It is only a coincidence that my book Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths, the first in a two-volume cultural biography of the Australian author, ends in 1974 – the same year that Copyright Agency was incorporated – and that it was published in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this incorporation. As Moorhouse himself always argued, such coincidences, chance happenings, and historical accidents are often far more important in shaping our culture than we like to concede.

When the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club in March 2023 to savage the bipartisan commitment to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement, he did so only days after Anthony Albanese had stood alongside his British counterpart Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden in San Diego to announce the ‘optimal pathway’ for the agreement. Fluttering above them were the respective flags of the three nations. In the background lay berthed the USS Missouri, a Virginia class submarine lined with American sailors and festooned with its own bunting. But as Keating noted in typically pungent fashion, on that day ‘there was only one payer: the Australian prime minister … there’s three leaders standing there … [but] only one is paying … our bloke, Albo. The other two, they’ve got the band playing, happy days are here again.’

Shortly after Black Saturday, David Lindenmayer was giving a seminar on post-bushfire recovery when a member of the audience yelled out, ‘If it wasn’t for you greenies, none of this would have happened.’ Lindenmayer’s response was neither defence nor attack, but rather to rephrase the man’s words. ‘Your hypothesis,’ he said, ‘is that a fire in a forest that is logged and regenerated will be less severe than a fire in an intact forest.’ Many years of research followed this heckle. The result? A counter-intuitive finding that fire severity increases in logged forests.

Identity is a hard thing to define. What makes us who we are? We have social identities, shaped by our affinities and proximities to social groups, cultural identities informed by values, languages, rituals, traditions, and a whole multitude of different phenomena that combine to make us who we are.

One of Caledonian Road’s primary characters, Milo Mangasha, tends to speak in political slogans, which his childhood friend identifies as ‘college talk’. Readers may recognise in Milo the rhetoric of characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s previous novel, Mayflies (2020), a popular and critical success that was subsequently adapted for television. Like Mayflies, Caledonian Road is stridently certain about its political and moral positions. It reads like a passionate argument for purification. In this fictional world, set in contemporary Britain, a person who maintains ties with corrupt and wealthy conservatives, while voicing left-wing principles and ideals, risks a ‘crack-up’. Failing the test of moral consistency turns you into a cipher, a hollow man, a danger to yourself and others.

The ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’ features on no banknote or coin, nor is he listed in any roll-call of ‘important Australians’, and yet, if it were not for John Büsst, it is likely that twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves on the far north-east coast of Queensland would not be so designated and might in fact have been obliterated. It is also probable that, without Büsst, today’s fight for the Great Barrier Reef would have already been lost, the vast ecosystem fragmented into a slew of cement quarries and cheap limestone pits. Considering the extent to which this vast coral labyrinth has shaped the identity of modern Australia, the relative absence of Büsst’s influence from the historical record is doubtless representative of the many such travesties historians seek to rectify.

The opening pages of Knife give an account of the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie at a speaking engagement in upstate New York on 12 August 2022. His assailant charged out of the audience and onto the stage, where he attacked the author, using one of several knives he had brought along, for exactly twenty-seven seconds. Rushdie is precise about that detail, which one imagines is rather a long time if you are being stabbed. By the time he was restrained, the would-be assassin had seriously wounded Rushdie’s left hand, punctured his torso multiple times, slashed his neck, and stabbed him in the right eye deeply enough to destroy the optic nerve.

You need to look closely at the cover of Shankari Chandran’s novel Safe Haven to notice the sharp edges of the deceptively inviting image it depicts: the handcuffs, the barbed wire, the boat that seems to sit on top of the waves and yet be at the bottom of the sea, and the rebuke contained in the book’s title.

A mid-career genre change is always cause for attention. Best known for her fearless investigations into institutional sexual abuse, it is hardly surprising that Louise Milligan should transfer her journalistic nous and commitment to social justice into the realm of crime fiction. Pheasants Nest is part of a movement in post-#MeToo crime fiction, which has flourished in Australia and abroad in the past decade. It challenges the norms of the genre to centre victims and amplify the reverberations of violence against women (recent examples include Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women and Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name).

Kevin Hart’s Dark-Land is the memoir of a distinguished poet and scholar who was born in England in 1954, moved with his family to Queensland when he was eleven, and migrated again in 2002 to the United States, where he is currently Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. Dark-Land is well-written and amusing, with memorable vignettes ranging from his time in a London primary school to his bonding as an Australian teenager with his cat Sooty. On a wider spectrum, though, Dark-Land addresses more weighty concerns around time, memory, and intellectual or religious illumination. He recalls as a child listening to a BBC performance of the allegorical journey invoked in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he describes himself now as ‘still clambering up the hill I had known since childhood in London’. The title of his memoir signals this putative passage from darkness into light.