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The autobiographer faces a real problem: the self. ‘Which self?’ may also be the reader’s question and it may also be the question of the autobiographer. Should one write about the known self, the self vaunted or scorned by others, the public one, parts of which can be found in archives, on record, in the books and conversations of friends and enemies? Or should it be the private self, the self-protected and defended by jokes, chiack and taciturnity, hinted at here or there, but never accepted as real when defined by others?

The official myth of the relationship between the elected political leaders and the bureaucrats charged with the administration of their decisions has been that it is for the politicians to set the ends, choose the values, and for the bureaucrats to advise on the means for the implementation of those values. The bureaucratic advice is to be objective and impartial as bureaucrats are there to serve governments committed to very different political values. But the myth has not always fitted the reality; facts and values are not so easily distinguished. James Walter in The Ministers’ Minders: Personal advisers in national government documents the emergence of a new political role in Western parliamentary democracies from this inevitable gap between the administrative and executive arms of government; and he explores the implication of this both for traditional ways of understanding political decision-making, and the range of role options open to political activists.

The two lots of new-look literary pages in the Age Saturday Extra and the National Times on Sunday are bidding fair to brighten up the weekends, especially for Victorians and for Other-Staters who also read the Age on Saturdays and will therefore get the benefit of both.

On the retirement of Stuart Sayers, Rod Usher has taken over the editorship of what is now the ‘Books’ part of ‘Arts and Books’ in the Age Saturday Extra, and is making a pretty classy fist of (and here I speak from experience and from the heart) an extremely demanding job. The few reservations I’ve heard around the traps have been to do with the number of Age staff reviewing books, and with the possibility that the ‘Books’ may get swamped by the ‘Arts’ now that they’re a double act. These odd mutterings are fair enough, but overall the whole section’s looking good.

It must have seemed as natural to Penguin as money in the bank to ask Helen Gamer to provide a few enticing words for the cover of Jean Bedford’s new book, Love Child. Here, it would appear, is a book very much in the Garner backyard – short, domestic, ‘certainly not ‘loud’ or attention-seeking, but nicely crafted.

I have never flown first class on Qantas; I’d love to, but somehow I don’t think I ever will. But next time you fly first class on a Qantas 747, take a look at the inflight library and you might be surprised to find copies of George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s Strong Man from Piraeus; Elizabeth Jolley’s Palomino; Evan Green’s Alice to Nowhere; Gerald Murnane’s A Lifetime on Clouds; or Kate Grenville’s Lillian’s Story.

It is surely one of the most widely believed tenets of Australia’s literary history that the short story has a special significance achieved with its rise to popularity in the 1890s under the patronage of the Bulletin and in the hands of a master craftsman like Henry Lawson. Orthodoxy has it that Australian literature was born in the 1890s: that is, it shucked off its colonial cast and developed a distinctly national stance with the emergence of what some call the tradition of formal bush realism and others the Lawson/Furphy tradition. So far as I know, no one has quibbled with the view put forward by Harry Heseltine in his introduction to the Penguin Book of Australian Short Stories (1976) that Henry Lawson was the ‘chronological founder of the tradition of the Australian short story’ and ‘the source of most that is imaginatively important in it.’

Dear Editor,

I wonder whether you would be so good as to publish, in a forthcoming number of ABR, a short list of selected errata as they appear in Kenneth Gelder’s review of The Book of Sei and Other Stories in your June issue.

Mr Gelder’s opinions are his own affair, much as I might wish that he had not made a book of mine their vehicle. I was, however, disturbed to find that, purporting to quote the first lines of the story entitled ‘The Dolphin’, he in fact quoted the opening lines of quite another (‘Red and Black’).

This book is about the role played by ministerial staff in Australian federal government. It is particularly concerned with the potential influence on policy making that this group may have through their capacity to advise ministers. It is, then, about the nature of the relations between personal advisers and their principals – a general issue that can be explored through history, and in countries other than Australia (see chapter 2). From the outset, however, it is important to differentiate between advice to ministers and advice to government, and the term ‘adviser’ does not sufficiently alert us to that differentiation. Indeed, the term ‘adviser’ is traditionally used to signify public servants, who are formally charged with the responsibility of advice to government. I have therefore elected to borrow the term ‘minder’, a term that is creeping into journalism and into the vernacular to refer to a member of a minister’s staff. We can thus distinguish at once between minders (personal advisers) and mandarins (public servants).

Ah, unblissful ignorance. Having recently travelled through part of the Eyre Peninsula, I wish that I had known more about Edward John Eyre, English explorer and administrator.

This year’s annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature was held in mid-July at James Cook University in Townsville, to which some two hundred delegates flocked to soak up ideas, information, sunshine, and the odd ale. Everybody had a good time except possibly the indefatigable organisers, Tony Hassall, Robert Dixon, and Stephen Torre, who, if they were not too exhausted to enjoy themselves, ought to have been. In general, the relaxed and benign atmosphere one has come to know and love at ASAL conferences prevailed.