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A Family History of Smoking, the most recent of Andrew Riemer’s memoirs, focuses on the world of his great-grandparents, his grandparents, and his parents. In so doing, it traces Hungary from the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse at the end of the Great War, on through the brief springtime of the 1930s and the chaos of displacement and destruction of World War II. It is a rich and rewarding memoir.

The title of this rich and varied collection of poetry by Philip Neilsen comes from a poem entitled ‘First Creative Writing Class’:

I have only just begun to know
what a cloud is and could be.
Poetry comes without an alibi,
in lightning flashes of sanity.

One of the intriguing things about Breath, Tim Winton’s first novel in seven years, is that it has a number of affinities with his very first book, An Open Swimmer (1982). Both are coming-of-age novels that attempt to capture some of the confusion and melancholy of youth ...

Marry an artist? Never! So I always thought, and reading these autobiographies does nothing to change my prejudice. Married to artists, both Judith Pugh and Irena Sibley spend a good deal of their time cooking and, even more, socialising. Not that they mind. Judith declares that ‘cooking was my deep pleasure’, essential to the story of her life with Clifton (‘Clif’) Pugh. Irena concedes facetiously, ‘it’s too hard painting pictures. It is easier to bake cakes.’ The importance of food is apparent in the chapter titles. Eleven of Sibley’s chapters refer to food, while all of Pugh’s have subheadings that, typically, jumble up evocative ingredients.

In 1938, the year of Australia’s sesquicentennial celebrations, trade unionist William Ferguson and former boxer John Patten helped to organise the first Aboriginal Day of Mourning and Protest on January 26; later that year, they co-wrote the pamphlet from which the above excerpt is taken, on behalf of the nascent Aborigines Progressive Association ...

This is an honest, modest report of what students and teachers across the country think about the teaching of Australian history in schools. Anna Clark has allowed her subjects to speak for themselves; being a scrupulous historian, she has not edited their offerings. So we hear words like these: ‘Now they’re having like record numbers [at Anzac Day], and like huge ceremonies all over Australia and they’re like young people that respect it’; and ‘Reading a textbook, when you have to like read three pages of a textbook, and then the teacher’s like, “Do the questions”...’ An enduring value of this book will be its record of teenagers’ spoken English in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It makes for rather tiresome reading, but it is salutary to be constantly reminded of where students are at, like.

Michael Bernard Kelly is perhaps best known for his association with the Rainbow Sash Movement, a group of gay and lesbian Catholics and their supporters who have, from time to time, been refused Holy Communion when attending Mass wearing the rainbow sash. Cardinal Pell, formerly archbishop of Melbourne, now of Sydney, has been a particular target. Kelly describes himself as the movement’s ‘writer, spokesperson and co-convenor’. For him the sash is ‘a symbol of gay visibility and dignity within the Catholic Church’, and the movement challenges what he sees as the hypocrisy of the Church’s continuing condemnation of homosexuality.

Each of these memoirs – Births Deaths Marriages: true tales, by Georgia Blain, and The After Life: A Memoir, by Kathleen Stewart – is the work of an accomplished novelist, and each writer is well aware of the risks involved in the shift of mode. If the novel, as Blain maintains, provides a place for the writer to hide, the memoir is the place of self-exposure, of speaking the truth, or a version of the truth. Although it is the wellspring of all creativity, to write about the life, to pin it down, is in a sense to distort it. Memory is unreliable and bias is inevitable. There is also the problem of exposing others, and the others in each of these memoirs are easily identified. Each writer faces the challenges of memoir in an entirely different way. The narrative voice in Births Deaths Marriages is thoughtful and contemplative; the account qualified at times by self-doubt. Stewart’s account, on the other hand, is sure of its truth. It is dramatic, forceful and defiant.

How many books should an author have under their belt before they indulge in a piece of frippery? When John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley (1962), about his journeys across the country with his poodle, it must have been hard not to see it as a comedown from The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Adding the subtitle (‘In Search of America’) can’t have been enough to convince anyone that this was anything more than a writer who knew he was nearing the end of his life and career, going for a drive with his dog. By then, however, Steinbeck was widely regarded as having earned a certain licence.