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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 ... 

If economics is a ‘dismal science’, criminology may be considered a hopeful one. Its deepest roots are to be found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly the belief in progress and the improvement of human nature. It probably occurred to very few of those sweating aboard the twelve filthy transports that sailed into Sydney Harbour in January 1788 that they were the first participants in an extraordinary social experiment in which viciousness, legal principle and mercy were to be held in constant tension.

The editors of this book declare that cultural history is fashionable, so fashionable that it stands in for what might otherwise be known as ‘general history’ or even just ‘history’. ‘When historians set out to write the history of everything,’ they claim, ‘these days they are most likely to imagine themselves writing cultural history.’

Why, then, is it necessary to assemble a collection of essays on the subject? It cannot be simply to celebrate the triumph of this form of history, since many of the contributors are still urging its attractions. The purpose might be to demonstrate the range and accomplishment of cultural history in Australia, since the collection includes some distinguished local practitioners – except that their contributions to the genre are well established and readily available. Alternatively, such collections can provide the opportunity to consider the theory and method of cultural history, and quite a few of the contributors do so – but mostly with reference to their own practice.

Like celebrities in Daniel Boorstin’s celebrated definition, some years – 1066, 1492, 1914 – are famous for being famous. Just published is Christopher Lee’s 1603: A Turning Point in British History, which follows John Wills’s Global History of 1688. James Chandler’s magisterial ‘commentary on a moment in the history of a literary culture’, England in 1819, repeats for its title that of a Shelley sonnet reflecting on the state of the nation in the year of the Peterloo massacre. Freezing the chronological progression of ‘history’ at an arbitrarily constructed ‘moment of time’, date-based literary histories allow a detailed consideration of how texts relate to their contexts.

The Tyrant’s Novel is Tom Keneally’s twenty-fifth novel (if you don’t count the revision of The Fear as By the Line, or the two that he wrote as William Coyle of World War II). It is also one of his most unusual – satirical in purpose, sombre in tone. What is not different is the author’s willingness to take risks and freshly to venture.

Lina Bryans’s painting The Babe is Wise captures the ‘insouciant chic’ of the New Woman in 1940: independent and self-assured, the subject stares at the viewer from beneath a sharply angled hat. A portrait of the artist’s close friend, author Jean Campbell (whose novel inspired the painting’s title), The Babe is Wise became Bryans’s most famous painting, and its subject captures the artist’s own attitude to life.

Gillian Forwood’s handsome new book, Lina Bryans: Rare Modern 1909–2000, recalls the life and work of a brave, unconventional and generous woman who single-mindedly pursued a career as an artist from the late 1930s until her death three years ago. This lavish Miegunyah Press publication serves both author and artist well, reproducing numerous images in colour, many for the first time.

A fascination with the kinds of abodes we humans inhabit, and dream about, is the central theme around which Mark Wakely has spun his wide-ranging observations, anecdotes and personal stories. The topic lends itself to as many possibilities as you wish to make it. In order to narrow the focus, the author could have gone several ways. One approach would have been to write for a specific audience, perhaps for people interested in building a home. Or the book could have become a memoir of observations and people around their favoured homes. The author has instead decided to present stories, facts and observations that seemed relevant to specific periods of life, from childhood to old age, even death (what kind of mausoleum would you like as your final resting place, baroque or minimalist?). Although a valid approach, the book’s form presents particular problems.

In Paradise Mislaid, Anne Whitehead captivated readers with a nicely judged blend of elements. Here was a documentary that interwove two travellers’ tales, each with the resonance of quest narratives. Those ‘peculiar people’ who went off to Paraguay as part of William Lane’s experimental Utopian settlement were seeking a just community where the labourer would not only be worthy of his hire, but actually receive it; while Whitehead was pursuing the historian’s endless quest to bring back into present memory the always receding reality of the past. But Whitehead’s journey was not made only in the mind or in the archives: it had a literal dimension, involving following physically ‘in the steps of’ her subject. This led to an interesting relationship between past and present in her work, a layered intercutting, sometimes positing connection, sometimes disjunction. The effect was analogous to the intercutting techniques of documentaries, and it’s not surprising to find that Whitehead has worked extensively as television producer, film director and scriptwriter. It also offered, in a way, a gentle rebuff to any undeconstructed readerly yearning for the complete and logically sequential narrative that we might once have thought history could give us.

This story is told from a number of points of view. One of them is that of Joy, a woman with impeccable light Green political credentials, a job in a suburban library in Canberra and a mother who seems to have a clearer idea of what Joy should be doing than Joy does herself. Joy’s partner, Geoff, takes a job at the Office of Planning in the Marshall Islands. His motives are good. He’d like to help. That’s his problem. He has walked into a culture where much happens but nobody ever seems to do anything. Jane Downing creates both this world and its visitors with a wry sense of humour. She notes that Geoff finds the move to a stress-free environment very stressful. He sets about drafting a plan for improving the local fishing industry. After a while, he discovers an almost identical plan, completed five years earlier. Nothing had been done about it.