‘Tasmania is in a new age of fire,’ writes Andrew Darby in an article for The Guardian. The fires in February, which came close to destroying ancient Huon pines in the takayna/Tarkine and pencil pines near Cradle Mountain, were started by a dry lightning strike, as were the fires which tore through the Grove of Giants six years ago. Lightning strikes were once responsible for less than 0.01 per cent of bushfires in Tasmania but now account for the vast majority, an eight thousand per cent increase over a decade. ‘Quite honestly,’ says Jon Marsden-Smedley, a former fire management officer interviewed by Darby, ‘I don’t know of any other climate-change parameter that is as dramatic.’

While reading this book, I saw an ABC TV Foreign Correspondent program on volunteer health workers in Ukraine tackling frontline fighters’ horrific injuries. I was moved by the stoic optimism of the soldiers, the dedication and compassion of the doctors and nurses, one of them wearing a brave slash of lipstick.

It always surprises me when I encounter someone so well read that they seem to have every obscure literary reference to hand and yet the late Canadian writer Mavis Gallant has managed entirely to escape not just their attention but their knowledge. ‘Who?’ they will ask. ‘How do you spell that?’ Offer them titles of collections and stories and their perplexity only deepens. The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, edited by American novelist Garth Risk Hallberg and published by New York Review Books, both tries to explain that underappreciation and to ensure that every serious reader knows precisely why one might wish to spend time in Gallant’s idiosyncratic and determinedly realist house of fiction.

‘Here’s what I think: there are neither major nor minor tragedies’, writes the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic. ‘Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for which every heart is too small.’

‘Bea never swam with the tide’, observes Judith Brett in her eloquent biography of the social reformer, activist, and public intellectual Beatrice Faust. Brett takes us behind the public face of this confident, outspoken, and strident political figure, whose name became synonymous with second wave feminism in Australia. The psychological reading of Faust that Brett offers, in a refreshingly analytical approach provides depth, complexity, and insight which makes this beautifully written book compelling to read.

Erudition for its own sake is perhaps not as prized in the world of Australian letters as it once was; in an age when sparsity is king – where blunt clarity and a kind of punchy journalese dominate contemporary essay writing – loquaciousness and intricate wordplay are undervalued commodities. Feathery intellectualism of the type personified by Robert Dessaix might not be much in vogue, which is precisely why it feels so joyful and necessary. Chameleon, his latest work of memoir, is discursive and prismatic, wise and worldly. For the shambolic musings of an esteemed octogenarian – ‘now at the end of my life, at the fraying, but suddenly illumined, highly coloured end of my life’ – it is expertly calibrated, often remarkably vivid, and always exquisitely articulated.

The three-volume History of the Book in Australia is now complete. Scholars of Australian book history would be aware that an earlier volume, covering 1891–1945, appeared in 2001 (A National Culture in a Colonised Market, edited by Martyn Lyons and John Arnold) and that in 2006 a second volume brought the story up to 2005 (Paper Empires, edited by Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright). Both titles were published by the University of Queensland Press. The end of that publisher’s capacity to support the project, with Australian Research Council funds long gone, is one challenge among others cited by co-editor Wallace Kirsop that sheds light on the long gestation of this final volume. The last to be published, it is in fact the first in the History’s series, covering the period 1788 to 1890.  

Adam lives with his father. Teddy lives with his parents and a sister. Both are children of broken or fragile relationships, about to enter their senior year of high school. Adam’s father appears to have ‘given up’ on life; he has stopped drinking and succumbed to ‘mute anger’. Adam hasn’t seen his mother in six years, since she left the family, and Teddy resents his mother’s extramarital affair. In both cases, the family home is a source of gloomy unease, with fathers who are incapable of dealing with the realities of their lives.

In his 1928 collection of poems, Odd Jobs, Ernest ‘Kodak’ O’Ferrall caricatures recitation as an onerous entertainment that has passed its use by date:

Editors tend not to look back – there is simply no time for nostalgia. Many literary editors in Australia work alone, or with one or two part-time assistants. Australian Book Review now has a staff of four (it was three when I began in 2001). This may seem huge, but check out the imprint pages of like publications in London or New York and note the difference. We smile when people ring our office and ask to speak to the advertising manager or the marketing manager. As if!