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The landscape has been seen (and continues to be seen) as a potent ingredient (the most potent?) in the construction of a national myth, in the determination of an identity which we can call ‘Australian’. The question of identity is a difficult area in which to delve but it is one which has elicited much critical debate and as many views as there are voices. Lying About the Landscape is exemplary of this.

Last month’s editorial on reviewing and its ailments in Australia seems to have touched a few raw nerves. Various reviewers have enquired nervously about whether I was referring to them, for instance. On the other hand, as a result of the editorial, I have held a number of valuable conversations about the state of reviewing in Australia. Alas this is not reflected in the Letters pages of this issue. It seems with such a long break between the December/January issue and the February/March issue, the letter writers think of other things. Letters in this issue are few, fewer than any issue for several years.

Oscar and Lucinda is the next best thing we have to that gleaming oxymoron a contemporary Australian literary classic. It won a swag of prizes (not least the Booker); it is a long vibrant narrative, including history full of the rustle of Victorian costumes, but with a whisper of the horrors on which this country was founded with a brief ghastly moment representing the murder of Aborigines.

Since its initial publication in 1906, Who’s Who in Australia has dominated the market for contemporary biographical information in Australia. Founded by Fred Johns, an Adelaide journalist and Hansard reporter, it began as Johns’s Notable Australians, changed to Fred Johns’s Annual, became the Who’s Who in the Commonwealth of Australia for the sixth edition in 1922 and settled on its current name in 1927. After Johns died in 1932, the publication was taken over by the Herald and Weekly Times, and Who’s Who was issued every three years from 1935 to 1991.

Still fondly remembered as one of the Doug Anthony Allstars, although most recently known for biding his time in the depths of Channel Nine between those twin peaks of high culture, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and Little Aussie Battlers, Tim Ferguson has obviously not been idle, instead indulging in everyone’s favourite pastime – Canberra-watching. Inspired (or possibly horrified, if Left, Right and Centre is anything to go by) by what he has seen, Ferguson has created a monster – Luther Langbene.

Phillip Knightley prefaces his book with these definitions, so which does he want to identify himself with? Surely not the first. A mere scribbler he may have been early in his career, especially when he was recycling other journalists’ stories (hacking them about, perhaps?) at the London officer of the Australian Daily Mirror. But no-one, now, could call him a poor writer.

If Antonella Gambotto hadn’t been sued by Cliff Richard early on in her career, would she have later described Kylie Minogue as ‘a charmlessly robotic dwarf’ under the impression of being an ‘incandescent, gifted and alluring siren’? Perhaps not. It seems it was Cliff, the 50,000 pounds and the resulting barrow-loads of letters that convinced Gambotto of the value of opinion pieces: people react.

A player of the calibre of John McEnroe constantly thrills his audience with strokes so perfectly timed that they appear effortless and lethal – and it is this combination which regularly amazes spectators. They may at times sense that what contributes so effectively to this timing is an early preparation of his strokes. He seems always already ready. It is, I suspect, only on fewer occasions that an admiring audience can see, and appreciate, what lies behind that: an ability, seemingly an uncanny one, to anticipate the play of the opponent. So uncanny sometimes that spectators come close to laughing, embarrassingly, at the supposed ‘luck’ of the player – to manage even to ‘get the racket at’ some extremely difficult or unexpected shot by the opponent, but then perchance to hit it for a winner. But the wise audience ‘knows’ that only the exceptional player has such ‘luck’ and has it so often. It is uncanny.

Family is surely the house of all feeling. Yet when we are in our early twenties, if not before, part of our dream of being grown up is to imagine the day when we will leave this house. Years later, many of us realise that we never did, that the building may be prison or comfort, but it is also us. How one adapts to this sage correction by time and maturity largely determines the emo­tional comfort of middle life and beyond.

I opened up my last issue of ABR to see my photograph. It’s there because I was mentioned at a conference at La Trobe as evidence of an ascendant anti­intellectualism. I suspect my new reputation as a villain on the black hat side of the Culture Wars has a lot to do with my play, Dead White Males, or, more accurately, the fact that the play proved popular with audiences. Dead White Males satirised the dominant theology of the humanities, variously called postmodernism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, social constructionism or what you will.