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Catherine Mckinnon is known around Adelaide for her work as a writer–director with the State Theatre and Red Shed Theatre companies. In 2006 she won the Penguin/Australian Women’s Weekly short story competition and obviously came to the attention of Penguin editors. The Nearly Happy Family, her first novel, is described on the front cover as ‘a tragic comedy’.

Philip mead’s Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry is an extraordinary piece of scholarly writing: large, ambitious, meticulously researched, brilliantly written and quite original. It is laudable not only for these inherent virtues but also, it has to be said, because of its very existence. Australian Scholarly Publishing is to be commended for publishing such a work. If poetry is marginal to Australian public culture (as we are routinely told), then works about Australian poetry are all but invisible. It is all the more notable, then, that Mead’s work should join another recently published, large-scale work on modern Australian poetry: Ann Vickery’s Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry, published by Salt in 2007. Both Mead’s and Vickery’s books use Australian poetry as a way of intervening in, or instigating, debates in modern politico-cultural history. (And to these studies we may also add another ambitious piece of poetry criticism, John Kinsella’s more globally focused Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism, Manchester University Press, 2007.)

War, on a sudden, and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals – no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortune seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action! The flock are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husband-man butchered, villas and villages burnt – cities and states, that have been ages rising to their flourishing state, subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war. So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good; of destroying than of building!

‘There’s a fine line … between fear and desire’ muses Shutterspeed’s adolescent protagonist, Dustin. His may not be a novel revelation but A.J. Betts provides an intriguing study of obsession and its disastrous results through a narrative set on this tremulous boundary.

Pertinent to the meaning of reality television is the understanding that it focuses on real life. There are no actors, no scripts and no staged events to provoke drama; the camera simply captures life as it happens, and we become ‘peeping toms’ for the duration of the programme.

Lucy’s parents have separated, and she is off to London to visit her mother and her new family. She is fortunate to be able to fly: the world is in the grip of perpetual rain, and travel is restricted. Some inhabitants have become amphibians; others live in government camps. But Lucy’s fate is rather more intriguing. A cloud boy (seen only by Lucy) appears outside the plane window before being snatched away by a ghoulish cloud creature. As they wait in the rain at a bus stop in London, Lucy and a boy called Daniel are whisked up to Cloudland by a peculiar woman called January. There it is the task of Lucy, Daniel and assorted Cloudlanders to rid the heavens of the evil Kazia and thus stop the rain on Earth and prevent the onset of an ice age – an interesting premise.

Jaynie Anderson, the third Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, initiated the study of Australian art historiography with fine accounts of the three scholars – Ursula Hoff, Franz Philipp and Joseph Burke – who form the focus of this book. Surprisingly, Professor Anderson’s contributions are barely mentioned, and she is not listed among the fifty-five people Sheridan Palmer has consulted. Some published memoirs of past students of Philipp and Burke go unmentioned in the text and are omitted from the bibliography. None of this encourages.