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Marion Halligan is a long-established fiction writer with an impressive list of publications. Even readers with only partial familiarity will recall that many of her novels have been informed by autobiographical material reflecting personal leanings and experiences, particularly her fondness for France, food and cooking, and the profound grief she sustained when her husband died. But in 2006 she changed direction, plunging into crime fiction with The Apricot Colonel, to which she has now produced a sequel. Both are written in the first person by a narrator called Cassandra Travers, a book editor.

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Like the theatre backstage, the artist’s studio has the look, sound and smell of the creative moment. For romantics, this is the place where genius ignites invention, where the down-to-earth mess of paints, brushes and canvas is transformed by an inspiring atmosphere. For historians such as Alex Taylor, however, the myth masks a different kind of reality: the social manoeuvring, economic strategies and self-conscious publicity of artists in search of a living. His scholarly book is a welcome alternative to recent photographic publications that attest to the continuing glamour of artists in their studios.

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Peter Sculthorpe must already be the most written-about of Australian composers, by a comfortable margin. One might legitimately wonder whether we need another Sculthorpe book in preference to an in-depth study of one of his comparatively neglected colleagues. However, this imbalance is not merely quantitative, but points to an underlying phenomenon: Sculthorpe’s position, in the concert-going public’s imagination, as the very incarnation of Australian ‘serious’ music. This phenomenon is, in a way, the real subject matter of Graeme Skinner’s new book – a meticulously detailed biography not only of the man but also of his almost mythic persona as The Great Australian Composer, created by Sculthorpe himself and by others.

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Rebel Journalism: The writings of Wilfred Burchett edited by George Burchett and Nick Shimmin

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March 2008, no. 299

Though he died a quarter of a century ago, the life and career of the Australian-born reporter Wilfred Burchett (1911–83) continue to attract significant critical attention. On the heels of Tom Heenan’s political biography, From Traveller to Traitor: The Life of Wilfred Burchett (2006), and Burchett’s re-released autobiography, also edited by Burchett’s son George and Nick Shimmin (2007), comes this collection of Burchett’s writings, spanning much of his long, eventful career.

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For two decades of my life, I worked as a senior executive with first Rupert Murdoch and then Kerry Packer. These were challenging years, not without their hairy moments, but I always felt my best way of retaining any kind of perspective at that time was to conceive of myself as a bit player at the court of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century monarch

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Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly (1946), and the Ramingining artists’ Aboriginal Memorial (1988), are the only two Australian works in a new and highly commercial picture book, 30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity across Time and Space. The Ramingining installation of 200 painted hollow-log poles, the kind used as containers for human bones, was categorised as ‘Aboriginal Culture’. Nolan’s painting was categorised as an example of ‘Surrealism’, but the caption concluded, sensibly, with the concession that he was more than a Surrealist: ‘Ultimately Nolan never adopted a single idiom, instead exploring different moods and techniques to portray his themes of injustice, love, betrayal and the enduring Australian landscape.’

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'Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it,’ wrote Watkin Tench of his companions on the First Fleet. Governor Phillip’s 1786 Commission had instructed him to build castles. Fitting their vision of the new into the old, settlers named the rocky outcrop above Middle Harbour as ‘Edinburgh Castle’, below which, in 1905, Henry Willis built ‘Innisfallen’, one of many would-be castles strewn around the continent. The newcomers’ lament that the local flowers were scentless and the birds songless had its parallel in the regret that settler Australia would never support a literary culture because it lacked ruins

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At the time of his death in March 2006, Slobodan Milošević had been on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (the ICTY) for more than four years. Greeted initially as a victory in the ‘struggle against impunity’, the progress of his trial was soon hindered by thickets of procedural argument and by the cunning of Milošević himself. Diverting attention from events in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo – the subject of his trial – Milošević manipulated every legal avenue available to him, giving the impression that, like the farcical and chaotic litigation in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of his Own (1994), the trial was meaningless, ultimately ‘about itself’.

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'I want to be buried on top of Connor’s Hill, the mountain at the head of the Tambo Valley in East Gippsland.’ These were the words that came into Barry Heard’s mind as he faced death in the jungle in Vietnam in August 1967, an episode recounted in his first memoir, Well Done, Those Men (2005). Later in that book, Heard recalled another near-death experience, when his mind turned again to Connor’s Hill: ‘I was in a warm, soft place that was bright, peaceful and beautiful, like the top of Connor’s Hill. It was where I wanted to be.

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Addition by Toni Jordan

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March 2008, no. 299

Addition is a trojan horse of a novel. It has a cutesy cover (featuring amorous toothbrushes), a kooky love story and a ‘hot’, wisecracking blonde heroine. There is a ‘hunky’ Irish love interest, Seamus O’Reilly, and a push-pull attraction of opposites between the romantic leads – whose first meeting, of course, is a witty war of words. But the heroine, Grace Vandenberg, is no ditsy Bridget Jones everywoman. She is an obsessive-compulsive counter who lives on a dis-ability pension; her only friends are her mother, her sister and her niece. And she is devastatingly smart.

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