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This is not a reissue of a novel almost twenty years old, nor is it quite a new novel: it is a heavily revised version of an early work by the author of the prize-winning novel Year of Living Dangerously. Across the Sea Wall was written before C.J. Koch was thirty. In a prefatory note to the new version he writes: ‘If such novels of youth are worth republishing, they are worth revising ... The cuts and alterations are not fundamental, but they are extensive.’ He concludes with the hope ‘that the earlier version of this work will be consigned to oblivion, and that anyone referring to the book, or quoting from it, will go to no other version but this one’.

The Shearers by Patsy Adam-Smith is worth a place in the best of libraries if only for its superb collection of photographs and reproductions – 291 of them! She is to be commended for including reproductions of an 1891 ‘Loyalty’ certificate, an 1890 Queensland Shearers’ Union ticket and three ‘shearing ticket’ versions of the Amalgamated Workers’ Union. I wish I could claim possession of an original of these. I do, however, have a complete collection of every membership certificate issued in what is now called The Australian Workers’ Union right from its very beginning in 1886, when it was called the Australasian Shearers’ Union.

If any volume of Selected Poems must be in part the autobiography of an imagination, it is subject to the vicissitudes and ironies which attend all autobiography. One gazes at it and finds familiar lineaments, but one also finds mobilities and stands made more evident than a more partial acquaintance can show. The very title is a warning that the whole story –whatever that might be – is not to be found here: a ‘Selected Poems’ is the outcome of recurrent options.

At seventy-one Judah Waten is not just another old soldier who refuses to fade away. Nor is he a man who keeps writing books out of habit. He is a born storyteller who writes when he has something to tell us. And the more he writes, the more powerful and persuasive his fictions become.

This is a very fine first novel by Jean Bedford. Her first publication was the collection of short stories, Country Girl Again, published by Sisters Press in 1978. Sister Kate justly deserves to be one of the two bestsellers in Melbourne.

The novel traces the life of Kate Kelly, sister of the famous Ned, and opens when Kate is twelve and Edward just returned from a three-year stint in Pentridge. He is shocked and outraged to learn that his brother, Jim, a mere sixteen-year-old, has been arrested for horse stealing and sent to Pentridge also. Ned is nineteen. Kate remarks:         

Sir Alexander Downer (1910–81) was a man of great courtesy, absolute integrity, honesty in reporting the things be observed. I think that these attributes are all self-evident in the book he has written about six Australian prime ministers. Also apparent was, I believe, a too subservient attitude to a Britain which was disappearing and changing throughout his life. After all, the concept of the Queen as the Queen of Australia – instead of the Queen of Britain or the Commonwealth – received acceptance only after World War II, which incidentally was a war that Alec Downer saw out living in the hell of Changi Prison Camp.

Russel Ward’s new book is a revision of History, which he published in 1965, mainly for an American audience. In fact, it was read more in Australia and now he has extended the work, put in more detail, and, presumably in response to recent developments, included some cursory glances at the doings of Aborigines, explorers, and the female half of the Australian people.

My Blue-Checker Corker and Me probably has enough strengths to make one forget, eventually, most of its irritating features. Paul Radley’s story of ‘a small mellow world’ is unashamedly emotional. and Radley is clearly fascinated with the possibilities of language. This is the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his relationship with his grandfather, his mates and his pigeons.