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Lucy’s parents have separated, and she is off to London to visit her mother and her new family. She is fortunate to be able to fly: the world is in the grip of perpetual rain, and travel is restricted. Some inhabitants have become amphibians; others live in government camps. But Lucy’s fate is rather more intriguing. A cloud boy (seen only by Lucy) appears outside the plane window before being snatched away by a ghoulish cloud creature. As they wait in the rain at a bus stop in London, Lucy and a boy called Daniel are whisked up to Cloudland by a peculiar woman called January. There it is the task of Lucy, Daniel and assorted Cloudlanders to rid the heavens of the evil Kazia and thus stop the rain on Earth and prevent the onset of an ice age – an interesting premise.

Jaynie Anderson, the third Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, initiated the study of Australian art historiography with fine accounts of the three scholars – Ursula Hoff, Franz Philipp and Joseph Burke – who form the focus of this book. Surprisingly, Professor Anderson’s contributions are barely mentioned, and she is not listed among the fifty-five people Sheridan Palmer has consulted. Some published memoirs of past students of Philipp and Burke go unmentioned in the text and are omitted from the bibliography. None of this encourages.

Antoine Capet’s pithy observation that commemoration is the continuation of history by other means neatly defines the focus of Peter Stanley’s latest book and the problem that he sets out to grapple with. The recently successful advocacy of a ‘Battle for Australia’ annual commemoration flies in the face of the historical record and the evidence that supports it, but the advocates of the popular notion that the Japanese stood poised to invade Australia in 1942 have never allowed the facts to get in the way of a firmly rooted belief.

In the beginning, says a much-repeated joke, was The Plan. Deemed excellent, at first, it passed through many reinterpretations at successive levels of bureaucracy, and ended up being derided as a crock of shit. Britain’s plan for reconstructing Iraq in 2003 might have met the same fate, only there wasn’t one. Don’t laugh: Australia had no plan either, excellent or crock.

Behind the Exclusive Brethren is the story of a religious group that goes to extraordinary lengths to remain ‘apart from the world’ but whose very ‘unworldliness’ is maintained by very worldly means. Journalist Michael Bachelard’s readable and balanced account of the Exclusive Brethren in Australia is informed by a broad understanding of the church in its international context.