In the last decade, Stuart Kells has become one of Australia’s most versatile and fecund non-fiction writers, responsible for a variety of diverting histories, of enterprises, institutions, and ideas. His thoroughly readable The Library: A catalogue of wonders (2017) was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Award; his Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature (2018) felt rather more padded, if not unenjoyably so. Books about Argyle Diamonds (2021) and Melbourne University Publishing (2023) have been welcome. I imagine him in a medieval artisanal workshop, a kind of booksmith studiously occupied in multiple, simultaneous pursuits.

This attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948 at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Four of the seven people in shot are unidentified; but two of the others, unmistakably, are Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier: she is in a fur coat, sitting in an armchair, a plate of food balanced on her lap; he is two along, perched on a piano stool. But who is that man in the middle in half profile? None other than Chico Marx, who was also in Melbourne, with his own show at the Tivoli.

On the surface, this encyclopedic work offers a gloriously lyrical exploration of the sea. It could be part of a recent shoal of books about the more-than-human world, limning the wondrous and astonishing. In Deep Water: The world in the ocean, whales learn rhyme-like patterns to remember their songs, a ‘babel of strange, eerie sounds: skittering blips, long cries, whoops and basso moans’. A loggerhead turtle travels more than 37,000 kilometres to return to her birthplace. Sharks’ chemo-receptors prove acute enough to detect blood ‘in amounts as low as one part in a million’. Port Jackson sharks socialise with their peers, and evidence emerges that some fish species use tools.

Siang Lu’s polyphonic début novel, The Whitewash (2022), occupied a unique place in Australian fiction. It was written as an oral history, with a cast of voices, sometimes in conflict with one another, coalescing to tell the story of the rise and fall of a Hollywood spy blockbuster. The film was supposed to star the first-ever Asian male lead in such a role, but he was replaced by a white actor at the last minute. Blending real and invented film history, The Whitewash was an original work of satire, providing a breath of fresh air in the local literary landscape – even more so considering that it dealt so adroitly with matters of race and representation, normally approached in a much more conventional, and predictable, way.

Say, you’re a school teacher in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and you’re looking for a play for your class to perform that is set in Broome. Or maybe you’re a crime writer playing with the idea of writing a novel set in Sydney and want to check out what other crime novels have been set there. Perhaps you just found out that your great aunt once wrote a series of poems, and you want to know more. It could even be that you’re an author wanting to find the reviews of your latest short story collection. All this, and more, can be found in AustLit. Scholars of Australian literature know how valuable AustLit has been for over two decades, but anyone with an interest in Australian literary culture will find something worth exploring in Australia’s national literary database. AustLit will not only answer your questions, it will surely inspire more.

Two of the defining figures of our age are China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Both are authoritarian rulers intent on reshaping the global Western-led order. They despise and mistrust the United States equally, and, to justify their hold on power, promote a nationalist and civilisationist vision that elevates the long historical and cultural roots of their societies. They have defined themselves as indispensable for their respective countries’ futures and standing in the world.

Bill Hayden might today be recalled as the unluckiest man in politics: Bob Hawke replaced him as Labor leader on the same day that Malcolm Fraser called an election that Hayden, after years of rebuilding the Labor Party after the Whitlam years, was well positioned to win. But to dismiss him thus would be to overlook his very real and laudable efforts to make a difference in politics – as an early advocate for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and as the social services minister who introduced pensions for single mothers and Australia’s first universal health insurance system, Medibank. Dismissing Hayden would also cause us to miss the counterpoint he provides to Peter Dutton, current leader of the Liberal Party.

Do gay men have a history – and, if so, what is it? Historians have grappled with such questions ever since Michel Foucault first published his History of Sexuality in the 1970s. The stakes are high because they are political: at root, they contest nature versus nurture. We know that men who have sex with other men have existed in every past society. But were those men the same as modern homosexuals? Many contemporary gays claim them as forerunners – yet several scholars see modern homosexuality as, fundamentally, a creation of contemporary late-stage capitalism and a chronological and cultural anomaly, whose associated rights may prove equally ephemeral.

I first met Boris Frankel when he was a thirteen-year-old, in the pages of a file at the National Archives of Australia. I was working on Russian migrant families in Australia that decided to return to the Soviet Union, but then tried to come back to Australia. Boris and his sister Genia had travelled more than 1,500 kilometres from the Crimea to Moscow, alone, in 1959, in the hopes of persuading British authorities to allow their return to Australia. It was a remarkable story: two teenagers who negotiated Soviet bureaucracy and surveillance, made an impassioned plea, and secured the support of a British ambassador. The file even contained letters the children had written to Prime Minister Robert Menzies – their own, teenaged voices. Letters like this are a historian’s dream: I felt I had got to the heart of the story. And yet, in Boris Frankel’s historical memoir, No Country for Idealists, I saw the trip to Moscow anew. In the texture of Frankel’s narrative – their Siberian cabin-mate on the train journey (named Rasputin!), the ambassador’s chef who cooked them breakfast – the wonder of the journey emerged afresh.

In 2020, with Katie Holmes and Andrea Gaynor, Ruth A. Morgan co-authored ‘Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times’, an article which was published in a dedicated ‘In urgent times’ edition of History Australia. With more than 8,800 views since its publication, which coincided with the first Covid lockdowns, the paper has gone on to become that journal’s most read article in its twenty-year lifetime. In it, the co-authors staunchly called for ‘barbed and incendiary histories that hold wrongdoers to account and keep watch over the present’. History writing is an inherently political act, and they stressed – in italics, no less – ‘there is no justice without history’. Four years on, there remains an ever-accelerating and palpable urgency to the work of history writing. With coruscating prose and assiduous scholarship, Climate Change and International History adds its voice to this chorus.