The landscape has been seen (and continues to be seen) as a potent ingredient (the most potent?) in the construction of a national myth, in the determination of an identity which we can call ‘Australian’. The question of identity is a difficult area in which to delve but it is one which has elicited much critical debate and as many views as there are voices. Lying About the Landscape is exemplary of this.

Since its initial publication in 1906, Who’s Who in Australia has dominated the market for contemporary biographical information in Australia. Founded by Fred Johns, an Adelaide journalist and Hansard reporter, it began as Johns’s Notable Australians, changed to Fred Johns’s Annual, became the Who’s Who in the Commonwealth of Australia for the sixth edition in 1922 and settled on its current name in 1927. After Johns died in 1932, the publication was taken over by the Herald and Weekly Times, and Who’s Who was issued every three years from 1935 to 1991.

Still fondly remembered as one of the Doug Anthony Allstars, although most recently known for biding his time in the depths of Channel Nine between those twin peaks of high culture, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and Little Aussie Battlers, Tim Ferguson has obviously not been idle, instead indulging in everyone’s favourite pastime – Canberra-watching. Inspired (or possibly horrified, if Left, Right and Centre is anything to go by) by what he has seen, Ferguson has created a monster – Luther Langbene.

Phillip Knightley prefaces his book with these definitions, so which does he want to identify himself with? Surely not the first. A mere scribbler he may have been early in his career, especially when he was recycling other journalists’ stories (hacking them about, perhaps?) at the London officer of the Australian Daily Mirror. But no-one, now, could call him a poor writer.

If Antonella Gambotto hadn’t been sued by Cliff Richard early on in her career, would she have later described Kylie Minogue as ‘a charmlessly robotic dwarf’ under the impression of being an ‘incandescent, gifted and alluring siren’? Perhaps not. It seems it was Cliff, the 50,000 pounds and the resulting barrow-loads of letters that convinced Gambotto of the value of opinion pieces: people react.

Family is surely the house of all feeling. Yet when we are in our early twenties, if not before, part of our dream of being grown up is to imagine the day when we will leave this house. Years later, many of us realise that we never did, that the building may be prison or comfort, but it is also us. How one adapts to this sage correction by time and maturity largely determines the emo­tional comfort of middle life and beyond.