Allen & Unwin

Setting is a particularly important feature in fantasy texts. One of these three fantasy novels for young adults is set in a self-contained world, while the other two have their main character travel from the ‘real’ world into a secondary one.

In Justin D’Ath’s Shædow Master, fourteen-year-old Ora – related to the royal family of Folavia – knows there is a mystery surrounding her. Why was she the only person to survive falling into Quickwater Lake? And why does she have the despised fair hair and blue eyes of the lower-class skiffers, instead of the dark eyes and hair of Folavian aristocracy? Ora’s search for the truth about herself is intricately linked to the destiny of Folavia. The country is in the grip of drought, its people are divided into rigid classes where the rich oppress or ignore the poor, and the ‘history’ being taught by the aristocracy proves to be seriously flawed. Through her courage, compassion and willingness to examine herself, Ora gradually realises the secret that haunts her family, and comes to understand what she must do in order to give Folavia a future.

Crime fiction offers various pleasures but rarely those of innovation, and that is the case with these three very different books from three veterans of the genre – familiar pleasures. Degrees of Connection is a police procedural featuring a series character; Earthly Delights is an amateur sleuth cosy in which Greenwood breaks away from her series character, Phryne Fisher; and Blindside is a hardboiled who’s-got-the-loot thriller in which the police and the criminals are morally indistinguishable and largely interchangeable. Each solves some crime problems, of course; each devotes considerable time and energy to documenting their home city: Sydney, Melbourne and environs. And each uses films and film viewing as a lingua franca, a cultural currency exchanged among its characters (and readers).

Spinning Around is reminiscent of Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), the story of Kate Reddy, a full-time fund manager who also juggles a husband, a nanny, and two young children. The voice of both novels is confessional and conversational. Both use existing brand names as descriptors, employ time as a structural device – Jinks uses days, Pearson, hours – and end with a quick summary of a brighter future illuminated by enlightening experiences. They also open with very similar sentences and sentiments (Jinks: ‘How did I ever get into this mess?’ Pearson: ‘How did I get here?’), and in each novel there is a daughter named Emily, a younger son and a helpful, slightly hopeless husband with less earning power than his wife. It’s hard to tell if this is evidence of the genre’s inherent features, the ineluctable truth of the situations, or a happy coincidence.

So who did murder Juanita Nielsen? Years of corrupt police inquiries and coronial and parliamentary investigations have failed to identify her killers, but this excellent history of Sydney’s most famous unsolved disappearance provides most of the answers. However, while it may fill many of the gaps in the record, the question of justice for Juanita is quite another matter. A number of key identities, such as Jim Anderson and Frank Theeman, are now dead. Others have had their testimony tainted by a lifetime of drug addiction and turmoil. Like the ultimate fate of Victoria Street, Kings Cross, the battle for which ultimately cost Nielsen her life, there is no neat ending to this story.

Some years ago, at a busy intersection in Chicago, Popeye’s Fried Chicken sported a notice saying, ‘Now Hiring Smiling Faces’. It seemed to cry out for a poem, or at least a memory. If Angus Trumble’s A Brief History of the Smile does not allude to it, this is not for want of curiosity or vivacity on his part.

Japanese troops landed and occupied Lae and Salamaua in north-eastern Papua on 8 March 1942. In an elaborate operation scheduled for early May, the Japanese planned a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby to safeguard their positions in New Guinea and in the Rabaul area, to provide a base that would bring northern Australia within range of their warships and bombers, and to secure the flank of their projected advance towards New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa.

Countermoves by the US Navy defeated this attempt. Therefore, in June 1942, Lieutenant-General Harukichi Hyakutake’s XVII Army was ordered to gather its divisions from Davao in the Philippines, from Java and from Rabaul, and to prepare for a revised attack on Port Moresby. In a two-pronged approach, one Japanese group would take Milne Bay (south-eastern Papua) by an assault from the sea and advance on Port Moresby along the coast; the other would attack overland from Buna and Gona (northern Papua) along the Kokoda Trail.

To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

An author who calls his book Wonderful is asking for trouble. He is either very confident or unusually foolhardy. Andrew Humphreys’ second novel has some ‘wonderful’ things in it, but it is ultimately too much of a good thing: it is too long, and tries to cover too much ground. I know nothing of his first novel (The Weight of the Sun, 2001), but one thing that strikes this reader is that few Australian novels betray as little of their author’s country of origin as this does. Wonderful could as easily have been written in California or Hungary, to choose two of the novel’s locations. This seems to me to be a matter for praise; there is no reason why Australian novelists should be doggedly bent on explaining their country to their readers. In a grown-up country, authors, like filmmakers and artists, should locate their work and their themes wherever inclination leads them. Nationalism is one of art’s corsets.

In 1972, at the start of my career as a science journalist, I was asked to produce the Commonwealth Day documentary, a portrait of the spectacular Anglo Australian Telescope being built on Siding Spring Mountain. Together with the Australian National University, an independent board was driving the telescope project. I set off to Canberra to interview the infamous Olin Eggen, then director of Mount Stromlo.