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‘I am really only an oppositionist, distrustful of power wherever I see it,’ wrote Jack Barry (1903–69) in 1951; and perhaps his oppositional instincts held him back from the heights of power to which he sometimes aspired. Instead, this biography argues, his impact was that of ‘a public intellectual before the term was invented’.

When G.B. Barton presented his two works concerning the literary history of New South Wales to the Paris Exhibition of 1866, he hoped that they would enable readers ‘to form an exact idea of the progress, extent and prospects of literary enterprise among us’. The words are succinct, unobjectionable, and their sentiments influenced much of the literary history of the next century, much as the productions of that time were usually annals rather than analysis. Barton’s civic-minded project linked the maturing of Australian literature with its political culture. Implicit in his endeavour, though numerous others would use the metaphor outright, was the notion of ‘coming-of-age’. This chimera had as long a life as the search for the Great Australian Novel.

The cover design for this book features a painting by Indigenous artist Johnny Bulun Bulun. It is an appropriate choice, given that it was this artist who in 1988 spearheaded the first major action in an Australian court against the unauthorised reproduction of Aboriginal works for commercial purposes, and in so doing set a precedent in establishing the existence of copyright in Aboriginal art. The case concerned the use of works of art on T-shirts. It was followed by one against the Reserve Bank of Australia, which had reproduced an Aboriginal image on the bicentennial $10 note without permission, and the famous ‘carpets case’ against a company that imported carpets made in Vietnam that contained some well-known Aboriginal artworks in their design.

Since the November federal election, kicking John Howard while he’s down has become something of a national pastime. While Howard’s take no-prisoners-except-on-Nauru behaviour has now exposed him to gleeful mass taunting, the idea that the end of his resilient political career has instantly created a noble Australia, its citizens and institutions cleansed and renew ed, is wishful thinking. In this context, Judith Brett’s new Quarterly Essay injects some welcome clear-headedness. Brett rains blows on Howard, but she is not a Howard-hater in the counterproductive and grandiose style of, say, Phillip Adams. Instead, she takes aim at the former prime minister in a characteristically nuanced and astute way. She bridges a gap – too often in Australia, a gulf – between scholars and interested laypeople, offering prose that is accessible and lively but that avoids dumbing down complex issues.

In this fascinating and irritating book, Elizabeth Farrelly hits out at almost everything about the modern world. She is an architect, and urban sprawl and ugly buildings are her bêtes noires, though obesity, kitsch and fakery also attract her coruscating attention.

Blubberland is a curious mixture of diatribe and philosophical treatise on cultural theory. Farrelly makes many good points: tight-knit cities, for example, are more energy-efficient than sprawling suburbs, and the ‘sea-change’ fad destroys beauty spots with little increase in happiness. She wonders ‘[w]hy we demand a built lifestyle whose habitual over-indulgence is, by even the standards of our parents’ generation, extraordinary? … Why these houses, and the suburbs full of them, are so ugly? Is it an aesthetic or a moral repugnance?

joanne burns: There’s a name to conjure with. The familiar lowercase signature – first encountered in my now-tattered copies of 1970s women’s poetry magazines such as Khasmik and Cauldron, and in the anthologies Mother, I’m Rooted (1975) and No Regrets (1979) – now appears on burns’s fourteenth book. An Illustrated History of Dairies offers a generous selection of her verse and prose poems, including the satires on (sub)urban life for which she is well known, condensed narrative pieces, enigmatic fragments linked by flashes of surrealist wit.

Seriatim, the poems are in order, though not subdivided into marked divisions indicating common themes with some compelling logic to them, but a series of observations, dot points, which may or may not be part of a larger argument. It is like a conversation. No one knows exactly where it will end when it starts, but it goes on with an order, sometimes determined by logic, otherwise by association, free and not so free. The book is one long poem; the poet’s consciousness explores ageing, place, time, poetry itself, language, and emotion, taking on whatever life throws up. So we start with reflections on Australian history, very old age (parents), old age (the poet himself), poetry and its practice, places here and abroad, and finally Islam and its extremists. It is a conversation between poet and reader in which there is no lofty conclusion, no stunning revelation or gesture, but a sharing of thought and emotion, which ends with the threads to be picked up later.