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Finding the answers is often not half as important as asking the right questions. Desmond Ball has written an important book even though he raises more fundamental questions than he answers.

The central question in A Suitable Piece of Real Estate is simply ‘What are the rights and responsibilities of a host country which allows installations of a foreign, albeit, friendly state, to be sited on its territory?’ The author has dedicated the book For a Sovereign Australia. Australia is the host country in question, with American defence, scientific, and intelligence installations on its territory; but the situation he describes in great detail could, and probably does, apply elsewhere.

The poet John Ashbery, now a considerable force in American poetry, has said: ‘I think that any one of my poems might be considered to be a snapshot of whatever is going on in my mind at the time…’ Like John Ashbery – and Frank O’Hara (who was involved with the Abstract Expressionism scene in New York before being killed by a dune buggy in 1966) – John Forbes and Gig Ryan are, in Australia, poets who must be linked to the broad automatic writing phenomenon which gained strength with so-called Action Painting (or, to use its other name, Tachisme). The foundation of that art movement was surrealist painting, sculpture, and writing; and these were made familiar to young American artists when writers and painters such as Max Ernst and André Breton escaped from Europe before Hitler took over.

The only woman in The First UQP Story Book is the naked one on the front cover. She is sitting in a kind of beanbag chair with her legs crossed and a floppy straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She is reading a book called The Possession of Amber which is by Nicholas Jose. Nicholas Jose is a man and so he was allowed to be actually in The First UQP Story Book.

Following the enterprising publication of Michael Leunig’s drawings and of Arthur Horner’s ‘Colonel Pewter’ and ‘Uriel’ cartoons Penguin’s latest offering in illustrated publishing in a wonderful book of evocations – a selection of many hundred Australia ‘trademark’ symbols created to identify local products ranging across the one hundred years from 1860.

Symbols of Australia is essentially a picture book. It has no conventional text apart from the introductions and preliminary notes, but there are captions which attempt to date the examples and sometimes explain their history significance.

Australia in the thirties – tough, innocent, conservative and patriarchal to the ninth degree. In A House with Verandahs Nene Gare writes about men dispossessed by the Depression and who become working class casualties, unable to grasp the world outside and clinging tenaciously to the world of domesticity and the comfort of women. And, in tum, the women struggle to maintain their world and to support each other through the petty obstinacy of their men. Nene Gare’s novel is drawn from her own childhood – its form is close to the autobiographical fiction of the Canadian writer Alice Munro. It also has similarities to Glen Tomasetti’s Thoroughly Decent People, and to a much earlier Australian classic, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians. All depict the culture of women and the linked culture of children. Like much of the fiction written by women, A House with Verandahs is episodic as it meanders through the intricacies of human relationships. The world outside makes very few impingements even the man’s work as a tradesman is spent in the backyard workshop. The Hounslow family are poor. They recycle everything in their battle to survive. Women’s skills are endlessly on call to save the day-old cast-off adult wear clothes are cut and made into children’s Fruit is bottled and preserved and served up as jams and chutneys. House­hold repairs are done by the family members usually again by the women or left to languish. The men are so debilitated that all their energy is spent keeping face. Anything extra is a threat to their identity and to their position. Molly Hounslow must continually remind her more rebellious and impatient daughters to be careful of Dad. She says after any crisis: ‘Don’t say anything to your father ... it might worry him. We all knew about not worrying Dad. It made him nervy . . . newspapers also upset him. He said people would get the idea from newspapers that the world was full of criminals.’

Sceptical Sociology is really a set of essays, some of them previously published, by the Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University. It contains a long introductory piece which gives the book its title, a concluding confession, and a number of vignettes which Carroll calls ‘stories’. The book as a whole is a display of the perversity of brilliance.

Don’t judge Donald Horne’s books by their titles.

Despite the title of the parent program, the aims of the Commonwealth Writers Series are not small. These paperback editions propose:

… a panoptic survey of a writer’s work, assessing its significance and merits, and conveying the critic’s enjoyment of the writer concerned, within a total length of between 96 and 176 pages. Each book will have a Survey chapter, placing the major works and events in the author’s life and times.