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In their recent polemic What’s Wrong With Anzac? (2010), Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds lament the militarisation of Australian history epitomised by the profusion of memoirs and military history in bookshops. The authors make a fair point that war history and commemoration has drowned out other notable achievements and failings in our country’s past. But their broad brush sweeps away an important Australian tradition of critical reflection about war and society. If historians ignored Australians at war – as most did until the 1970s – there would be much more wrong with Anzac. Anzac Legacies, edited by Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson, is a compelling and insightful collection of carefully researched essays about the impact of war upon Australians and Australian society. It is a timely reminder that historians need to stay in the Anzac game, and can take it in challenging directions.

A few years ago, I heard Michael Cathcart speak on ‘the myth of the inland sea’. It was one of the funniest takes on Australian history I have heard. He related how his initially confident search for statements of belief in an inland sea by early Australian colonists petered out in the face of lack of evidence. Certainly, the explorer Charles Sturt believed in an inland sea and in his divine mission to discover it, but by 1845 he knew better. Finding little other evidence of the inland sea as the impetus for exploration, Cathcart decided it must be a creation of historians from Ernest Giles in 1889 to Derek Parker in 2007, with the idea recycled uncritically from book to book. Cathcart intended his research to be an academic thesis in history. How hard it must have been to be his academic supervisor. Each session must have ended in laughter and a mounting sense of desperation. How could an increasing lack of evidence be turned to good thesis account?

Living in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, Christopher Isherwood wrote the stories that first brought him fame and later became the basis for the musical Cabaret. This was the period that Isherwood mined for his ground-breaking memoir, Christopher and His Kind (1976).

The kindness of patrons

Early last month we launched our Patrons Scheme. One hundred friends and supporters celebrated the event in style at ‘Cranlana’, in Melbourne. A full report appears on page 5, next to a list of all our Patrons. For ABR, as we have already reported, private philanthropy is absolutely essential. Without it we can’t grow, can’t take the odd risk, can’t introduce many new features.

Name a selection of your own most interesting and iconic Australians of the last century. My personal list would begin with John Monash, Donald Bradman, and W.K. Hancock.

According to the author’s note at the end of The Grand Hotel, this will probably be the last of his stories to be set in fictional Mangowak, a coastal town in south-western Victoria. The first, The Patron Saint of Eels (2005), won the 2006 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The second, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (2007), was shortlisted for the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Fiction.

In 1996–97, three young women were abducted from the nightclub area of Claremont in Perth, and murdered. One of them was a young lawyer, Ciara Glennon. Her mother, Una Glennon, has written a memoir of her passage from despair, anger and grief to a mature and rounded understanding of the complexity of the human condition. Her book is a wise and beautiful one – written sparingly, without unnecessary personal embellishment. ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,’ she says, quoting Kierkegaard.

While Americans squirmed or vented self-righteous outrage at the revelation of their president’s escapades with Monica Lewinsky, the rest of the world seemed bemused. Oxford history fellow, George Cawkwell, who knew William Jefferson Clinton in his 1960s Rhodes Scholar days, was worldly in defence of his former student: ‘I think the truth is that people behave in sex matters in a way they’d never behave in anything else.’ He counselled English discretion: ‘We don’t attack our monarchs all the time. It wouldn’t have been good for people to have known every bit about Henry the Eighth.’

Busted

Dear Editor,

In his essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ (May 2010), David Hansen focused on the politics around the Benjamin Law busts of Truganini and Woureddy. As an aside, he mentioned that ‘Law’s only other known bust, of Robinson himself, has been lost’. It is ironical that, as Hansen’s essay was going to print, Gareth Knapman (Museum Victoria) and Olga Tsara (State Library of Victoria) located one of the George Augustus Robinson busts in the State Library of Victoria.

The Book of Human Skin details the trials and tribulations of an innocent Venetian noblewoman named Marcella Fasan, a girl ‘so sinned agin tis like Job in a dress’, Gianni delle Boccole, loyal family servant and bad speller, explains. Marcella’s principal antagonist is her older brother Minguillo, who, out of filial jealousy and a desire to be the sole heir to the family’s New World fortune in silver, makes her a prisoner, a cripple, a madwoman, and a nun. Think Jacobean tragedy meets Gothic novel, then add some – namely a crazy Peruvian nun called Sor Loreta, who, in between fasting and self-flagellation marathons, terrorises the saner sisters at the convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa. It is these four characters – Gianni, Marcella, Minguillo, Sor Loreta, plus the kindly Doctor Santo Aldobrandini, a specialist in skin and its maladies – who, unbeknown to one another, take turns narrating this novel.