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Julia Leigh rose to prominence at the end of the 1990s, when Australian literature was experiencing the best and worst of times. Though the 1990s were not the ‘low dishonest decade’ that the post-9/11 allegorical reading of W.H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’ implied, this characterisation was apt where Australian literature, or at least its worldwide reception, was concerned. Relentless hype tended to drive out literary factors altogether, even as Australian novels reached audiences they had never before attained. As a young, gifted writer with a sharp, fresh style, Leigh could have easily followed up the success of the The Hunter (1999) by writing a middlebrow-pleasing mega-blockbuster. Instead, she has produced a very short but demanding work that is both compelling and highbrow. Disquiet is an even better book than The Hunter – less formulaic, operating on the level of touch as well as trope, and furiously part of the twenty-first century.

See,
how this slow tide
tugs
and sighs against
the flank of patient night –
the driving pulse that
aches towards the
fleck
of dawn then
shifts,
and curls around skin’s soft
warmth, that quiet space –

So much shown in a little space
All humbleness, all dignity,
Hand-work – the Knitted Nativity!
Seeing, one whistles on an arc of breath
Wonderful, oh wonderful!

Histories of classical music of whatever epoch – medieval, baroque, twentieth-century – tend to be written by university professors writing for a university readership. That being the case, they are issued by academic textbook publishers and are unlikely to pop up in your local bookstore. Chances are they won’t appear on best-seller and ‘pick of the critics’ lists.

Brenda Niall (ABR, March 2008) feels ‘confronted’ by an ‘extraordinary claim’ in my book, Arthur Boyd: A Life. The two sentences that caused her consternation are: ‘Yet it seems that ultimately Martin’s spirit was crushed. His broken body would be discovered in the Blue Nuns’ gardens, lying where it had fallen, below his hospital window.’ Niall complains that I did not ask her opinion about Martin Boyd’s likely suicide. Since this was not included in her biography, Martin Boyd: A Life ( 1988), I believed she knew nothing about it. I understand how annoying it must be to write a full biography of a person and learn later of information that may have been available, but Niall’s defensive and plaintive attack demands a response.

The Good Parents, Joan London’s second novel, begins with the seduction and disappearance of Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old who has recently moved to Melbourne from a small Western Australian town. Maya’s worried parents, Jacob and Toni, travel to Melbourne, set themselves up in her Richmond share house, and begin to search for clues to explain her absence.

‘Science fiction and fantasy’ is the cover theme of Wet Ink. Not all the contributions adhere to it. Michael Welding’s essay on utopias and dystopias is a good introduction to the theory surrounding literary projections of both idyllic and apocalyptic futures. He notes that, before white settlement, the antipodes was often the subject of fantasy, referring to Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), in which a mariner shipwrecked somewhere in the Australian and Antarctic region discovers that the inhabitants can fly. He also jokes that flying was regularly depicted in speculative fiction but that the banning of humour (at airports) is just another case of political realities outstripping the literary imagination.

Twenty years after the publication of their ‘inclusive Australian literary history’, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman have returned with a ‘sequel’, After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007. One leaden title succeeds another, although the tone of the second book is angrier. More of that later. As the authors note in their preface, The New Diversity was published by McPhee Gribble, an independent outfit that would largely be subsumed by Penguin in 1989, the year in which that book appeared. This observation prepares for the consistently impressive aspect of After the Celebration: its detailed, incisive, intelligently informed account of the changes in the circumstances of publishing, and especially fiction publishing, in Australia during the last two decades. One might take counsels of hope or despair from their analysis (particularly if one were a novelist), but still be grateful for it.

Judith Clarke’s new novel for young adults, The Winds of Heaven, is a moving story about the strength and difficulty of friendship, and how accidents of birth, family and situation can combine to overwhelm the brightest spirit.

On her first trip to Lake Conapaira in 1952, ten-year-old Clementine meets her cousin Fan for the first time. Fan is a whirlwind: beautiful, impulsive and imaginative. Clementine is entranced by Fan’s strength and liveliness, and the two girls quickly become friends. But Fan’s childhood is a world away from Clementine’s cautious but loving family home. Stranded with her violent mother amid the prejudices of a country town, the beautiful Fan is labelled ‘stupid’ at school, and regularly beaten and emotionally abused by her depressive mother. Her sister has left home, and her father disappeared long ago. Fan fights for happiness, and fights hard. She has her miyan, or spiritual guardian, an elderly Aborigine who lives in the bush and tells her stories. He calls her Yirigaa, ‘Morning Star’, and is the only positive adult influence in her life. Clementine wants to stay with Fan, but the holiday draws to an end and she must return home, leaving Fan with her mother in the house that smelled of ‘anger and hatred and disappointment and jagged little fears’.