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We all like to think of ourselves as civilised. Civilisation is like ethics: a concept and an underlying value system that seems impossible to oppose. Who, after all, could possibly be against civilisation? Who would want to take issue with the institutional stability, the democratic order and the standards of fairness, decency and culture we have come to see as hallmarks of a civilised life? Brett Bowden does. He does so in an ambitious and fascinating book that offers what could be called a genealogy of civilisation: an inquiry into the history, meaning and political impact of a concept.

At first sight, a genealogy of civilisation seems a rather dry and academic exercise. Bowden, a political scientist at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales, examines the political and cultural contexts in which the idea and the ideal of civilisation emerged. He locates the linguistic roots of civilisation in fourteenth-century French, but then focuses primarily on how the concept took on an increasingly important meaning in the French, English and German vocabulary during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Bowden draws only on English-language sources, he still offers a sophisticated and remarkably wide-ranging discussion of how the concept of civilisation became central to philosophy, legal discourse, scientific progress, socio-political institutions and colonial ambitions.

There is this battleground, see. On one side, shooting from the jungle, there are the literary agents. On the other, shooting from the swamps, are the publishers. And contrary to what you’re probably thinking the writer isn’t bleeding on the barbed wire, caught in the crossfire. Hell, no. The writer’s at home in silent safety, pencils sharpened, ruler straightened, papers just so, about to begin A New Work, for which the literary agent will extract from the publisher an advance twelve times bigger than the writer ever dared to hope for or believed possible.

Have I talked on this topic before? Do I hear the echo of my own voice? ‘What we do’, I say so many times a week, ‘is read your manuscript. If we think there is a market for it, we’ll try to place it with the most appropriate publisher, negotiate the best possible terms for you, exploit such subsidiary rights as are applicable, and take 10 per cent of whatever we can get for you.’

It has a brave title, John Rickard’s Australia: A cultural history, for that adjective ‘cultural’ raises expectations difficult to meet. ‘Culture’, as Raymond Williams has explained, ‘is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ After reading the book I cannot help wondering whether the substitution of the word ‘social’ would have made for a more accurate subtitle. For what Rickard has given us is an impressive synopsis of recent research and inherited wisdom about the nature of Australian society. It will be a welcome addition to university and college reading lists on Australian history, but it is not, I believe, at the most fundamental level, ‘a cultural history’.

The question remains – where is St John the Baptist’s head? David Dale and Glenn A. Baker are both formidable travellers and reliable chroniclers. Both claim to have been in close proximity to the detached cranium of this biblical hero, but in different countries: Dale in the north of France, Baker in Damascus.

This publication (BAL) represents the first section of a general bibliography, which the general editors describe as one of the major projects of the Bibliography of Australia Project (BALP) of the National Key Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. It includes, as a lengthy appendix, Kerry White’s bibliography of Australian Children’s Books 1989–2000 A–E.

The dilemma for confessedly nationalist intellectuals has always been what to do about their strange bed-fellows, the scoundrels who have sought a last refuge under the same patriotic blanket. Generally they have distanced themselves with glib distinctions between good and bad nationalisms, left and right nationalisms, radical and conservative and larrikin and respectable nationalisms. Often, too, they looked back – radicals to the 1890s, conservatives to the Great War – and contrasted an idealised past nationalism with contemporary selfishness. How often does discussion of Australian nationalism not get past the 1890s?

At a time when critics are becoming increasingly interested in Australia’s war literature, Robin Gerster turns to it for an understanding of how national legends are created and perpetuated.

Although this is not the first selection of Greek-Australia literary works to be published in book form – George Kanarakis’s Logotechniki parousia ton Ellinon stin Australia (1985), which was recently published in English as Greek Voices in Australia: A Tradition of Prose, Poetry and Drama, lays claim to this honour – the introduction to Reflections does claim that it represents the ‘first attempt to select, to choose, to say these (Greek-Australian works) … have quality’, ‘these are significant as works of literature’. In contrast, it is argued that Kanarakis’s collection is ‘not an anthology in the normal sense’ because Kanarakis’s aim was to present a sample of the work of all the authors who can be considered Greek-Australian.