once observed, ‘one must be alone.’ True enough, you think, though hardly deserving of quotation. Down the years all kinds of artists have made the same observation, yet not many of them have been as consistently forthright when essaying the value and aesthetic nature of their lonely activity. Fairweather was an exception. ‘I paint for myself,’ he went on to add, ‘nor do I feel any compulsion to communicate, though naturally I am pleased when it seems I have done so.’

I know nothing of David Martin’s childhood or family, but I think that he must come from a long line of slayers of dragons, and that somewhere during the formative years of his childhood he listened to many adult conversations on social justice and human dignity. At any rate, his adult life has been spent dealing with dragons, in one way or another.

One of the joys of reading Jack Fingleton on cricket is that the personality of the author illuminates every page. It is not merely that Fingleton’s style is the man himself; his work transcends a Parnassian obsession with manner of expression. Just as one expects existentialism in every scene of a Sartre play and Shavian philosophy in every line of a Shaw prologue, the reader would be disappointed if he did not discover a highly individualistic and forceful view­point on cricket eloquently expounded in each chapter of a Fingleton book.

‘From the day you were born all you ever heard about was how you came from the “Blacks” Camp! You weren’t a person; you were just a thing that had to live out there to keep you away from decent people. It’s not too different today, either.’

Probably not too many would quarrel with Evan Jones’ light-hearted description of himself as ‘one of our twenty best-known poets under forty in some views…’ Though closer now to fifty than forty, Jones in his three books so far has shown himself to be one of those academic poets of great fluency in traditional forms, capable of whipping up a cigar-and-port entertainment at a moment’s notice – but also capable of genuinely moving poems.

The exploits of legendary heroes, so deeply rooted in particular cultures, very often suffer diminution by being retold in another language. Heroic deeds need no justification or explanation for the original audience, who share with the teller the same aspirations, the same fears, and the same codes of behaviour. The explanatory footnote and the authorial aside to mitigate strangeness in a new version are just as fatal to authenticity as those turn-of-the-century illustrations showing Jason and Perseus looking like upper-class British Empire builders, exemplars of the Baden-Powell ethos.

The approach taken by the South Australian Royal Commission into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs is to be highly commended. This commission was appointed in January 1977, under the chairmanship of Professor Ronald Sackville, Professor of Law in the University of New South Wales, nearly nine months ahead of the Federal Commission chaired by Mr. Justice Williams and the New South Wales Commission, chaired by Mr Justice Woodward. The South Australian Commission includes Earle Hackett, Deputy Director of Adelaide’s Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, and Richard Nies, Head of the School of Social Studies at the South Australian Institute of Technology.

I found this a book of uncertain trajectory. On the one hand its target seems to be a broad readership, for these forty-three short stories were first written for the periodical, Tabloid Story, whose method of distribution has been the effective one of being hosted by student and national journals of wide circulation. On the other hand, the collection includes a long self-conscious explanation of itself whose apparent interest in a secure perch on a tertiary syllabus would exclude the popular audience. In it the editor outlines why these stories represent a revolution in Australian short fiction, anatomises the causes and course of this upheaval, locates its European and Latin American antecedents, names its genres – in short tells why his authors should attract serious study rather than serious enjoyment. The ruse, of course, is to hallow an episode in Australian literature, a manoeuvre that I found as transparent as it is indicative of shaky confidence. A revolution with genuine roots will hallow itself.