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The history of Australia at war has tended to focus on the exploits of the Australian army to the neglect of the other two services. It is usually forgotten, for example, that the most famous of Australia’s military actions, that at Gallipoli, was part of a combined operation, in which the failure to land the troops at the designated spot virtually condemned the attack from the outset. In both world wars, command of the sea was the prerequisite for Australia’s military participation and for her own security. Far removed from the main theatres in World War I, Australian forces had to be transported thousands of miles by sea to the Middle East, Gallipoli and the western front. Allied sea power made that possible.

This book is a testament to the persistence of the legend of King O’Malley. Larry Noye tells the story of the self-proclaimed founder of the Commonwealth Bank and builder of Canberra very much as O’Malley himself never tired of telling it, heavily embellished with the exaggerated ‘spreadeagle’ rhetoric and baloney of the hot gospellers, land-boomers, social reform cranks, and snake-oil salesmen of the American West among whom O’Malley took his first steps in the adult world. The book’s strength is that its author is so intoxicated with the O’Malley legend that it faithfully gives us a picture, as it were, straight from the horse’s mouth, full of colour and incident; its weakness is that it fails adequately to step back and separate fact from fiction.

Vale John Hanrahan. Dear reader, if you think you miss him, you should see how I feel. I tried to get a Sydney person to take over this column. I really did. He said no. (Actually, he laughed.) So for those Sydney people who complain that ABR suffers from rampant Melbocentrism (and as a native of Adelaide I am far from blind to the ravages of this local disease, myself), bear in mind that the number of Sydney writers who get asked to write for ABR is considerably greater than the number who actually do. In the meantime I shall do my best, faute de mieux, since neither rain nor hail nor sleet etc., and ABR’s monthly deadline waits for no person …

This is a book in two parts, the first written by historian Enid Moodie Heddie and published by Cheshire in 1960, and the second part written by well-known Melbourne writer on wine Frank Doherty, the two sections being joined for publication as one volume in l985.

The contentious issue of abortion will probably never be resolved. The antagonists in any discussion frequently confuse facts with moral problems. There are two fundamental questions in the abortion argument: the empirical one, ‘when does human life begin’, and the philosophical one, ‘is human life always sacred?’

The answer to the first question may be considered a matter of fact. Indeed the authors of this book are unequivocal. They respond by saying that ‘A unique human being comes into existence when a human egg is fertilised by a human sperm’ (p.8). Others would dispute this statement. The authors however anticipate the well-known arguments and, through a question-and-answer format, dispose of them to their own satisfaction. It is this first chapter that is the least credible and, at the same time, the most emotive chapter in the book. It will delight the pro-life people, anger the pro-choice people and worry the fence-sitters.

The Australian colonies were much more of an ethnic mix in the middle of the last century than is nowadays imagined. In 1861 one Victorian in ten was Chinese. Germans were everywhere, not just in the Barossa: 10,000 also lived in Victoria. The folk memory of such groups was not continuous enough to preserve a sense of their collective heritage. Few material traces remain: overgrown tombstones, fading foreign surnames atop country stores, an exotic farmhouse looking quite unlike its neighbours.

The vast majority of these itinerant aliens left no mark at all. They lived in a goldfields tent, rented a room in the inner city, or built a shanty amid tall timber. Within a few years they moved on, perhaps to New Zealand or the Americas, and returned home in old age. Of Italians, for instance, probably 120,000 had come to this country by the time of the Great War, but the 1921 census counted only 8,000 of them.

The reasons for which anyone finally values a literary work – for its insight into human behaviour, for the place it occupies in some aesthetic hierarchy – lie beyond the control of all but that reader himself. My concern is with the earlier and possibly sub-critical activities of gaining access to the text, making it fully present to the reader, putting him into a position to judge for himself.’ (p.3) This is the purpose of G.A. Wilkes’ Studying Literature, as expressed in the first chapter, ‘Functions of Criticism.’ The book, according to the preface, evolved from material delivered to English I classes at the University of Sydney. Because these students are the intended addressees, Studying Literature is readable; and, in its occasional humorous debunking of The Literary Establishment, and its advice to the student, it is also a valuable handbook for novices in the study of literature.

These two first novels join the rapidly increasing library of fine and varied fiction being written by Australian women. Pairing them in this review is entirely fortuitous, and it is always possible to construct a comparison between any two books with a little ingenuity. I would want to stress the contrasting ways in which these authors explore very different aspects of female experience. However, at this juncture I am also particularly conscious of the doubtful position a male reviewer takes when he wishes to praise women’s fiction in this way. It is one thing for men imbued with a dash of new consciousness to recognise the positive examination of women’s lives in fiction; it is quite another for them to hold it up to (masculine) judgement. Despite the passage of virtually a generation, I’m uncomfortably aware, as I write this, of some remarks made by Mary Ellmann in Thinking about Women:

Paul Salzman has wit and judgement. He knows his chosen period is usually thought of as a lean one for prose fiction; he is anxious not to be typed as ‘the indefatigable in pursuit of the unreadable.’ He sees himself as the cartographer of a largely uncharted region: his main aim is to give us an idea of what is there.

A writer in this situation would like to be able to report on neglected masterpieces. Salzman is too sensible to make extravagant claims: the claims he does make are the more believable because they are modest. If he fails to find a seventeenth-century rival to Clarissa or Middlemarch, he nevertheless turns up some long and short fictions that deserve to be better known than they are. Mary Wrath’s Urania, ‘a feminist reading of the romance form’ which exposes ‘the less salubrious underside of the courtly code’, is one. It is apparently the earliest published work of fiction written in English by a woman. (It was suppressed soon after publication because it allegedly played ‘palpably and grossly’ with the reputations of certain influential people whom it portrayed under fictional names.)

Place has always been an intrinsic element in the detective story from the Paris of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (despite the fact that his knowledge of the city came from an exhibition and not reality) to the London of Holmes to the village of Miss Marple to San Francisco of Hammett. In many cases it is as important a component as the detective character itself, or at least the detective is so entwined in his or her geography as to be impossible to conceive without it. This aspect of the detective novel probably reached if not its penultimate then its most obvious demonstration in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and has continued through the LA detective tradition that Chandler founded (with considerable outside help from Hammett). The liveliness of that tradition together with the fact that Los Angeles is home to Hollywood have made it the most mapped city in public consciousness.