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Murray Bail has passed muster as an important Australian novelist for quite a while now.  His 1980 novel Homesickness, with its sustained parodic conceit of Australian tourists forever entering the prefab theme park, rather than its ‘real’ original, was an early national venture into what might have been postmodernism. Holden's Performance, a good time later ...

My great-grandfather Robert had a beard, a pointed one, presumably grey. He stands in a sepia-coloured photograph, gazing steadily at the camera, leaning on a walking stick and wearing a grainy-looking overcoat. But these are only dimly recollected details: I have not looked at the relevant album for years. Much more vivid is the voice I never heard. It was transmitted by my mother, who is now also dead. Throughout my childhood my imagination was peopled by various characters, as she recalled their exact words, entertaining my sister and me as she herself had been entertained: by using remembered voices she recreated her past and created one for us.

For the eighteen months or so that I taught novel writing a few years back, I was haunted by a remark of Somerset Maugham’s: ‘There are three rules for writing a novel, unfortunately nobody knows what they are.’ In his teasing way, Maugham is suggesting that while the novel has a recognisable form, it cannot – for a multitude of reasons – be reduced to a formula. What escapes definition is what makes the journey into the unknown worth the effort for both the writer and the reader. The danger is, of course, that such a remark can be used to mystify the whole process and imply that creative writing can’t be taught. You either have what it takes or you don’t.

If presence in literary journals, anthologies and at writers’ festivals may be taken as an indication of a poet’s importance, Anthony Lawrence has for some time been regarded as one of Australia’s foremost poets of the post-­’68 generation. He has published five books of poetry, all of which to my knowledge have been well received, and he has also been the recipient of many prizes, most recently the inaugural Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize and one of the Newcastle Poetry Prizes for 1997. With the publication of his New and Selected, Lawrence seems to have been canonised.

I am sitting at my home desk high up in the mountains overlooking the border ranges to New South Wales and then to the left, the strip of highrise, the Gold Coast, and the sea beyond. Hathorn and Lucashenko have both set their recent youth novels in an imaginary location not far from me. The sea and the hinterland is a territory I am beginning to know well and I have enjoyed exploring it a little further in my reading.

Popular fiction is often character-driven. An immediate distinction between these heavily-populated novels would be that if I met the main protagonist of Scott’s book I’d want to have coffee with him whereas if I met Aitken’s I’d want to slap him.

Two autobiographical works, both by women historians, are presented in the elegant small format which often says ‘gift book’ and may suggest more surface charm than substance. In fact, there are at least as many contrasts as resemblances between the two, and although the mood is quietly reflective, there is no easy nostalgia.

It is the often hapless task of the reviewer to draw together observations on the aspirations and creations of up to six people into a seamless and riveting piece of critical prose. Sometimes it is just not possible, as is the case here, when all these three books have in common is that they are picture books, and will probably be found somewhere near each other in a bookshop or library.

This book, a tale of Stephen Scheding’s search for the artist of ‘a small unsigned painting’ he was unable to resist buying at an art auction, has already been warmly reviewed by others as an excellent read, a sleuth story that captures the frustrations and joys of research while holding its reader in a state of suspense worthy of the best whodunnit. I heartily agree and warmly recommend the book to anyone, amateur or art professional, looking to while away a pleasurable and interesting few hours.

The poet John Forbes died suddenly in January 1998. He was not glamorous, but his work was, for reasons that are not immediately apparent. Certainly, he was the most accomplished, along with the immensely learned Martin Johnston, of the young poets who swam into orbit in the 1970s. He was also the writer who most convincingly bridged the gap between a radical art and the relatively conservative, yet difficult, kinds of cultural theory which are expounded in the universities. Such newly collected poems as ‘post-colonial biscuit’, ‘Ode to Cultural Studies’ and ‘Queer Theory’ body forth, in their disembodied way, this concern to be a bridge-maker between academic talk and the melodious realms of poetry.