Allen & Unwin

Death of a Whaler considers the grand themes of death, grief, the quest for meaning and the potential for reawakening. Just days before the Byron Bay whalers are made redundant in 1962, lopsided Flinch is involved in an accident and literally frozen. It is not only when he meets Karma, himself troubled by the past, that Flinch reluctantly begins the trial of healing.

Love, family, hope, death and grief have always been among fiction’s chief concerns. The Gospel According to Luke and Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, both second books from their authors, share many of these themes. The Gospel According to Luke adds faith, belief, religion and prayer; and Emily Maguire adroitly pulls off what would, in lesser hands, be a farce.

These two novels are both strong in their sense of locale, and take their settings as part of the subject, linked to pictures of isolation and barely functioning relationships, and with catastrophe not averted.

Murder in the Dark is a worthy addition to the vast Phryne Fisher collection. Fans of this well-researched series will be pleased to rediscover the usual St Kilda cast, and will welcome the diverse, if not always likeable, supporting cast of profligate party-goers, polo-playing cowgirls, sultry American jazz musicians, rather luscious young men and the occasional goat.

Fisher, the waspishly slim, ever-fashionable and cunning detective, is endowed with looks as deadly as her pearl-handled Beretta. Despite holding a high social ranking in 1920s Melbourne, she enjoys breaking societal rules as much as author Kerry Greenwood does generic ones (using an unconventional figure as her heroine). If she were male, Fisher’s drinking, smoking, casual sex and choice of profession would be a less entertaining stereotype. Aficionados of the series will enjoy the latest misconstrual of Fisher’s behaviour and femininity: a male character always manages to underestimate her abilities, intelligence or openness to all members of society.

Sometimes, the middle ground is a good place to be. The Shifting Fog is classy commercial fiction that sits happily in the space between literary fiction and mass-market trash. It might occupy the middle ground, but it’s far from middle of the road. First-time author Kate Morton (recipient of the six-figure sums for deals in eleven countries that publisher Allen & Unwin is happily hyping) has skilfully and intelligently created a novel that is indeed, as the publicity has it, ‘compulsively readable’.

One of the three central protagonists of Neil Chenoweth’s book, Graham Richardson, famously titled his autobiography Whatever It Takes (1994). Despite the title’s hints at candour, Richardson’s book eluded all but the most passing references to Kerry Packer. As Chenoweth points out in his alarming new book, this, from the man John Button had dubbed the Minister for Kerry Packer, represented storytelling at its most elliptical. More than Richardson’s book, Chenoweth presents the tale of Whatever it Took. It is not an edifying spectacle.

Cambodia is best known for the Angkor temple complex, and for Pol Pot. This primer incorporates the famous monuments and the Killing Fields into 2000 years of history, from pre-Angkorean Funan to the present. As John Tully suggests, it suits ‘tourists, students and general readers’. Writing a ‘short history’ presents specific challenges: the author must balance a narrative that tells a comprehensible story with the reality that history is messy and contested. While Tully cannot avoid discussing eras, issues and personalities with haste, the chapter on the Angkorean civilisation is especially crammed. In part, this reflects his obligation to acknowledge scholarly disagreement, but a more detailed and leisurely account of the Angkor era would have been welcome. In contrast, the chapter on the French protectorate (1863–1953) is assured and authoritative, which is unsurprising since Tully previously wrote the majestic France on the Mekong: A History of the Protectorate in Cambodia, 1863–1953 (2002).

Almost 100 years ago, Justice Higgins was asked to determine a ‘fair and reasonable wage’ for the average worker. In a landmark decision, Higgins declared that an unskilled labourer should receive a wage of seven shillings per day. This, he said, reflected the needs of an ordinary person living in ‘frugal comfort’ in a civilised community with the responsibilities of providing for his family. Higgins was explicit in setting this basic wage based on the needs of a worker, not the business organisation for whom he worked. ‘Fair and reasonable’ must also be something which the individual employee could not otherwise get through individual bargaining directly with employers. For, if it was, there would be no need for such regulation. Higgins’s decision shaped Australian wage regulation for the last century, and institutionalised the concept of collective regulation of workplace matters. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission thus became a ‘bedrock’ institution of Australian capitalism, civilising market forces and mitigating the adverse consequences for individuals of the uncertainties associated with them.

One of the contestants on television’s Australian Princess last year was a stripper, the oscillation in whose carriage was queried by the judges. ‘Of course I wiggle when I walk,’ the young woman protested, ‘I’ve got booty.’ Another competitor found that the going got tough when she was called upon to make a cup of tea. ‘I’m more of a bourbon girl,’ she shrugged. We were meant to laugh and cringe, and we did, but the show, for which nearly 3000 hopefuls had auditioned, was also a ratings success, reinforcing the widespread belief that anyone can become a princess. After all, it seemed as though anyone had.

The heroine of Marion Halligan’s latest novel has little time for reviewers. More often than not, she complains, they are ‘patronising ignorant nobodies’ who wouldn’t know a book from a biscuit. I will not hazard a biscuit metaphor, but I will venture a complaint. The Apricot Colonel is as elegantly written as any of Halligan’s novels. It provides the linguistic curios, surprising digressions and insights into storytelling that made Lovers’ Knots (1992), The Fog Garden (2001) and The Point (2003), among others, so exciting. Next to these, The Apricot Colonel is startlingly slight. In Halligan’s best novels, strong story lines tether the witty digressions and thoughtful asides together. In The Apricot Colonel, the plot never seems quite sturdy enough to hold them.