In Youth, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee (who has recently taken to the Adelaide Hills) continues the project he began with Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life (1997). We are told by the publishers that this is a novel; indeed, the use of the third person throughout makes this plausible ...

How does Arnold Zable do it? After two finely wrought, deceptively simple books on Holocaust themes, he has brought out another, linking tales of the Greek island of Ithaca with the stories of his parents, Polish Jews, and their contemporaries who settled in Melbourne just before or just after the Annihilation, as Zable prefers to call the Holocaust.

It is tempting, and dangerous, for a writer to return perpetually to the obsessions that drive him. The Holocaust and its manifold aftermaths is a literary seam in danger of being mined to exhaustion. But Zable’s heritage, replete with a strong Yiddish-Polish culture, is so rich, his approach so fresh, that his readers will follow him willingly down some well-worn paths.

First, a disclaimer. Since 1975 I’ve had a sneaking affection for Jim Cairns. At that time, I was flirting with various environmental causes – as you do at the age of nine. I circulated some petitions at my primary school calling for the preservation of the Tasmanian south-west from its concrete-crazed Hydroelectricity Commission. I forwarded these to a string of political power-brokers, identified rather shrewdly by their appearances on the ABC news.

Tara Brabazon’s Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects – including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner – Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie Fight Club, Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that. However, for a book that celebrates the brazenness of feminism, why not include the F word in the title? In fact, the lameness of the title’s pun turns out to be characteristic of a deeper identity crisis. While Brabazon argues for a non-populist feminism, a tough and gritty brave new world of feminist critique, the style and packaging, and sometimes the substance, of her book seem to be trying hard to reach a market that is both ‘young’ and ‘popular’. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this market, but it contradicts Brabazon’s wider project of taking us somewhere other than feminist readings of popular culture that dumb down many of feminism’s most critical insights.

From at least the mid-1980s, it has been almost obligatory for Australian reviewers to bemoan the dearth of contemporary political novels in this country. In some ways, this is a predictable backlash against the flowering of postmodern fabulist novels of ‘beautiful lies’ (by such writers as Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley, and Brian Castro) in the past two decades ...

Robert Menzies cast such a large shadow that the contribution of his immediate successors has tended to be belittled, if not forgotten altogether. Each of the three is remembered mostly for things unconnected with their prime ministerships: Harold Holt for the manner of his death; John Gorton for his drinking ...