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This Encyclopedia – claimed by the publishers to be the first for Melbourne – is an immense undertaking. The sheer numbers are staggering: 1500-odd articles, 850,000 words, 250 illustrations, nineteen maps and twenty-one tables, produced over a period of nearly ten years by an army comprising two principal editors, five associate editors, fifteen working parties and 440 authors (to say nothing of administrative and publishing staff). Fourteen notable residents offer more reflective pieces on ‘My Melbourne’, ranging from Stephanie Alexander on ‘Eating Melbourne’ and Barry Dickins on St Paul’s Cathedral (his ‘favourite place of anarchy’), to Barry Humphries’ elegiac meditation on ‘the days of Gladstone bags and gloves and hats and glads, / Before Melbourne had been Starbucked, and the trams plastered with ads’.

Graham Freudenberg, who has been at the centre of federal and NSW Labor politics for more than forty years, has now written his political memoir. Elegantly presented by his publisher, A Figure of Speech details Freudenberg’s life story, from his childhood in Brisbane to his early career in journalism, a rite of passage to London, and the vicissitudes of life in politics.

We’re all interested in people; misanthropy is not trendy. Contemporary interest in people may be manifested by the success of reality television, the media coverage given to celebrities, and books such as these, which set out to investigate people and what makes them tick.

The late pope John Paul II was the greatest celebrity of modern times. Although he was the sovereign of the world’s smallest state, his influence seemed greater than that of any secular ruler. Did he not bring down communism in Poland by sheer spiritual power? Did he not provide a new moral leadership for mankind, speaking simple truths to millions seeking guidance in a confusing world?

Here are five reasons why there is a literacy crisis in Australia. It is not about teacher-training; it’s about appallingly conservative publishing choices and the positioning of ‘reading’ as something that needs to be slipped under the radar of children’s attention, rather than celebrating it as one of life’s biggest adventures. What these novels share is a commitment to sport as a structuring narrative principle. Australian Rules, rugby union, netball, athletics, soccer: the sports and titles change, but the overall arc remains the same. In this respect, these books feel market-driven: generic responses to some global marketing division called ‘encouraging reluctant readers’. While this enterprise is not unworthy, the assumption that children who are not reading will be automatically attracted to novels about organised sport seems dubious.

Although you might not guess it from media comment, The Latham Diaries (MUP, $39.95 hb, 429 pp, 0522852157) is the most important book yet published on Labor’s wilderness years. It provides a pungent characterisation of Labor’s post-1996 history; conveys a profound understanding of the challenges facing a social democratic party in contemporary Australia ... 

Two-thirds of the way through Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002), its characters come across a house standing in a valley high in the Queensland ranges. The house is empty, abandoned like some landlocked Marie Celeste, but in one room a library remains. Standing before the shelves, one of the characters removes a volume, only to find the pages eaten away to dust, the book, like the house, an empty shell. It is a scene of extraordinary power and implication, resonant with the peculiar energy that builds when meaning coalesces, however briefly, and we feel ourselves in the presence of something that runs deeper than words.

Geoffrey Robertson, the author of The Tyrannicide Brief, enjoys the same high public profile as those old lags who constitute the élite of Australian expatriates in London: Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Barry Humphries. In his case it is as a leading international human rights lawyer, the author of Crimes against Humanity (1999) and The Justice Game (1998), and host of the popular television series Hypotheticals.

Come – no grazed knee, no tears, no –

no fear of darkness in the singing wood.

Hear the threnody written on the wind:

a lament not for lostness, no, but for the slow

path homewards, the pebbles which guide us:

The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine

In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.