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At a time when some fiction writers are busy defending their right to incorporate autobiographical elements, and some non-fiction writers are being charged with fabrication, it seems timely of Nam Le to begin his collection of stories with one that plays with notions of authenticity in literature ...

Diane Armstrong is a prolific, award-winning journalist whose book-length publications began with a memoir of family history, Mosaic (1998), and The Voyage of their Life (2001), set on the SS Derna, which brought Polish-born Armstrong, her parents and 500 refugees to Australia in 1948. In 2004 Armstrong turned to fiction with Winter Journey, about a Polish-Australian forensic dentist. Now we have Nocturne, which, although it features one or two Australian characters, takes place in Warsaw, England and Germany during World War II. It is a gallant and gut-wrenching story but a difficult book to review, because it suffers from inadequate editing.

It is tempting to become impatient, and to reach for a gun to resolve a problem, or a knife to cut a Gordian knot. As I write, the Burmese generals have been dithering and obfuscating rather than letting aid workers into their storm-ravaged country. The paranoid preservation of their honour and control bids fair to cause the death of tens of thousands of people. If the Burmese people cannot rise up to change this (and as poor, pacifist Buddhists, they are peculiarly ill equipped to overwhelm a shameless and violent régime), then we should surely invade, distribute the emergency aid, and replace the generals with responsible government. Some people only respond to violence, and surely justice demands this intervention.

When journalist Helene Chung grew up in Hobart in the 1960s, there were fewer than one hundred Chinese living there, and her complicated family seemed to include almost all of them. Her great-grandfather came to Australia for gold, but succumbed to opium. He was rescued by her grandfather, who worked in the Tasmanian tin mines, founding a small dynasty as brothers and cousins arrived with their multiple wives, and married more in Australia. It sounds like a familiar story, but as it unfolds the author’s intelligence and determination create an idiosyncratic portrait of what first- and second-generation migrants endure, and how they triumph.

Freedom on the Fatal Shore brings together John Hirst’s celebrated works on the early history of New South Wales: Convict Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1983, and Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, published in 1988. Both books have been out of print for some time; the chance of picking up a second-hand copy is almost nil. Black Inc. has done historians, students and general readers a great service with this combined volume. Convict Society and Strange Birth have an intellectual symmetry that justifies their union.

This book is dedicated to all Asian Australians. Like the term ‘Chinese Australian’, ‘Asian Australian’ is revealing to my baby-boomer generation of Australian-born Chinese, for we have lived most of our lives known as Australian Chinese, a term that stresses our ethnic background over our Australian birthplace, even though our families have contributed to Australia for four, five or six generations. We may not speak a word of our ancestral tongue, and may never have trod the land of our forebears. The new term recognises that the growing numbers of Australians of Cambodian, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese and other Asian heritage are equally Australian as are white Anglo-Celtic Australians.

Possibly inspired by the British Film Institute’s ‘Classics’ texts, the ‘Australian Screen Classics’ series is not only downright valuable but also looks good. The latest two, in their smart black covers, each adorned with a striking still from the relevant film, confirms the importance of having such detailed attention paid to key films in our history.

Between the mid-1940s and the late 1960s, Mohammed bin Laden fathered fifty-four children (twenty-five sons, twenty-nine daughters) from an assortment of wives (he married twenty-two times). It should hardly surprise that such a large group included several extreme personalities. The eldest son, Salem, channelled his manic energy into aeroplanes, cars, girls and the good life. The eighteenth son, Osama, born in 1957, chose a very different path. This would eventually leave New York’s skyline smouldering, Osama repudiated by his family and disowned by his country: a ‘black sheep’ in a league of his own.

In a recent column in the Australian, George Megalogenis looked back to Arthur Fadden’s budget of 1952 as a possible comparison with the current financial situation. Few political scientists, let alone journalists, display this sort of historical memory. In 2006, Megalogenis published The Longest Decade, an account of the combined years of Paul Keating and Howard, based upon extensive interviews with the two leaders. The book was reviewed in ABR by Neal Blewett (November 2006), who regarded the book as a useful ‘bullshit detector’ on his newspaper colleagues, whose political journalism appeared in The Howard Factor that same year.