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In his influential book The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne argued: ‘The time has come when broad views of change that now seem impractical will seem sensible and to the point.’ This argument is taken up by the contributors to Griffith Review 28. These contributors explore the ways that Australia has reinvented itself in recent years, both economically and culturally.

Julia moves to Lovely, a fictional country town in Victoria, with her yoga-teaching husband, Bryant, and their two children. The place is dismal; Julia can’t find a decent cup of coffee; the local plumbers won’t come to install her espresso machine; and she misses her ballet-dancing friends back in Melbourne.

Soon after arriving, she meets Tom, a young man who can see auras and hear people’s ‘inner songs’. Julia can also hear Tom’s ‘song’, and they are inexorably drawn to each other. Bryant, similarly drawn to Tom, decides to heal his troubled soul. New Age spirituality infuses Milk Fever, at times to the detriment of the narrative. Tom and Julia’s attraction is so heavily linked to spiritual resonance that their eventual relationship seems based on little more than cosmic codependency. This is a pity, because there is much here to suggest that the author understands the complexity of relationships, self-doubt and the past’s influence on the present.

The Byron Journals is organised into short, eventful chapters detailing several months in the life of Andrew, its protagonist. Andrew sets out from Adelaide on a schoolies’ trip, hoping to escape the weight of expectation and the fallout from his parents’ personal and professional lives. In Byron Bay he joins a group of street musicians. His prolonged holiday becomes a lost summer of drugs (consumed, cultivated and sold), alcohol, sex and music. Andrew is drawn into intense relationships with the members of the group, particularly with the captivating Heidi, who has herself come to Byron to escape a troubled past.

Those familiar with the previous titles in Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series will be expecting another carefully structured, action-filled adventure. They would be half right. In the seventh and final instalment, Lord Sunday, Nix has abandoned his familiar formula. The elements are all there – the seventh key, the seventh Trustee, the seventh fragment of the Will – but the meticulous structure that has been the benchmark of the series is replaced with a mad dash to the ultimate conclusion. As a result, this book reads like a finale to the interrupted climax of book six, Superior Saturday (2008). This lends the narrative a frenetic energy that mirrors the plot, as the ever-encroaching Nothing grows closer to overwhelming the House, the Universe and Everything, while the ‘real world’ (which fans will understand isn’t really the ‘real’ world but only Arthur and Leaf’s version of it) descends into further chaos as a result.

With series titles dominating the new releases, it would seem that every author’s (and illustrator’s) ambition is to find a character and a conceit that will have sufficient appeal to carry them successfully through multiple volumes. This is a particularly achievable ambition in children’s literature, where the target readership has a high tolerance for repetition, a loyalty towards favourite characters and a seemingly insatiable appetite for more of the same.