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The editors of Who Do You Think You Are? cheerfully point out the imprecision and contradictoriness of the second part of their title. ‘How can you be born in Australia and also be an immigrant? If you were not born in Australia but came here at an early age, how can you be second generation?’ Nevertheless, they have chosen to regard the linguistic slipperiness and confusion inherent in the term ‘second generation immigrant’ as being appropriate to the social reality of those to whom it refers. The thirty-five contributors are therefore predominantly women who were born in Australia of immigrant parents or who came to Australia at an early age.

For its double epigraph, Rock’n’Roll Heroes combines a couple of lines of Midnight Oil’s Hercules – ‘my life is a valuable thing / I want to keep it that way’ – with six wonderfully numinous sentences from Thomas Traherne:

Kingdoms and kingdoms go, but great books last forever. Rowan Ireland’s is a great book. It catches the otherness of a Brazilian religious/political experience tenderly, humbly. It is masterfully academic and lovingly humane at the same time.

When, the opening pages of The Butcher Boy, it becomes clear that the narrator is an uneducated toughie whose sorry history is going to be the subject of the book, the reader’s danger flags are likely to be unfurled. To sustain such a voice without losing credibility is a tricky task. But the first chapter establishes that voice with exceptional skill, and this success continues through almost to the final scene, which curls back to the beginning, with the narrator an old man, remembering slowly, frighteningly, his tragic life.

If John Hewson leads the next Australian government, we are likely to see a reversal of the current government ban on mining at Coronation Hill and the lifting of other impediments to mining. Should the fight to preserve an indigenous right to negotiate other’s access to mineralised lands have to be renewed, these two books will make invaluable background reading. They document the awesome political responsibilities on nation-states wishing to encourage economic development but trying also to satisfy the legitimate and changing claims of the traditional owners of mineralised lands. National leader’s political commitment to indigenous rights is only one of the issues highlighted here. Of equal importance is the complex and changing attitudes of the landowners themselves.

In Australia there is a paucity of serious lesbian critical comment regarding lesbian and gay writing. In Island last year, Dennis Altman suggested that there is little of interest being written while there is a ‘peculiar squeamishness amongst literary critics to critically comment about Patrick White or any other gay and lesbian writer’.

These two books could stand as period pieces for their times, reflecting rigid moral codes and the limited expectations of women. If we wonder how far we have come towards changing the narrowness of female existence, we have only to compare everything implicit in the expression of the societal mores as depicted here.

Nancy Cato’s Marigold is a swashbuckling heroine’s tale; Winsome Smith’s Rachel Weeping is a flatly stated realistic account of a heroine’s woe, with emphasis on realism. Cato’s book is written with an underlying sense of humour, while Smith’s is restrainedly serious.