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I first made the acquaintance of Olga Masters’s writing some years back when a judge of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, for which her collection of stories The Home Girls had been submitted. I was immensely impressed by the control, passion, and implicit violence of the stories, and was of the impression that the book should win. But another judge, of considerable seniority, carried the day with the opinion that all the stories in the book were ‘at the same pitch’. It seemed to me at the time, and still does, that her objection could equally be levelled at, say, Flannery O’Connor or Dubliners, but that’s water under the bridge.

Place and the specifics of place are supremely significant in Tim Winton’s writing. It has established the South-west corner of Western Australia as its region, and the elements of that area, sea, sky, and forest, recur in his stories, images of an ultimate if unknowable meaning in the world. The people of Winton’s fiction live outside cities, immersed in their natural environment, from which the best of them learn as they struggle to make sense of their lives. Physical and metaphysical frontiers give Winton’s work its special flavour. Placed as they are, closer to nature than culture, his characters and the events of their stories develop beyond the boundaries of what we ordinarily know of ourselves and how we understand the world around us.

A founding figure in the Sociology Department at Flinders and now Professor at Macquarie, Bob Connell is almost certainly the most significant figure in sociology in Australia. If sociology has traditionally been a poor relation in our older universities to both politics and anthropology, its current claims to influence owe a considerable amount to the directions in which Connell has pushed it.

The Chief Justice of New Zealand opened his recent judgment on the attempts to suppress the book Spycatcher by Peter Wright with the comment that it was ‘probably the most litigated book in all of history’. That may be correct; although I suspect that the Bible may yet have a slight edge.

The Bible was probably the first book carried from the ships of the First Fleet when they anchored in Sydney Cove in January 1788. From reading the catalogue which accompanies this exhibition, I get the impression that the Rev. Richard Johnson – sent to this country by an organisation with the engaging name of the Eclectic Society – was rather like those annoying people who nowadays clamber aboard a jumbo jet struggling remorselessly on with the entirety of their worldly possessions. Johnson was just such a man. He carried with him no less than 100 Bibles, 350 New Testaments, 500 Psalters, 100 Prayer Books and 200 Catechisms – all made available to him by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Amongst his most precious possessions were twelve copies of Bishop Thomas Wilson’s An Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians. Sadly, guns and hangings all too soon quickly replaced words and books in the relationship between the newcomers and the indigenous inhabitants of the Great South Land.

A founding figure in the Sociology Department at Flinders and now Professor at Macquarie, Bob Connell is almost certainly the most significant figure in sociology in Australia. If sociology has traditionally been a poor relation in our older universities to both politics and anthropology, its current claims to influence owe a considerable amount to the directions in which Connell has pushed it.

For Connell, sociology has always been a discipline that can contribute directly to the political project of establishing a more humane and equitable society, and his concerns have been largely around the major dimensions of inequality along lines of class and gender (racial and national divisions have been far less of a preoccupation, although he acknowledges their significance). His work has been heavily anchored in the Australian experience, though with a larger theoretical interest; in a submission to the C.R.A.S.T.E Committee he argued for encouraging original theoretical work in Australia rather than merely Australianising the empirical content of scholarship.

Do people still have reading groups? I suppose they do. I wonder what people in them read these days. Foucault? No, that’s surely passe. Do they have reading groups about novels which read novels about reading groups which don’t read novels? Perhaps. And would that qualify as meta-literature about meta-theory? Probably yes, especially if you were in a post-Foucault reading group about novels. I’m a pre rather than post person myself:

When I was ‘younger, and less cynical’, like Lohrey’s characters, reading groups gathered in dingy terrace houses at night to wade through a suitably weighty tome of Grand Social Theory. Marx’s Capital was always a favourite. Young aspiring male intellectuals, accompanied by transient and sometimes bewildered female companions, sparred with one another until alcohol or other substances opened a trail to the record player and another favourite game of one-upmanship, ‘have you heard … ’ rather than ‘have you read … ’ More rigorous groups were dry, or so I’m told.

The dominant note of Professor Kramer’s long-awaited James McAuley is control. The volume will no doubt be gratefully received by lovers and adversaries of McAuley’s literary achievement, for many reasons: it brings before a wider reading audience guile a few new poems published only in the little-circulated volume Time Given (1976). These poems can now receive their due and wider admiration. (Unfortunately, only thirteen of the thirty-one poems from Time Given have been reprinted here, in two different sections.) This volume also gives wider accessibility to some of McAuley’s scattered journalism and literary criticism. Fifteen essays have been selected, but I 1hink it a great pity that some of the essays referred to and discussed at some length in Kramer’s introduction do not appear in the text, especially the seminal and highly ambivalent ‘The Magian Heresy’. In a similar way Kramer mentions the importance of the poem ‘A Letter to John Dryden, but summarily dismisses it as ‘the rather strident satire’, and does not include it in the volume.

The title A People’s History of Australia is certainly a grand one. Its multi-volume predecessors have more modest titles, such as Clark’s disarmingly simple A History of Australia or the eleven-volume Australians: a historical library. The People’s History’s aspirations go beyond content to embrace audience. This is refreshing to see as many Australian scholars still regard their colleagues as the only audience that matters. The editors say in their introduction that:

John Bunting’s portrait of Robert Menzies is a book for fans. Beautifully produced, with a handsome cover, tartan endpapers, and a royal blue marker, it is an ideal gift for those who agree with Bunting’s judgement – that Menzies was ‘grand and magnificent, the best man of his time’. It will also please those who, though more reserved in their admiration than Bunting, remember Menzies with respect and admiration.

Bunting was a member of the Prime Minister’s Department for the last seven years of Menzies prime ministership, and a senior officer in that Department from the beginning of Menzies long post-war reign in 1949. He feels that Menzies suffered a bad press after his retirement and has often been misunderstood; as he can speak with the authority of experience he has taken up his pen to write of Menzies as he knew him.

Psycho politics has been a recurring explanatory option, at least in academia, since Freud’s volumes in the early 1920s, with Reich, Fromm, and the Frankfurt school building on Freud’s earlier forays, from the early 1930s onwards. Obviously, philosophers, historians, and political theorists had provided many kinds of psychological explanations of leaders’ movements and classes from Greek times onwards, but there is little doubt that Freud involved some new ways of considering political behaviour. Psycho politics has waxed and waned ever since.