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'I am very annoyed and disgusted with the discrimination, prejudice, ridicule and scorn, with possible disgrace and ruin of my reputation, and good name, if my family, friends, associates and colleagues ever discovered that I express my ‘feminine personality’ by dressing completely as a woman. And yet, because of my ‘feminine personality’ I consider myself to be more compassionate, more understanding, and certainly more relaxed and happy, than the average male.’ Thus wrote the president of a group of heterosexual transvestites to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

The handsome reissue in one volume, by Collins, of Australian Legendary Tales with illustrations by Rex Backhaus-Smith, is a most welcome addition to current publications for Australian enthusiasts and certainly well overdue.

Audrey Tennyson, in a letter to her mother in January 1903, wrote: ‘About my letters … would you ask somebody to buy at Harrods a japanned tin box for holding them … the great thing is to keep them together as if they are in several places they are likely to get put away and forgotten. I am afraid they won’t be worth publishing but they may be of great interest to the boys some day – and Hallam might perhaps make use of them for a book on Australia.

Sibnarayan Ray is the Chairman of the Department of Indian Studies at the University of Melbourne; predictably, therefore, those essays in this collection that deal with Indian literature do provoke one’s interest. Mr Ray is especially enlightening about the problems facing the contemporary Indian writer. In a revealing essay devoted to this subject he explains that, apart from English, there are at least a dozen major languages in India each with a well-developed literature of its own. Add to this eight distinct scripts in use, each cast in type, and that translations between the languages are few.

Nicolette Stasko’s poetry is as far from the postmodern baroque as it is possible to be. This is not to say that her work lacks awareness of contemporary theories of art, but rather that her style eschews self-consciously clotted imagery, radical syntactical dislocation, and the production of high-sounding obscurities. There is nothing rebarbative here. At their best, the limpid surfaces of these poems invite the reader into aesthetic experiences where the pictorial is rendered with such clarity that the images resonate deeply. As we might expect from a poet who writes one of her best sequences in response to Cezanne and another following Van Gogh, the most satisfying of these poems recreate that moving stillness characteristic of figurative painting.

This is a book about words that are on their way to the dictionary cemetery where they will be stamped with the labels ‘archaic’ or ‘obsolete’. Of course, unlike us, these dying words will achieve a kind of eternity through being permanently displayed in dictionaries, but the time will come when no living person possesses them as part of their actual speech. Ruth Wajnryb proposes that a hospice should be set up to provide sanctuary and comfort for these weary and largely forgotten lexical bits and pieces, a ‘hospice of fading words’.

The ten essays in this volume revisit the achievement of the late Cecil Hadgraft, whose Queensland and Its Writers, published nearly fifty years ago, is a masterly and non-doctrinaire exposition of a century of writing in Queensland. Hadgraft was one of the pioneers of the teaching of Australian literature at a time when academics trained in British traditions joked about what the hapless students of local literature were going to study beyond the third week of term. I will always be grateful to Cec Hadgraft for teaching me not only about the variety of Australian literature but also about the diversity and value of what had been written in my own state. So too, I imagine, is Patrick Buckridge, one of the editors of this volume.

Walt Whitman’s famous line ‘I sing the body electric’ could well serve as the epilogue to Etchings 2, whose dynamic offerings are gathered under the theme of connectivity and the generation of energy. indeed, being ‘wired’ has become a predominant feature of modern existence. This is obviously true of our relationship to the internet and of our addiction to instantaneous transactions and connections. Yet we are wired in other ways as well. To be wired is also to be anxious and edgy; it implies a disconnection, a nervous distance. The pieces showcased in Etchings 2 examine the multifariousness of this experience.

Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure. In a move that’s perhaps indicative of this revival, the British bookseller Waterstones recently placed their biography section at the very front of their stores, renaming it boldly, LIFE. Biography has similarly taken prime position in our nightly television, with programmes such as Dynasties, Australian Story, Talking Heads and Enough Rope. It has bagged the front stalls in our cinemas, where the lives of Casanova and Kinsey, of Truman Capote and Elizabeth I, of Johnny Cash and Alexander the Great are played out on the big screen. In our public libraries, readers huddle over computer terminals, busily researching their family genealogies. The National Library of Australia is now constructing its new coordinated online resource for biographical researchers, the People’s Portal, and has recently launched its latest publishing venture, a series of titles devoted to (what else?) Australian Biography.

History of Modern Design has developed from a course of the same name at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In keeping with its didactic origin, the subject is presented in chronological order, illustrated with more than 500 images, 125 of which are reproduced in colour. The book is ambitiously broad in its coverage, commencing with the seventeenth century and ending in the twenty-first, focusing on design from Europe and North America, and ranging through furniture, interiors, metalwork, ceramics, graphic design, typography, and product design. A good two-thirds of the book is devoted to the twentieth century, which is presented in context from the preceding historical surveys. While the focus is on design for mass production and industrial processes, the crafts are not entirely neglected. An extensive bibliography on design, coupled with helpful reading lists, will prove popular in this useful introduction to the complex and wide-ranging subject of design. (CM)