The La Trobe Library Journal began life in 1968 as a modest, even dowdy sixteen-pager produced by the Friends of the (still very new) La Trobe Library. Its purpose was to publicise the Library and its holdings. For the first decade of its existence, the journal was edited by that quiet achiever of Australian letters, Geoffrey Serle. Over the following twenty years it was edited, and largely written, by a succession of librarians, high-lighting not only the riches of the Library’s collections but also the calibre of its staff.

The first thing that struck me on picking up Tatjana Lukic’s posthumous collection, la, la, la, is the impressive appearance of this Five Islands Press publication. High-quality production hasn’t always been a feature of this press, but it is now under the new publishing team. Lukic’s volume joins other attractive collections by poets such as Louise Oxley, Barry Hill and Judy Johnson.

There are a hundred ways of putting together any anthology, most of which are going to annoy somebody. In the case of that much sought-after beast, Australian literature, editors have a fair chance of turning into the quarry. It is not so long since J.I.M. Stewart said, from his chair of English in Adelaide, that there wasn’t any Australian literature so he was going to lecture on D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo instead.

I once visited John Batman’s property in north-east Tasmania, happily in the company of a Tasmanian. The guidebook listed it as a heritage site on a public road, but the graded track along the side of a ridge had to be entered by a gate marked ‘Kingston – Private Property’. We drove several kilometres before reaching another gate. We breached this, too. On our left was a nineteenth-century stone cottage incorporated into a weatherboard homestead. On our right was a large shed and stables. A generator puttered away, and music came from the house. We shouted our presence. Only the horse in the stables responded. Clearly, we were not going to find a stall selling Batman memorabilia.

Janette Turner Hospital is an Australian-born novelist with an international reputation, though Australian readers often have reservations about her work. She has written some brilliant short stories, but her novels can strain for effect, with insistent intellectual allusions and postmodern shifts of fictional status. Perhaps, though, this is a typical Australian response to an expatriate writer whose work is not immediately accessible. Australian critics have not been as willing to praise Hospital as some North American readers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who, on the cover of Rainforest Narratives, describes Hospital as ‘a writer of consummate craft and visionary insight’.

Material culture is everywhere. We hoard it, we gift it, we visit it, we label it and we read it. There is little doubt that the production, preservation, use and re-use of material culture is a key means by which cultural identity is retained, protected and made available across generations. Understanding how a society inherits its cultural identity tells us a lot about that society and what it values. The danger is that this inheritance may be degraded and disenfranchised as time and fashion alter both the meaning, and materiality, of the object. If we are concerned about the stories that objects tell, we must also be concerned about possibilities for misunderstandings and mistranslations. Enter Paul Eggert and his new book, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature.

Sins of the Father focuses on Philip Cooper, a forty-seven-year-old Australian who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian commune established by his father, Neville Cooper, in New Zealand. In 1989, Philip left the commune and came to Australia. Since then, he has been trying to extricate his wife and children and create a ‘normal’ life.

What is it that endows an actor or performer with stage presence? Jane Goodall introduces her exploration of this phenomenon with three disparate examples: Maria Callas commanding an audience of 20,000 at Epidauros, including a ten-year-old girl who would never forget the experience; Bob Dylan recalling the professional wrestler Gorgeous George making an entrance ‘in all his magnificent glory’; and a young Simon Callow, who, employed in the box office at the Old Vic, sneaks into the empty theatre and, setting foot on the stage and declaiming a few lines from Hamlet, is shocked by the ‘physical, or even psychical, power released, a small earthquake’.