Hume Dow

‘Memory as slippery as a melon seed.’ So wrote Frank Dalby Davison in a letter to his mother in 1945. And memory in its trickiest forms is before the reader’s mind throughout Owen Webster’s semi-, demi­biography of Davison -·’semi’ because, though Webster described this book as a ‘non-fiction novel’ it relies so heavily on Davison’s fiction for ‘facts’ that one might be ... (read more)

Rita Erlich states that Good Enough to Eat is ‘a guide to some of the best foods in Melbourne’. It is that indeed and a very good one – and fun to read as well. But it has much more than a provincial value. Since Australian Book Review is a national journal, it is worth stressing that this book gives invaluable advice that is applicable anywhere – how to shop, what to look for, how to judg ... (read more)