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Girls like books about friends and relationships. Boys like books about explosions and sport. Right? Like any generalisation based solely on gender, the answers are, invariably, ‘yes’; ‘sometimes’; ‘up to a point’ and ‘of course not’. This latest grab bag of junior fiction contains its fair share of ‘girlie’ books about friendship and ‘boyish’ books about sport. Thankfully, there are also some books to cater for other sections of the spectrum, including sensitive explorations of boys’ friendships and robust girls who trek up mountains.

Meg McKinlay’s Annabel Again (Walker, $14.95 pb, 143 pp, 9781921150104) lands us squarely in girlie territory. When Livvy’s best friend moves away, her world folds. With the best of intentions, her New Age mother hatches a plan to help Livvy forget about Annabel, as quickly as possible. But one year later, Annabel returns and Livvy believes things will be just the same again. But Annabel is distant and hostile, and nothing is the same. Can their friendship be resurrected? This book covers familiar ground, but the treatment of the girls’ friendships is refreshingly angst-free. This is a quick, humorous read that highlights both the strength and delicacy of friendship, and offers some sound advice about when not to listen to your mother.

The Australian book is by and large a good-looking piece of merchandise. Surveying the pile of Christmas titles that thudded onto my desk right till the end of the year, I am struck by the air of careful grooming that most of them possess. Could one have said that of the Christmas books of 1968? Sophistication and confidence have advanced hand in hand and taken Australian publishing over. However, some books that I have looked at closely have proved disappointing in points of detail. It seems that the abundant skill which is at work in making books is often hard-pressed by the need for high productivity. Too little time, too many slips showing. To distinguish between avoidable carelessness and the unforeseeable mishap is a problem for the reviewer of book production.

At the presentation of the Australian Book Publishers Association design awards for 1977–8 in Sydney last April, during a cocktail party at the association’s annual conference, I was struck by the inattentiveness of the gathering. A representative of the P&O Company, awarding for the first time a prize of $1000 for the book of the year (The Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds, published by William Collins, designed by Derrick I. Stone), could scarcely be heard above the party chatter. It seemed that many publishers who were present did not feel obliged to pay attention, their complacency abetting rudeness. One could almost hear them saying, ‘Well, yes, this was a disaster area up till the sixties, but we’ve fixed it now. Everyone knows that Australian books today are the equal of the world’s best.’

How violent was the Australian frontier? At the moment, this is the biggest debate in Australian history. As most would know, the question has gained national attention largely through the efforts of Keith Windschuttle who, in four Quadrant articles in 2000 and 2001, argued, among other things, that historians had inflated the numbers of Aborigines killed on the Australian frontier and that the National Museum of Australia’s ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit contained factual errors. In December 2001 the National Museum organised a conference that brought together Windschuttle and many of the historians he had criticised. This book results from that conference and provides a useful introduction to the debate.

Welcome to the 250th issue of ABR – or, rather, to the 250th issue of the magazine in its present guise. Some readers may be unfamiliar with the first series, which appeared between 1961 and 1973. It came out of Adelaide under the editorship of Max Harris, Rosemary Wighton and, for a time, Geoffrey Dutton. Kerryn Goldsworthy – herself an Editor for two years in the mid-1980s – writes fascinatingly about those early ABRs in her article ‘The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah’ (page 23). Like Kerryn, we celebrate the original begetters of ABR, and everyone else who has made the magazine such a success since the present series began in 1978. Independent magazines have never been more vital than now, when a remarkable (even eerie) editorial consensus obtains in the major Australian newspapers. We look forward to bringing you more cogent, questioning writing in coming years, and we trust you enjoy the 250th issue.

Pigs don’t fly, but dragons and kites do, and possums can jump, which is perhaps just as scary if you’re a little one. These four picture books deal with flight, their authors and illustrators using more or less imaginary elements in the process.

According to Andrew O’Hagan, writing in a recent London Review of Books: ‘If you want to be somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.’ The journey from Nobody-hood to Somebody-hood is central to June Dally-Watkins’s recent autobiography. Indeed, O’Hagan’s pithy insight could almost have been the Sydney socialite and queen of etiquette’s mantra.

When you bump into people who know Gideon Haigh – and that happens a lot in Geelong – they will tell you about his encyclopedic knowledge of cricket, his dedication to detail, and his casualness with money. I want to add to this list of his idiosyncrasies a delicious ability to turn the mundane into the magnificent. For this is exactly what The Vincibles is to we weekend warriors – a magnificent vindication of our very existence.

On the night of 13 September 1993, flight lieutenants Jeremy McNess and Mark Cairns-Cowan were killed when their F-111 crashed at Guyra, in northern NSW. Written by Jeremy’s mother, The Thirteenth Night dwells on the complex fatality of that night, which permanently changed several life stories in an instant. For his mother, who had coped with his exceptionally difficult childhood, winning through in his early teens to a remarkably close relationship, Jeremy’s death was and remains a dark frontier. Beyond lay a strange and cold country. Totally disoriented at first by devastating grief, she found the courage and stamina to pursue the true story of the accident’s cause for five years in the face of institutional defensiveness and media ignorance. This book began as a story for the family, but it is an important book for other readers on several counts.

At 9:40 pm on 23 October 1942, in the North African desert, the heavens lit up with myriad flashes from more than one thousand guns, and the roar of the British Commonwealth Eighth Army’s opening barrage rolled out towards Field Marshal Rommel’s poised Panzerarmee Afrika. Promptly, at 10 pm, when two search-lights arced across the sky, beams crossing, the waiting infantry from Australia, Scotland, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Great Britain rose from weapon pits, where they had been lying doggo all day, and began to fight their way forward through wired and dug defences, and ingeniously laid enemy minefields stretching up to six thousand metres deep.