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I have often found myself feeling a little frustrated after reading a David Foster novel. While never doubting his ability as a writer, the convolutions of his narrative have, more than once, overshadowed his undeniably fine prose. His latest book, Hitting the Wall, a collection of two novellas, allows us the opportunity to examine how Foster handles the more urgent needs of this much shorter form.

The presence of the Irish ambassador and the muscatel was accounted for by the first theme of the week, which was that of W.B. Yeats and his influence. It is not surprising that a great many Celtic accents could be heard off stage as well as on. Indeed, the previous night saw a private dinner held by the W.B. Yeats Society of W.A. (one of only four Yeats societies in the world) whose only club rule seemed to be that some of Yeats’s poems should be read and suitably appreciated.

Back in 1964 before I left the University of Tasmania, Amanda Howard (now Lohrey) introduced me to a serious, nondescript first-year student who, she told me, would go far. Twenty years later Peter Conrad is a Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and author of a number of well-regarded books on literature, opera, and television, with a reputation established on both sides of the Atlantic.

Often collections of stories seem to me idle gatherings of chance acquaintances, sometimes uneasy with their companions. While the random can offer pleasures of its own, it can mean narrow-minded stories offended by their wilder and noisier neighbours, together a matter of squabble and disharmony. The four long stories that comprise Michael Wilding’s new work, Under Saturn, have instead a creative discord. Each one is self-contained, yet the movement of counterpoint among the four brings to Under Saturn the unity of a single composition, a quartet of variations on a theme.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an affectionate look at Melbourne through the eyes of a drunken, literate, old member of its Establishment. There should, theoretically, be nothing wrong with the countless surreal situations which this takes us through in an effort to elucidate the soul of Australia’s most endearing city. There’s nothing wrong with a lost daughter sub-plot. There probably is something wrong with dragging in literati under such pseudonyms as F. Rank Morguehouse, Halloween Gurner, and Bob L. Arse – especially to those and of who believe Australian literature to be masturbatory enough already. But this element is merely a grain of sand against the reader’s neck. It is the whole uncomfortable yoke we must examine.

What would you like to know? Doc Evatt’s on-the-­spot explanation of why he wrote to Molotov? Archbishop Mannix’s response to Cardinal Spellman’s claim on the papacy? The particular pleasure derived from small boys by the headmaster of Geelong Grammar Junior School? How a knowledge of Urdu maintained the Hands off Indonesia blockade? What Malcolm Ellis said to Charles Currey when the lift opened? All those delights and more tumble out of Russel Ward’s autobiography.

‘Dissatisfied’ summarises in a single word how I felt after reading Backstage at the Revolution. Dissatisfied not by John Bryson’s undoubtedly eloquent prose but by the publishing and marketing concept of the book.

Among the stories by seven women writers in the recent collections, Canberra Tales, there is a haunting story by Dorothy Johnston, in which, in the improbable setting of contemporary Canberra, she conjures up the figure of a mythical boatman rowing across the waters of Lake Burley Griffin. The image lingers, shimmering and numinous.

A slightly unconventional 1950s upbringing – I was nourished on Russia’s virtues as well as Weeties – may be responsible for my inability to believe in that pandemic, the tall poppy syndrome; instead I’ve always seen the naming of it as just one more jaunt down that jingoistic path which supposedly leads to the discovery of a definition of Australian identity – surely one of the dreariest literary pursuits known to person. But having popped my head up over the parapet a few times in the last few weeks, and having attracted an absolute fusillade of complaint, I was thinking seriously about changing my tune.

At a recent international conference at Victoria Falls, Mr Rupert Murdoch spoke passionately of the role of a free press. His national masthead, The Australian, reported the essence.