Miss Maude Silver, Miss Jane Marple, where are you, with your splendid and authoritative bosoms, your discreet inquiries, natural reticence, and cunning powers of deduction? Oh, a long way from these sisters in crime.

To an outside observer of the Australian literary and cultural scene, the Ern Malley hoax is one of those spin-offs in the Australian experience that keep on conjuring up Mark Twain’s famous dictum of the nature of the country’s history: ‘It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies ... 

Readers who share Helen Nickas’s view that Antigone Kefala’s fiction forms ‘a continuous narrative which depicts and explores the various stages of an exilic journey’ may be pleased to find more instalments in her fourth book of fiction, Summer Visit. The first of the three novellas is an account of an unsatisfying marriage, told with a controlled detachment that makes its title, ‘Intimacy’, seem ironic. In contrast, the third, ‘Conversations with Mother’, contains a series of elegiac apostrophes of the deceased; the connections with Braila and other congruities with a figure familiar from previous writings again encourage an assumption of autobiography.

At a recent Australian Broadcasting Authority conference, federal communications minister Senator Richard Alston conceded that the early adoption of digital television in Australia had been ‘modest’. More impartial observers of the transition to digital broadcasting in Australia have been less restrained. ‘A digital dead-end’ and ‘dismal failure’ are representative of recent media commentary on the subject.

Oh Dennis, Dennis! For four decades, we’ve had to forgive your indiscretions and blemishes. We’ve done so willingly, because you were not only the fast bowler of a generation, but of that generation’s milestones. For many Australians, their national cricket team of the Lillee, Chappell, Marsh era was as important a cultural statement as the Beatles to the English in the 1960s. The stovepipe creams, the body-shirts, the massive crops of hair and the noses thumbed at the old Establishment, English and local, either drove or represented significant change in Australia. Lillee, ultra-competitive and irreverent (he said gidday to the Queen and asked for her autograph), stood at the forefront of all this. So we forgave him for the aluminium bat, for betting on England, for kicking Javed Miandad, for pulling out of a tour of England to help establish World Series Cricket – for so many things. And here we are again in 2003, still having to forgive him.

Oh Dennis, Dennis! For four decades, we’ve had to forgive your indiscretions and blemishes. We’ve done so willingly, because you were not only the fast bowler of a generation, but of that generation’s milestones. For many Australians, their national cricket team of the Lillee, Chappell, Marsh era was as important a cultural statement as the Beatles to the English in the 1960s. The stovepipe creams, the body-shirts, the massive crops of hair and the noses thumbed at the old Establishment, English and local, either drove or represented significant change in Australia. Lillee, ultra-competitive and irreverent (he said gidday to the Queen and asked for her autograph), stood at the forefront of all this. So we forgave him for the aluminium bat, for betting on England, for kicking Javed Miandad, for pulling out of a tour of England to help establish World Series Cricket – for so many things. And here we are again in 2003, still having to forgive him.