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In 2005 Simon Cleary was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for the best manuscript of an emerging Queensland author, and here it is, every bit as fresh and lyrical as the report promised. It is one of those novels that works by close-up focus on substantiating detail, leaving the main contours of the plot to emerge as they will; like a bridge, perhaps, calling attention to its line and form and even its usefulness. It takes a more careful eye to appreciate the development and assembly and the structural stresses – its very strength.

Rod Reeve manages a company that directs foreign-aid projects. Rather than flying in with helicopter-loads of rice, he focuses on ‘capacity-building’ and infrastructure. Agricultural science is his own speciality, but he has set up and run a variety of projects. He has worked to counter opium production in Pakistan, develop dryland farming in Africa, Iraq and Jordan (he had to evacuate during the 1991 Gulf War), and improve health and education in China, Laos and Indonesia. He assisted with the quarantine service in Papua New Huinea and post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh.

The title is presumably meant to be ambiguous. Not only did the protagonist, Howard Hughes, hurtle round the world in aeroplanes of his own devising, and not only did he ingest amphetamines at a rate that would finish most of us, but there is also a sense of his crashing non-stop through life itself. And 'speed', he tells us in Luke Davies' remarkable new novel, 'shouldered some of the weight for me ... helped me maintain control over a bucking project, since, control, ultimately, is all there is.'

In the wake of the Commonwealth parliament’s apology to the ‘stolen generations’, what are we to make of Daisy Bates (1859–1951) – especially given that, in the past year, two new biographical studies have appeared, indicating, more than fifty years after er death, an enduring fascination with her commitment to ‘render the passing of the Aborigines easier’?

Bates will not ( as Ann Standish hoped) ‘sink like a stone', taking with her with the easy popularisation of some of the most morally and politically debilitating characterisations of the 'plight' of indigenous Australians: that 'full bloods' are doomed to extinction because they cannot cope with 'civilisation'; that 'half-bloods' are, at best, the consequence of that failure, needing to be saved, or, at worst, evidence of irredeemable lasciviousness. 'The only good half-caste,' Bates once confided, 'is a dead one.'

A good picture book is like a complicated dance between words and pictures in which each must be in step and working towards the same artistic outcome. If either clement is dancing to a different tune, the narrative strength will be diminished and the story will limp along. In The Peasant Prince: The True Story of Mao s Last Dancer (Penguin, $29.95 hb, 40 pp, 9780670070541), author and illustrator combine in an exquisite pas de deux. Li Cunxin, international ballet dancer turned successful Melbourne stockbroker and best-selling author, has now added a children's picture book to his impressive CV.

Ross Clark Wins The 2008 ABR Poetry Prize

The menace of lantana has not prevented Ross Clark from carrying off the fourth ABR Poetry Prize. Mr Clark wins $3000 for his poem entitled 'Danger: Lantana', which was published in the March issue with the four other shortlisted poems.

Ross Clark is no stranger to the ABR Poetry Prize. His poem 'Full-Bucket Moon' was shortlisted in last year's competition, which was eventually won by Alex Skovron.

After a career as a high-school teacher, Ross Clark now teaches in two Queensland universities. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry and two chapbooks. Janet Upcher reviewed his latest collection, Salt Flung into the Sky (2007), in the March 2008 issue. Reacting to his win, Ross Clark commented: 'Both shortlisted poems created memories within rural settings; the former's fictionality is more obvious, but both poems are songs made from the sweepings of my mind, both begin in the rag-and-bone shop of history and locality. I'm thrilled to have won, and hope the readers of ABR will hear the creek flowing again in these words.'

In Glenice Whitting’s début novel, a dying man, Frederick, recalls his childhood in Footscray from before World War I to the end of his life at the close of the twentieth century. The theme is the split identity of an Australian-born man who has strong connections to his German heritage. His formative influence is his charismatic grandmother who raises him when he is rejected by his mother. This remains the centre of his personality even when, as he grows older, he craves acceptance as an Australian. Frederick is more like a first-generation immigrant than a second, especially as the grandmother names him Frederick Joseph Heinrich Frank Fritschenburg, a name destined to become a burden in his childhood as Australia succumbs to rabid anti-German propaganda during World War I. A similar predicament impels the family to change their name to Fraser.

'I had fully expected to find Karoline and her family living in difficult circumstances but in their home I am confronted and embarrassed by the extent of their poverty.’ In his stand-out piece of reportage, Peter Mares relates how Karoline and Jone came to Australia from Fiji to pick fruit, pluck chickens and make their families’ lives back home more bearable. They stay illegally, ‘enmeshed in a complex web of opportunity and obligation’. This refugee story details the global reasons for, and effects of, such journeys, as well as the daily hardship of poverty. The shock of reality, the yearning to make a positive difference, the allure of an ‘authentic’ experience, the realisation of its impossibility, and the weary cynicism of disappointment: these themes persist as Australians write about their Asian neighbourhood.

Christopher Heathcote’s scholarly study of the abstract artist Roger Kemp (1908–87) took more than a decade to complete. Heathcote’s examination of this Melbourne-based painter provides a refreshingly different view of Melbourne’s art scene from the 1930s to the 1980s and opens up new vistas beyond the much-studied Angry Penguin circle.