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I am sure A.B. Facey intended no irony in calling his remarkable autobiography A Fortunate Life. He is at once too unassuming and, too serious for smart games with words though he does find humour sometimes among the grim and frightful events of his earlier years and, after his perfect marriage, there were times of fulfilment and true happiness. He has chosen to emphasise triumphs as well as struggles, and, while such brave qualities determine his title, they are also what make this chronicler a great man and his book a classic to equal Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Beyond all Pity. It surpasses anything else I know of to which it might be compared; even Shaw Neilson’s autobiography must yield before Facey.

The title of this book accurately represents Jane Adamson’s approach to Othello, her view of the play, and her critical achievement. Rejecting from the outset the ‘conventionalist’ approach, which would have us discount our own responses and treat the play as ‘artificial’, a ‘purely dramatic phenomenon’ (ars gratia artis: the old lie), she bases her critical judgment on a systematic consideration of the feelings it arouses. This leads her to the view that. the connection (or disconnection) between the characters’ feelings and their judgments is at the heart of the play, and at the heart of the tragedy.

The only woman in The First UQP Story Book is the naked one on the front cover. She is sitting in a kind of beanbag chair with her legs crossed and a floppy straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She is reading a book called The Possession of Amber which is by Nicholas Jose. Nicholas Jose is a man and so he was allowed to be actually in The First UQP Story Book.

Following the enterprising publication of Michael Leunig’s drawings and of Arthur Horner’s ‘Colonel Pewter’ and ‘Uriel’ cartoons Penguin’s latest offering in illustrated publishing in a wonderful book of evocations – a selection of many hundred Australia ‘trademark’ symbols created to identify local products ranging across the one hundred years from 1860.

Symbols of Australia is essentially a picture book. It has no conventional text apart from the introductions and preliminary notes, but there are captions which attempt to date the examples and sometimes explain their history significance.

Australia in the thirties – tough, innocent, conservative and patriarchal to the ninth degree. In A House with Verandahs Nene Gare writes about men dispossessed by the Depression and who become working class casualties, unable to grasp the world outside and clinging tenaciously to the world of domesticity and the comfort of women. And, in tum, the women struggle to maintain their world and to support each other through the petty obstinacy of their men. Nene Gare’s novel is drawn from her own childhood – its form is close to the autobiographical fiction of the Canadian writer Alice Munro. It also has similarities to Glen Tomasetti’s Thoroughly Decent People, and to a much earlier Australian classic, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians. All depict the culture of women and the linked culture of children. Like much of the fiction written by women, A House with Verandahs is episodic as it meanders through the intricacies of human relationships. The world outside makes very few impingements even the man’s work as a tradesman is spent in the backyard workshop. The Hounslow family are poor. They recycle everything in their battle to survive. Women’s skills are endlessly on call to save the day-old cast-off adult wear clothes are cut and made into children’s Fruit is bottled and preserved and served up as jams and chutneys. House­hold repairs are done by the family members usually again by the women or left to languish. The men are so debilitated that all their energy is spent keeping face. Anything extra is a threat to their identity and to their position. Molly Hounslow must continually remind her more rebellious and impatient daughters to be careful of Dad. She says after any crisis: ‘Don’t say anything to your father ... it might worry him. We all knew about not worrying Dad. It made him nervy . . . newspapers also upset him. He said people would get the idea from newspapers that the world was full of criminals.’

Sceptical Sociology is really a set of essays, some of them previously published, by the Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University. It contains a long introductory piece which gives the book its title, a concluding confession, and a number of vignettes which Carroll calls ‘stories’. The book as a whole is a display of the perversity of brilliance.

Playlab Press is an offshoot of the Queensland Playwrights Laboratory which has the aim of assisting playwrights in the development of their craft through workshopping, production and possible publication of playscripts. It seems to be, with one exception, very much a regional enterprise and all the more admirable for it. The quality and number of these scripts culled, one assumes, from a much larger number of scripts submitted for selection, suggests a wealth of unpublished and unperformed theatrical material in the rest of Australia waiting for local groups as enterprising as the Queensland Playrights Laboratory.

This is the story of one woman’s crusade to achieve social justice for a handicapped child. It is one person’s elevation of the ineptitude, the hypocrisy and the dishonesty that became associated with a particular group of handicapped children. It concerns an institution that attempted to tum a pretext into reality rather than declare that a terrible mistake had occurred. Rosemary Crossley found Annie in St Nicholas Hospital in 1976. The hospital was originally a children’s hospital built in the 1890s. In 1964 The Mental Health Authority took possession of the buildings and after demolishing some and refurbishing others opened again in order to cater for the needs of severely and profoundly handicapped children, those whose purported I.Q.s were believed to be below thirty. Although it was originally designed to cater for individuals on a temporary basis most of those who came never left. It is perhaps Indicative of our attitudes towards the handicapped that the ‘high brick walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass’ were left untouched. One wonders whether the author of the slogan ‘Break Down the Barriers’ had this in mind when he took up his pen.

Finding the answers is often not half as important as asking the right questions. Desmond Ball has written an important book even though he raises more fundamental questions than he answers.

The central question in A Suitable Piece of Real Estate is simply ‘What are the rights and responsibilities of a host country which allows installations of a foreign, albeit, friendly state, to be sited on its territory?’ The author has dedicated the book For a Sovereign Australia. Australia is the host country in question, with American defence, scientific, and intelligence installations on its territory; but the situation he describes in great detail could, and probably does, apply elsewhere.

The poet John Ashbery, now a considerable force in American poetry, has said: ‘I think that any one of my poems might be considered to be a snapshot of whatever is going on in my mind at the time…’ Like John Ashbery – and Frank O’Hara (who was involved with the Abstract Expressionism scene in New York before being killed by a dune buggy in 1966) – John Forbes and Gig Ryan are, in Australia, poets who must be linked to the broad automatic writing phenomenon which gained strength with so-called Action Painting (or, to use its other name, Tachisme). The foundation of that art movement was surrealist painting, sculpture, and writing; and these were made familiar to young American artists when writers and painters such as Max Ernst and André Breton escaped from Europe before Hitler took over.