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Over the last two decades, Ross Gibson has earned an outstanding reputation for ground-breaking investigations into cultural memory, image and place, and for his strikingly innovative films and installations, his curatorial work on the Photographic Collection of the Sydney Justice & Police Museum, his foundational directorship of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and, of course, his highly imaginative non-fictional writing. With its eponymous allusions to William Empson and to Jonathan Raban, his Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) announced its own haunting by earlier explorations of the pastoral and of the irreducible ambiguities in history’s traces.

The Best Australian Political Writing 2009 is a collection of articles about the political climate in Australia over the course of twelve months. In 411 pages, a range of prominent Australian writers analyse the events that made headlines in this country during what editor Eric Beecher describes as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime-year’.

Towards the close of the second section of The Red Highway, Nicolas Rothwell is driving across the Kimberley Plateau towards Wyndham with a hitchhiker, an Aboriginal girl. When she asks why he has come back, he tells her that while he was a reporter in the Middle East he heard stories about places in the Kimberley that reminded him of people he knew there and of how much he missed the country. He tells her that ‘people who come to northern Australia come here because they’re lost, or searching, or on the edge of life, and silence, and they’re chasing after some kind of pattern, some redemption they think might be lurking, on the line of the horizon, out in the faint, receding perspectives of the bush’. He turns on the radio and picks up a station based in Kununurra. The announcer is chatting about strongyloids, a parasitic worm which causes heart and kidney problems in outback communities. ‘“I’ve got that,” said Cherandra proudly.’

Recently I engaged in an act of bad faith as a teacher. I set my second-year Shakespeare students a ‘research essay’ as a final piece of assessment, and insisted that they engage with primary scholarship – hardcover monographs and scholarly articles – if they wanted to do well. The problem is that industrial-strength literary criticism is almost unintelligible to undergraduates, and that is not entirely their fault. I knew this, but went ahead and set a criterion I knew would benefit only the tiny minority who might go on to a higher degree. The bulk of my students, who will be teaching adolescent South Australians Romeo + Juliet for decades to come, may never get around to thanking me.

Australia’s major galleries, with the odd exception, have generally conducted their exhibition programs to show that fanfare for blockbusters is reserved for exhibitions that come from somewhere other than Australia. The die was cast long ago. In the past thirty years, temporary exhibitions have increasingly consumed the lives of public galleries – and blockbusters represent the embodiment of this phenomenon.

The Bible is not a book. Its title comes from the Greek biblia, books; it is a collection, or library. That the Bible has become a single book, or even the book for some, is a remarkable and sometimes problematic accident, and the premise for this engaging tour through one part of its history.

In 1950 a friend presented the young Welsh poet T.H. Jones with a hand-made, leather-bound octavo notebook, the ‘Black Book’ into which he subsequently copied every completed poem he wished to preserve until shortly before his untimely death in 1965 at the age of forty-three. The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (1977) included a brief selection of unpublished poems from this notebook, as well as the poems from Jones’s four published volumes. Now, some thirty years later, we have a collection of all the poems from the notebook, as well as those from earlier preserved manuscripts, some only recently located. It also includes a handful of poems completed between the filling of the Black Book in 1964 and the poet’s death, and some additional poems that the poet considered ‘too “occasional” for preservation’, thus making it the first complete gathering of his large and impressive poetic oeuvre. The editors include a biographical introduction and extensive notes dating the poems, identifying first publications, and explaining literary and personal references.

As Israel began its assault on Gaza last year, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, launched the offensive by declaring: ‘There is a time for calm and a time for fighting.’ His declaration alluded to Ecclesiastes, but overturned the order of the verse. Not so long ago, however, in an era that has since been largely misrepresented by its detractors, there was a time for peace; a time when, at a deal-signing ceremony between Israel and the Palestinians in Washington in 1993, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, used the same phrase from Ecclesiastes but was able to leave it intact.

The title of this memoir and the cover picture, showing a pretty girl with brown skin and hair and dark eyes walking along an urban street hand-in-hand with a neatly dressed white woman, captures the theme of uncertain identity. The story begins in mid-twentieth-century Australia, when, under the government’s assimilation policy, children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were still being removed from their families. Lorraine McGee-Sippel was not stolen from her family by the authorities, but was surrendered for adoption by her eighteen-year-old mother.