The first time Mary Ellen Jordan’s name appeared in ABR (June 2001), it was followed by a brief, heated exchange. Bruce Pascoe responded to her ‘Letter from Maningrida’ mixing accusations of betrayal with a series of familiar analogies, in a stern warning that this kind of fearless journalism was not wanted. Melissa Mackey moved to Jordan’s defence. She had read courage, not fearless journalism, and, in open frustration, ended her reply by simply asking: ‘then what can we say?’ I read Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land as part answer, part re-examination of that question.

Evil empire or fellow citizen? It seems to me that the arguments and counterarguments about America’s role in the world today run parallel to the debates concerning cultural studies’ standing in the humanities. It’s a thought that would have Raymond Williams rolling in his grave, of course. As an academic discipline, cultural studies was born Marxist, and reared to champion the local, the underdog, the oppressed. But intervention of all kinds, good and bad, is a form of influence. Act on behalf of others and for every round of applause, there’ll be a competing cry of indignation. Perhaps I should declare my hand? I’ve been in and out of English departments for the last fifteen years. I feel a sense of overwhelming gratitude to cultural studies for loosening literature from New Criticism’s explication de texte. That said, I mourn the loss of a community of readers that the canon – and the existence of English departments, discrete unto themselves – ensured. I also baulk at the idea that readers are mere consumers – that catch-all term – as if curling up with a novel was experientially no different to eating, shopping or watching television.

One walks a fine line between patriotism and claptrap when writing about anything to do with war. Especially when writing for young people, one tries to salute the courage of soldiers and to honour the fallen, but also to instil caution in potential young soldiers; to convey that war is hell and that it shows human beings at their worst. Of course, one wants to tell an exciting story, too, with heroes and villains and suspense – with maybe a history lesson or two thrown in. Two of the following books succeed majestically in this task; the third falls far short.

Families are curious entities. They are, by simple definition, households of individuals bound by common lineage. But they are also complex organisms, as these three novels show. Families nurture the individual and offer a refuge from the problems of the larger world, yet they can also impede the growth of their youngest members, who seek their own place in the world and attempt to shape their own responses to it.

‘Little more than a hundred years ago,’ Alfred Deakin wrote in 1901, ‘Australia was a Dark Continent [without] a white man within its borders. Its sparse native population was black as ebony. There are now some sixty thousand of their descendants remaining and about eighty thousand coloured aliens added. In another century,’ he confidently predicted, ‘Australia will be a White Continent with not a black or even dark skin among its inhabitants.’ Deakin was, of course, celebrating the White Australia Policy, not only as embodied in the Immigration Restriction and Pacific Island Labourers Acts (designed, respectively, to prohibit Asian immigration and to expel the Melanesians indentured to work in tropical agriculture) but also as expressed in widespread complacence with the disappearance of the indigenous Australians.

A flurry of books have been produced about the cultural aspects of John Howard’s governments: for example, Andrew Markus’s Race: John Howard and the Remaking of Australia (2001), Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark’s The History Wars (2003) and Carol Johnson’s Governing Change: From Keating to Howard (2000). Useful edited collections have also been produced on each of the elections of 1996, 1998 and 2001, and on the republic referendum. In 2004 Robert Manne published an edited collection called The Howard Years, which was wider ranging than the cultural agenda, but generally critical in its tenor. But nine years since Howard defeated Paul Keating, there is still not a great deal of analysis.

Only a few decades ago, in the developed countries of the West, tattoos were a relatively uncommon sight, and were generally associated with marginalised groups: soldiers, sailors, gangs and criminals. Since the 1980s, tattoos have become a mainstream form of bodily adornment for the young and socially edgy. This tattooing renaissance has both driven and been influenced by an increased interest in ‘traditional’ tattoo designs from the Pacific. Within Pacific societies themselves, traditional tattooing is seen as an assertion of cultural endurance and value. On the international scene, where tattoos are aligned with individualised desires, Pacific tattooing practices are prized for their strong patterns and ‘neo-tribal’ qualities.

Reading a handful of primary-school-age historical novels in swift succession underlines the commonality of stratagems for encouraging young readers to engage with the past. First, there is the need to find a credible child role to focus on. Then, since adventure in historical times fell largely to the lot of boys, a female interest has to be introduced, or, with some contrivance and loss of credibility, the main role handed over to a girl in disguise.