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‘From the day you were born all you ever heard about was how you came from the “Blacks” Camp! You weren’t a person; you were just a thing that had to live out there to keep you away from decent people. It’s not too different today, either.’

Probably not too many would quarrel with Evan Jones’ light-hearted description of himself as ‘one of our twenty best-known poets under forty in some views…’ Though closer now to fifty than forty, Jones in his three books so far has shown himself to be one of those academic poets of great fluency in traditional forms, capable of whipping up a cigar-and-port entertainment at a moment’s notice – but also capable of genuinely moving poems.

The exploits of legendary heroes, so deeply rooted in particular cultures, very often suffer diminution by being retold in another language. Heroic deeds need no justification or explanation for the original audience, who share with the teller the same aspirations, the same fears, and the same codes of behaviour. The explanatory footnote and the authorial aside to mitigate strangeness in a new version are just as fatal to authenticity as those turn-of-the-century illustrations showing Jason and Perseus looking like upper-class British Empire builders, exemplars of the Baden-Powell ethos.

The approach taken by the South Australian Royal Commission into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs is to be highly commended. This commission was appointed in January 1977, under the chairmanship of Professor Ronald Sackville, Professor of Law in the University of New South Wales, nearly nine months ahead of the Federal Commission chaired by Mr. Justice Williams and the New South Wales Commission, chaired by Mr Justice Woodward. The South Australian Commission includes Earle Hackett, Deputy Director of Adelaide’s Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, and Richard Nies, Head of the School of Social Studies at the South Australian Institute of Technology.

I found this a book of uncertain trajectory. On the one hand its target seems to be a broad readership, for these forty-three short stories were first written for the periodical, Tabloid Story, whose method of distribution has been the effective one of being hosted by student and national journals of wide circulation. On the other hand, the collection includes a long self-conscious explanation of itself whose apparent interest in a secure perch on a tertiary syllabus would exclude the popular audience. In it the editor outlines why these stories represent a revolution in Australian short fiction, anatomises the causes and course of this upheaval, locates its European and Latin American antecedents, names its genres – in short tells why his authors should attract serious study rather than serious enjoyment. The ruse, of course, is to hallow an episode in Australian literature, a manoeuvre that I found as transparent as it is indicative of shaky confidence. A revolution with genuine roots will hallow itself.

Science-fiction short stories traditionally made their first appearance in American and British pulp magazines. The best stories then appeared in anthologies. In recent years more stories have been published for the first time in all-new anthologies, skipping the preliminary magazine stage. This in turn has led to the growth of science fiction publication in those countries, such as Australia, which do not have sufficient population to support specialist science fiction magazines of their own. Other Worlds and Rooms of Paradise are each all-new anthologies of science fiction. Rooms of Paradise is the more polished collection. Six of its twelve stories are by established overseas writers – including stars like Brian Aldiss and R.A. Lafferty – and the other six are by Australians. The local product is not overshadowed in this company; I think that in general the Australian stories are as well written and more original.

During the past fifty years far-reaching changes have occurred in the manufacture of dairy products in all developed countries. Some of these changes have been dictated by much stricter health and hygiene standards. Other changes were made possible by rapid advances in food engineering.

Today, milk is collected and transported in bulk tankers and the manufacture of dairy products is carried out in very large factories by mechanised and often fully automated processes. There is no more need for the dairy farmer’s wife to set the pans for the cream to rise, or to churn her own butter. She no longer coagulates milk with rennet, or strains the cheese curd through a cloth, setting aside the whey to feed the pig. The art of making dairy foods on the farms or at home has almost died.

But in recent years a strong trend has emerged, particularly among young people, towards ‘natural’ foods. In the case of dairy products this means – milk your own cow or goat. If this is not possible, buy the milk and make your own yoghurt, sour cream or even your own challenge to Stilton! But how?

In Tirra Lirra by the River, an elderly woman, Norah Porteou, returns to live in her childhood home in Brisbane after forty years as a ‘London Australian’. The house is empty, so is her life. Norah is a ‘woman whose name is of no consequence’. She is sensitive, vaguely artistic, slightly superior (‘Mother,’ she appeals in a childhood scene, ‘don’t let Grace call me Lady Muck.’) The novel consists of a review of her past, with interruptions from half-remembered neighbours offering curious and resentful help.

The title of David Malouf’s novel, An Imaginary Life, must be read three ways. Most obviously, the novel is an imaginative recreation of the last years of the life of the Roman poet, Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), who was exiled to a village on the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus in the last century BCE. The life is imaginary because it imagines – most successfully – the circumstances of this exile.

The first thing the general reader will need to know about this book is that it is not for the general reader. It too often and too closely approaches the clipped and densely allusive style of the average scientific paper, designed for initiates only and a small band of them at that. It uses too many words from the jargon of physics, chemistry and even geology with insufficient or no explanation. Even if Scientific American and New Scientist are your cup of tea, this book could exceed your powers of digestion.