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Beverley Farmer is one of a group of women writers celebrated in Gillian Whitlock’s collection of excerpts from their work, Eight Voices of the Eighties. Its introduction begins with a remark attributed to Elizabeth Jolley where she calls the 1980s in Australia ‘a moment of glory for the woman writer’. Beverley Farmer’s first novel, Alone, was published in 1980, at the beginning of this period of renaissance and recognition of women’s writing as central to a national literary culture.

A friend of mine remembers a reception during an Adelaide Festival of the Arts. It was a large gathering: visiting musicians, singers, actors and writers, members of the Adelaide establishment, people from the university. The hosts were Ninette and Geoffrey Dutton. My friend, a visitor from Sydney, was struck by the Duttons’ confidence and sophistication. They were a handsome couple, she recalls, entirely at ease with the famous people who had come to the Festival from many parts of the world.

I remember hearing about the first Somerset Celebration of Literature when I was in Europe last year. The letters and postcards arrived: imagine a private college paying for Peter Carey to fly out first-class from New York to attend a literary event. Everyone was fixated on the details: limousines for authors; personal minders taking care of presenters; an army of volunteers looking after every detail.

Dear Editor,

Congratulations to Fiona Capp for her excellent essay in the Feb/March ABR on journalism and fiction. Parts of it have etched themselves in my memory. It’s great to see work that is not only well written and structured but is also about something that matters.

It’s a pity that ‘Microstories’ is no more. It’s been a showcase of fresh names and approaches, one not offered elsewhere. ‘That Was Jeff’ by Michael McGirr, for example, stands out as an example of tight, powerful fiction. We can find previews of longer pieces by established writers in other journals but if we must have them, why not continue microstories in every second issue?

The way we organise our deaths offers insight into the meanings and significances we attribute to life. The sidelining of organised religion has allowed Australians to voice our own ideas about the muddles of existence through the choice of music for funerals. The regularity with which ‘I did it my way’ is heard at wakes is a reminder of how much more pertinent that song is for individuality than are newspaper columns by Bettina Arndt or Hugh Mackay, still less from Andrea Dworkin or the late Christopher Lasch.

Desmond O’Grady is uniquely placed to interpret Australia for Italians and Italy for Australians. He grew up in suburban Melbourne, but as a journalist, biographer, and writer of fiction he has spent most of his working life in Rome.

In an interview in this issue about his new novel, The Sitters, which is about a portrait painter, Alex Miller suggests the novel is almost

a continuous monologue. almost something he shouted to himself while he was working. The Sitters is this kind of shouted monologue: this man shouting at himself, to himself, listening while he is painting, listening to the sounds of himself painting.

As most would know, Brides of Christ was an enormously successful mini-series recently co­produced by the ABC, Channel 4/UK, and RTE/Ireland. UQP have responded to its popularity with the publication of this slim book aimed, primarily, at the education market.

Rather than inundating a potential readership with a set of six one episode volumes or, presumably, the one mega volume, the publishers have decided to provide a representative release containing the screenplay of one episode – three, Ambrose – which the writers considered to be the most likely to translate effectively onto the page. The result is a quick enjoyable read which, although unlikely to lay siege to any bestseller’s list, would certainly prove a flavoursome and challenging text for study.

In a memorable sketch about enrolling a child in an English public school, Peter Sellers had the Headmaster of Cretinbury refer to the child as being at ‘the awkward age – too old for Mother Goose and too young for Lolita’. The Angus & Robertson imprint series, Bluegum, aims to provide quality fiction for thirteen-to fifteen-year-olds – an awkward age indeed.

Two of the most recent publications in this series are books which have much in common: both deal with the experience of young women who migrate to Australia; both are told in the first person.

Some time ago, I was curious about steam cars and found an advertisement, dating from the 1920s, for the sole Victorian distributor of the Stanley Steamer. The address was Flinders Lane, the street in Melbourne which exudes more personality than most of the others combined. I discovered that the building in question had been turned into a printshop. But its origins as a motor garage were obvious. Such unprepossessing buildings as service stations survive more by good luck and stubbornness than by design. So I was strangely impressed. All the more so because Flinders Lane now boasts a boutique hotel with a swimming pool that overhangs the street. You can paddle out and look down on the traffic swimming below you like the lost city of Atlantis.