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Dear Sir,

I liked Geoff Muirden’s review of The View from the Edge in the August issue, even though he got a bit confused here and there.

‘Aussiecon’ (dreadful name, but we had to sell the idea to the Americans and they like that kind of thing) was the 33rd World Science Fiction Convention, held in Melbourne in 1975. Ursula K. Le Guin was our guest of honour.

State Premiers are usually required to be articulate; to be literate and civilised as well is an unexpected bonus.

After almost nine years in office, one of our most literate Premiers since or before Federation, has set down in urbane, often oratorical prose, his observations on the way Australia is going.

Fifteen years ago the British urban historian Asa Briggs wrote a short but stimulating essay on Melbourne in the Victorian era in his Victorian Cities. In thirty pages he not only challenged the conventional assumptions of Australian historiography of that time (specifically deploring the lack of systematic study of the Australian city) but also threw out various ideas about how to approach Australian urban history. It took some time for historians here to take up Briggs’ challenge, but with the publication of Graeme Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne Australian urban history has come of age.

This book in praise of the potato, the most versatile and delicious of vegetables, is one I thoroughly enjoyed. Having a penchant for the potato I am an easy mark for the creative use of this lovely vegetable.

Ms Souter shows us over and over again in this well defined book how very diversified one can be with the potato. She gives general information on the types of potato grown in Australia and those types usually available at the local markets, which type to use according to methods of cooking, and growing and storing potatoes.

Beverley Kingston’s review in this issue draws attention to the effect the Women’s Liberation Movement has had on our understanding of our past. By asking the questions insistently imposed by the present, the historians of women’s affairs have not only forced us to see a segment of our history which had been hidden, but have made us realise that this omission was just part of a total distortion of our view of history, and therefore of life. This distorted knowledge of the past affects the way we see ourselves, and thus diminishes our recognition of the possibilities open to us in the present. The unreasoning hostility which the Women’s Movement has aroused can be explained only in terms of our fear of the unknown. These new ideas do not threaten just the security which a male-dominated world offers to men and women alike. Rather, by taking away our comfortable structure, they take away our personal identity, and therefore threaten the existence of any kind of order.

A curious fact of modern history is that it seems to take a single decade, sometimes less, for an exploited or colonised people to become, in turn, exploiters or colonisers. This is especially true in Asian history: the Chinese conquest of Tibet, the forceful takeover by India of Portuguese Goa and more recently, in 1975, the military campaign launched by Indonesian forces against East Timor.

 This volume of stories adds to the spate of books by or about Turgenev that have appeared recently yet it cannot be said to be redundant, as it provides an English version of five novellas not readily available in a collected form. Since the translator’s argument rests on the importance of the frequently neglected later part of Turgenev’s oeuvre (i.e. the shorter works appearing after the major novels) to a true understanding of Turgenev’s philosophical and spiritual history, then obviously the English-speaking world must have access to it, and they should be pleased to make the acquaintance of this accurate and easy translation.

The first edition of the Australian Encyclopedia was published by Angus & Robertson in two volumes in 1925, under the general editorship of Captain Arthur Jose. The second edition, completely revised and rewritten, was published in 1958 and ran to ten volumes, including an index. The editorial team was headed by Alec Chisholm. This edition was later sold to the Grolier Society, which has now published a third edition with Bruce W. Pratt as Editor­in-Chief. This edition is a complete revision and updating of the second.

Shalom, compiled by Nancy Keesing is I think a brilliant and moving collection of short stories.

Ms Keesing, an indefatigable compiler, has brought together for the first time a selection of Jewish stories and. arranged them in three sections, each one of which throws light on a certain aspect of Jewish life, either in Europe, in Australia over a long period, or in the present Australia-Israel conflict. This is a fine and sensitive arrangement of the stories.

It was inevitable that the phenomenon of Don Chipp’s Democrats would spawn an industry of quickie books; so far we have had two. The Third Man (which was written by Chipp himself in collaboration with the Melbourne journalist John Larkin) and now this one: Don Chipp, written by two journalists from the Melbourne office of The Australian, Tim Hewat and David Wilson. Both books are more or less bad, revolving as they do around a sort of log-cabin-to-White-House theme which is manifestly unsuited to any discussion of Australian politics. But at least Chipp and Larkin have both met the man about whom they are writing. There is no evidence that Hewat or Wilson has; and in fact their brief and boring 113 pages, padded out with an already out-of-date policy statement and a totally unnecessary index adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge, either by way of new facts or sensible analysis.