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One of the pleasures of sitting down to read a number of Young Adult books in quick succession is that of being catapulted into a world of such passionate intensity: a world of strong colours and energy, where boundary testing, self-consciousness and questioning are the norm; in which a character’s search for personal integrity often puts him or her at odds with a community seeking conformity, and all this struggle played out against the richness and stresses of family life. Quite heady stuff. It can also be illuminating, as much for the adult reader as for the young. Maybe warring parents and their children should be persuaded to read and discuss some of these books. The experience could be enjoyable and eye-opening for both parties.

Australian expatriate artist Bessie Davidson was a woman who ripened with age. After decades of living in Paris and dressing somewhat dowdily ‘à l’anglaise’, she gained confidence with the liberation of France towards the end of World War II. In her sixties, she adopted a long black cape, a wide-brimmed fedora and a slender black cigarette-holder. Penelope Little’s A Studio in Montparnasse: Bessie Davidson: An Australian Artist in Paris similarly improves as it goes along, becoming increasingly engaging as the artist is brought to life and found to be in the midst not only of two world wars but also of bohemian interwar Paris.

Dear editor, I have often wished that more of the letters to the editor would comprise interesting debate or comment on literary matters. Sadly, about ninety-five percent of them are responses by furious authors to what they perceive as an unfavourable review of their book. While boring, such letters are at least understandable as being the output of wounded childish egos. Not understandable, and in fact unethical and unforgiveable, are attacks by publishers on reviewers, such as happened a while back when Fremantle Arts Centre Press rushed into prolonged print via your letters to criticise Dr Ivor Indyk for having unfavourably reviewed one of the many collections of verse by John Kinsella which Fremantle has pumped out over the last few years.

Katherine Brisbane’s Currency Press is the major play-publishing house in the country and no stranger to the snap-freeze process of producing program play texts by women as well as men. The women have a fair representation in Currency’s general range, but they proliferate in the Current Theatre Series, those pre-first production texts so impossible to follow up with the writer’s post-natal reconsiderations.

Writers for children have always known this: from the Puritans who thinly disguised their religious teachings under stories of children who lived a pure life and went to heaven, and those who didn’t and went to hell; to modem writers who tell stories to help children cope with difficult aspects of modem life.

Bates and Middleton are certainly valiant in their attempts to make a giant hollow rampaging male ego appear cute in Big Bad Bruce. Just look at it go! Indiscriminately swallowing everything in sight, making its way through the world astride a giant throbbing machine. But don’t toss this big glossy number aside – it can serve an excellent purpose. Treat it, allow me to suggest, thus.

One of the most interesting developments in recent Australian historiography has been a pushing back of the frontiers, a recovery of times or phases which seemed quite beyond recall, even when remembered. Such history-writing bears something of the character of sounding in archaeology.

This book, researched, written, and published in the United States, fulfils an immediate Australian need. Sweat on that you local academics, publishers, and timid promoters of the Oz product. It is called ‘A guide to information sources’, which makes it sound very ‘Australian Literary Studies’, but in fact it is an eminently readable, browsable volume.

For many years there has been little study of politics and elections at the state level in Australia. It seems to have been assumed that only national politics is really important, and that voters made very little distinction between state and federal politics. Thus, the conventional wisdom on electoral behavior had it that voters reacted fairly predictably on the basis of their early political socialization and in response to a set of vague images of the parties which was generated largely at the national level and changed only slowly.

One of the great merits of Phillip Deery’s presentation is the way in which he shows the immediacy of the coal strike: its great significance in changing the lives of the miners and in transforming the political situation in New South Wales. It was a time of great bitterness, in which those who expected the interests of the Labor movement and the Labor Party to converge, considered themselves betrayed. Nor did the swiftness of the Chifley government in moving to crush the miners’ strike garner them any favour in the public’s eyes. The public considered the hardships brought about by the coal strike to be merely the latest in a series of events that seem destined to threaten their comfort and standard of living. The communists were blamed for the strike, probably unjustly, for although there were communists among the miners, the vast majority were non-communists with legitimate grievances against the mining companies.