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When journalist Helene Chung grew up in Hobart in the 1960s, there were fewer than one hundred Chinese living there, and her complicated family seemed to include almost all of them. Her great-grandfather came to Australia for gold, but succumbed to opium. He was rescued by her grandfather, who worked in the Tasmanian tin mines, founding a small dynasty as brothers and cousins arrived with their multiple wives, and married more in Australia. It sounds like a familiar story, but as it unfolds the author’s intelligence and determination create an idiosyncratic portrait of what first- and second-generation migrants endure, and how they triumph.

Freedom on the Fatal Shore brings together John Hirst’s celebrated works on the early history of New South Wales: Convict Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1983, and Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, published in 1988. Both books have been out of print for some time; the chance of picking up a second-hand copy is almost nil. Black Inc. has done historians, students and general readers a great service with this combined volume. Convict Society and Strange Birth have an intellectual symmetry that justifies their union.

This book is dedicated to all Asian Australians. Like the term ‘Chinese Australian’, ‘Asian Australian’ is revealing to my baby-boomer generation of Australian-born Chinese, for we have lived most of our lives known as Australian Chinese, a term that stresses our ethnic background over our Australian birthplace, even though our families have contributed to Australia for four, five or six generations. We may not speak a word of our ancestral tongue, and may never have trod the land of our forebears. The new term recognises that the growing numbers of Australians of Cambodian, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese and other Asian heritage are equally Australian as are white Anglo-Celtic Australians.

Possibly inspired by the British Film Institute’s ‘Classics’ texts, the ‘Australian Screen Classics’ series is not only downright valuable but also looks good. The latest two, in their smart black covers, each adorned with a striking still from the relevant film, confirms the importance of having such detailed attention paid to key films in our history.

Between the mid-1940s and the late 1960s, Mohammed bin Laden fathered fifty-four children (twenty-five sons, twenty-nine daughters) from an assortment of wives (he married twenty-two times). It should hardly surprise that such a large group included several extreme personalities. The eldest son, Salem, channelled his manic energy into aeroplanes, cars, girls and the good life. The eighteenth son, Osama, born in 1957, chose a very different path. This would eventually leave New York’s skyline smouldering, Osama repudiated by his family and disowned by his country: a ‘black sheep’ in a league of his own.

In a recent column in the Australian, George Megalogenis looked back to Arthur Fadden’s budget of 1952 as a possible comparison with the current financial situation. Few political scientists, let alone journalists, display this sort of historical memory. In 2006, Megalogenis published The Longest Decade, an account of the combined years of Paul Keating and Howard, based upon extensive interviews with the two leaders. The book was reviewed in ABR by Neal Blewett (November 2006), who regarded the book as a useful ‘bullshit detector’ on his newspaper colleagues, whose political journalism appeared in The Howard Factor that same year.

The train to Leura early Sunday morning
and our compartment full of total strangers,
Russian-speaking hikers, boots and shorts,
and four Americans, I’d say, late sixties,
calling out the stations as they pass:
‘Melbourne was more interesting than this’,
‘The trees looked better across Portugal’,
‘I want to see a kangaroo today’.

Chameleons are the ultimate multi-taskers. With distinctive eyes that can rotate and focus separately, these fascinating creatures can spot future trends while winking a fond farewell to past achievements. They can blend in with their surroundings if the mood takes them, or they can adopt a crimson flush to underscore their need to communicate. And when they write, they publish five books across several genres in one year, and look just like Sean Williams.

'These stories were all written on the 7.22 between Normanhurst and Central,’ reports the author. I find it eminently pleasing to learn that a writer is so driven to create that he will suffer through even the lurching ignominies of train travel to get words on the page. It speaks of a higher purpose, one that most commuters, hard-wired to their iPods or up to their eyeballs in Sudoku, will never recognise. So, hats off Mr Gaunt, for bucking the trend. His stories – there are three in this collection – all bear the mark of a writer with an instinct for narrative; they are the right shape.

A journal with an ego, Going Down Swinging (GDS) is not afraid of blowing its own trumpet. There are two editorials: Steve Grimwade’s, written in the voice of his infant son, claims that GDS is the ‘finest literary journal on the planet’ – but this is cheeky enthusiasm, not arrogance. Lisa Greenaway’s editorial is best summed up thus: ‘we want the people who never pick up a literary magazine to pick up GDS’.