What was the point of a landscape’s allegories,
or the show of fractured bedrock in Bellini’s
Transfiguration, the way it caught the folding
and tightening, the rough-shod squeezing of old
strata, and the intrusion of the igneous, ferns’

Isabel Allende’s My Name is Emilia del Valle begins in the Mission District of San Francisco in the late nineteenth century and vividly evokes life among ‘that multicolored, polyglot multitude of emigrants’.

The first six months of the second Trump administration have left American allies worldwide, including Australia, in a state of shock and sullen resignation. Shock at the resumption of Trump’s global trade and tariff war, following threats to Canada, Greenland and Mexico, not to mention the harm being done to American institutions and soft power; resignation that US protectionism and the rising demands of Washington on allies to pay more for their own defence are here to stay.

A scanning of programs on any streaming service will reveal that the phenomenon of the cult, both real and imagined, continues to fascinate the public imagination. One notorious historical example, and the subject of recent documentaries and a gripping TV series, is a group called The Family, which operated undetected from the late 1960s for over twenty years in a secluded rural property near Lake Eildon in Victoria. What makes this case so unusual is the fact that its leader was a woman: the glamorous, pathologically narcissistic Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Shockingly, as many as twenty-eight of the victims were children who were subject to brainwashing and sustained physical abuse. Discovered and released in 1987, many of those children suffered lasting trauma and some committed suicide. In a stroke of terrible irony, Hamilton-Byrne never faced justice for her heinous crimes because the law judged the testimony of the children to be unreliable.

This is a sombre, sad, and at times angry book. It is also a wise book. The sister of one of those Australian prisoners of war in World War II who died at Ambon wrote: ‘Everyone who was touched by Ambon has a crying heart which will never leave them.’ Of an initial force, since known as Gull Force, of 1,131 men, 779 were killed in action or died as prisoners. There were many crying hearts in Australia.

For a long time, Antigone Kefala was thought of as a migrant writer. This lens confined discussion of her work to the territory of biography and witness and obscured the migratory poetics of the writing itself. In her spare, bristling poems and candid journals, and across her non-fictional prose and fiction, Kefala’s restive work hinges on precision and vision.

What can a reader expect from the ‘shortest’ history of anything? Probably something that gives basic information about that subject with a possible admixture of humour and a fresh approach that conceals the gaps that brevity inevitably produces. Mart Kuldkepp’s shortest history of Scandinavia achieves these goals skilfully and can be trusted to provide the general reader with a reliable narrative. It also succeeds in analysing what it is about the countries that we call Scandinavia that makes them special, creating a sense of ‘Nordicness’ that is recognised by both insiders and outsiders.

Australia is a weird place. A backwater colonial outpost settled by racist squatters and their indentured convict servants, it is a country forever defined by its isolation, in every sense, from the rest of the world. Faster than Barron Field could say ‘kangaroo’, an Empire crashed onto the shores of the First Peoples who had been cultivating a narrative tradition since time immemorial, and set about writing a (manifest) destiny of its own.

In Too Soon Too Late: History in popular culture (1998), Meaghan Morris evokes Walter Benjamin’s ‘poor angel of history’, whose wings, ‘encrusted’ with scholarly citation, now beat ‘sluggishly in the service of a not very lively professionalism’. The critical discourse around W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) sometimes produces a similar feeling of fatigue, not least in its relationship to Benjamin, whose influence on Sebald’s melancholic oeuvre is well documented. 

The First Cold War is an account of 300 years of British-Russian relations, from mutual incomprehension to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which reached an accommodation between the great powers. This proved remarkably stable and provided the basis for resisting German aggression in the twentieth century. It only ended in 1949 when the next cold war began.