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Much Australian writing about military subjects reminds me of the recent film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which started in adulthood and rapidly progressed into adolescence. From the evidence of this work, it is showing no signs of growing up. This book purports to have discovered an event about which Australians have remained deeply ignorant for the last ninety years: the charge of the Light Horse at Beersheba in the Middle Eastern war against the Ottoman Empire, in 1917. Only someone long exiled on a desert island could call this event ‘forgotten’. We have had a famous film about it (Forty Thousand Horsemen, 1940), a good book about the Light Horse by Alec Hill (1978), extensive work on the subject by Ian Jones, and a plethora of books by British historians about the Middle Eastern war that include this incident. The author, Paul Daley, must be one of the few Australians who had not heard of it. Is this reason enough to write a book about it? Possibly – but not this book.

Jeremy Mynott begins his capacious and disarming new book with a dedication to his wife, the author Dianne Speakman. ‘In all our twenty-five or so years together,’ he writes, ‘I have never yet succeeded in persuading her to take the slightest interest in birds. This is my best and last shot.’ Any ornithophile knows this feeling: the regret that his sense of wonderment remains for the most part private, something that others regard as slightly weird or ridiculous.

In the epilogue to the latest, massive contribution to his populist and nationalist enterprise, Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men, Peter FitzSimons laments that ‘the true glory days of the pilot are substantially gone’. He charts an heroic, pioneering age of aviation. The ‘magnificent men [in their flying machines]’ include not only the Australians, Kingsford Smith and his partner Charles Ulm, but the German Manfred von Richtofen, the Dutchman Anthony Fokker, the Frenchmen Louis Blériot and Charles Nungesser. Most of them saw service in the first aerial combats, above the trenches of the Western Front in the Great War. Kingsford Smith, a dismounted motor-bike despatch rider at Gallipoli, was accepted into the Royal Flying Corps. He called this ‘the chance of my flying life, and it was a decision I made without a moment’s hesitation’.

The judges of the early Miles Franklin Awards clearly knew what they were about. Their inaugural award went to Patrick White’s Voss in 1957; the second to Randolph Stow’s To the Islands in 1958. At the time, White was in the early stages of a distinguished career that would bring him Australia’s only Nobel Prize for Literature, while the precocious Stow also promised great things. Hailed as a literary wunderkind, he had published two novels, A Haunted Land (1956) and The Bystander (1957), and his first collection of poetry, Act One (1957), by the time he was twenty-two. When Act One was awarded the 1957 Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society and To the Islands won it the following year, plus the Melbourne Book Fair Award and the Miles Franklin, he seemed to be embarked upon a stellar career.

Devotees of the television program Spooks may find Australian history less than exciting, but the Petrov Affair is surely the exception that confounds the cliché. Its ingredients included the Cold War, espionage, agents, a defection (hugely important propaganda for the Menzies government on the eve of the 1954 federal election) and a charming woman, the defector’s wife, who was unceremoniously hustled on to a waiting aeroplane by beefy officials from the Russian Embassy. The poignancy of Evdokia Petrova’s white shoe lying abandoned on the tarmac as the plane took off was only eclipsed by the drama of the refuelling stop in Darwin, where she was prevailed upon by Australian security to remain in this country with her husband, Vladimir. He was quite clear about his defection; Evdokia, in that pivotal moment and long afterwards, was tormented by uncertainty.

History of the Day is Stephen Edgar’s seventh poetry collection. His first was Queuing for the Mudd Club in 1985, and over the last twenty-four years he has been publishing poetry with a strikingly individual formal music. This latest volume further refines his superbly measured control of rhythm and cadence. There is nothing else like it in contemporary Australian poetry.

As John Frow and Katrina Schlunke state in their editorial, the diverse writing in this issue of Cultural Studies Review, collected under the theme of ‘Homefronts’, includes essays dealing with nationhood, family, the manufacture of crisis and celebrity, neo-liberalism and homelessness. Given the space to explore complexity, many contributions remain refreshingly accessible to the non-specialist reader. Popular culture is, of course, one of the mainstays of cultural studies, and the first two essays concern themselves with film. Jon Stratton’s insightful opening essay posits that the Australian tilt towards neo-liberalism from the mid 1990s, with its replacement of the social contract with individualism, has led to a series of films in which individual contracts and narratives of revenge are legitimised. Concerns with this ideological shift pervade a number of the essays, including pointed analyses of TV networks mining tragedy and triumph in Beaconsfield (by Jason Bainbridge) and the Howard government’s constructions of ‘crisis’ in indigenous communities (Virginia Watson).

Barry Maitland’s Dark Mirror, the tenth instalment in his Brock and Kolla series, sees newly promoted DI Kathy Kolla on the trail of a poisoner. Despite numerous references to the Pre-Raphaelites, laudanum addiction and arsenic, Dark Mirror does not exude the gritty Victorian Gothic atmosphere its subject matter and central crime evoke. Instead, the reader is presented with a murder investigation often bogged down by the realities of police work. This sense of realism is countered by some remarkable coincidences; scenes that appear tangential end up having profound consequences.

Nam Le is the author of The Boat (2009). He has received the Dylan Thomas Prize (2008), the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Book of the Year (2009) and the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Award (2009), among other prizes. His fiction has been widely anthologised. Currently the fiction editor of the Harvard Review, he divides his time between Australia and overseas.

On paper, jazz critic John Shand’s Jazz: The Australian Accent is a welcome intervention, one of the first books to take Australian jazz seriously. Shand’s prose is well paced and easy to read, if slightly glib. There is little obfuscation in his method, which is infinitely preferable to the pretensions of many jazz critics who fail to translate jazz into prose. Shand’s descriptions of music are engaging enough to make you want to listen to the musicians whose work he is describing, if only to confirm or deny the mutedly rhapsodic element of Shand’s descriptors. Unfortunately, they generally don’t live up to his prose, which you’ll discover when listening to the compilation CD that accompanies this book.