Gillian Dooley

A generation of Australian schoolchildren knows Peter Skrzynecki’s poetry. The simple, direct language of Immigrant Chronicle (1975) speaks of both the desolation and optimism of the postwar migrant. Boys of Summer, Skrzynecki’s third venture into book-length fiction, treads similar thematic terrain.

Lost children appear (or disappear) everywhere in literature and film: in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008). Wendy James’s new novel, Where Have You Been?, concerns a lost teenager, and Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight (which I reviewed in last month’s ABR) explores the mythic status of the lost child. However, Stephen Orr’s novel Time’s Long Ruin goes to the harrowing core of one of the most disturbing mysteries in twentieth-century Australia – the disappearance of the Beaumont children.

The mystique of the Roman Catholic Church has been thoroughly exploited by the likes of Dan Brown and writers of the medieval monastic murder mysteries that gained a certain popularity following the English publication of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in 1983. Carmel Bird’s latest book contains a mystery, though not a murder. It is set mostly in 2001, but monks, convents, rosaries, black madonnas, and miracles fill the pages of The Child of Twilight, along with artificial insemination and air travel.

Sydney Peony Kent, the narrator, is the product of assisted reproductive technology, both of her genetic forbears being anonymous donors; her parents, habitually and oddly bundled together as ‘Avila/Barnaby’, are infertile. Sydney has a couple of imaginary friends, a Mexican nanny, and a collection of snow globes containing black virgins. And she writes novels.

A popular myth holds that all librarians are inspired by a love of books. As with all such stereotypes, it doesn’t take long working in the profession to realise that it is only partly true, only slightly more so than the cardigan, bun and glasses with which we are usually endowed in the popular imagination. Librarians, in fact, whatever their initial sentiments about books, commonly become blasé about the volumes they are responsible for and can be pitiless in weeding out the less attractive, useful and popular books from their collections. David Pearson’s new book sets out to make librarians and others who have books in their care think again about their value as cultural artefacts and pieces of historical evidence, especially at this moment in history when they are beginning to lose their primary role as repositories of the world’s knowledge.

In the shadow of the famous romance of Ann and Matthew Flinders lies another, even sadder love story, between Flinders’s partner in exploration George Bass and his wife, Elizabeth. Bass and Flinders are so firmly bracketed in the Australian historical imagination that it comes as a surprise to find that the only references to Flinders in this collection of the Bass letters come from Elizabeth. Flinders does not even merit an entry in the biographical notes at the beginning of the book.

Jana Wendt has conducted her share of difficult and confronting interviews with public figures during her television career, but rather than rehashing old encounters for this book, she spoke afresh to thirteen people, naming each interview after a principle the subject nominated, or one that ‘seemed to me to most obviously propel the thinking and attitudes of the person in question’.

Margaret Reynolds was a junior minister in the Hawke government. She began her career in special education, developing a passion for advocacy of the marginalised. Providing effective early childhood education for Aboriginal children in race-bound Townsville in the 1960s took not only idealism but ingenuity and guts. Juggling the needs of a young family with work and political activism, she joined grass-roots organisations such as the anti-war group Save Our Sons, One People of Australia (committed to Aboriginal welfare) and Women’s Electoral Lobby.

In her contribution to Britishness Abroad, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, Anne Dickson-Waiko writes that ‘the experiences of the colonised Other in relation to empire and colonisation needs [sic] urgent investigation, so that the colonised other can … move on to the post-colonial’. She shows a touching belief in the usefulness of research in the humanities: I envy her confidence that her efforts will have such a beneficial effect on the world beyond the academy.

Rod Reeve manages a company that directs foreign-aid projects. Rather than flying in with helicopter-loads of rice, he focuses on ‘capacity-building’ and infrastructure. Agricultural science is his own speciality, but he has set up and run a variety of projects. He has worked to counter opium production in Pakistan, develop dryland farming in Africa, Iraq and Jordan (he had to evacuate during the 1991 Gulf War), and improve health and education in China, Laos and Indonesia. He assisted with the quarantine service in Papua New Huinea and post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh.

As survival memoirs go, Lifelines is unusual in at least one respect. Peter Couche has managed to write this book over a period of thirteen years, while almost completely paralysed and unable to speak after a stroke. With the small amount of movement left in his index finger, he uses a computer to write.