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During the 1970s, when Nation Review was a newspaper and the Labor Party was fair dinkum, this country spawned cartoonists like mushrooms in a paddock where cows have been defecating in a grand manner. The Vietnam war was on, but that didn’t stop the Melbourne Cup or the Grand Final, and it didn’t improve the economy as expected either.

We found lovely ways to get rid of some frightening chemical wastes, i.e., we tipped them on Asian forests: all the better to see you with.

Brilliant Creatures is not so much a novel – a first novel, as the title page coyly points out – as it is a presentation pack. The text itself is bookended by an introduction at the front, and a set of extensive, very boring notes and index at the back. A set of notes and an index for a novel, a first novel? Yep. Clive James has heard of Nabokov and Pale Fire. He has also, as the four-page introduction makes clear, heard of his ‘illustrious ancestor Henry’: of Gide, Montaigne, Sterne, Peacock, Firbank, Trollope, Joyce, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche.

The World of Norman Lindsay is compiled by Lin Bloomfield, proprietor of the Bloomfield Galleries in Paddington, NSW, and an authority on Lindsay’s work. It was first published more expensively in 1979. This elegant paperback will make it widely accessible, which is a matter for satisfaction. It contains comprehensive, short, expert articles about Lindsay’s life and achievements as an artist and the reminiscences of Lindsay’s children, grandchildren, models, friends, and colleagues. Good illustrations, some in colour, cover every era of his works in all their variety, and the book also includes photographs of people and places.

It is difficult for a reviewer to do justice to this enchanting book. But if one were looking for something to give to an Australian to help him better understand the history, traditions, literature, environment, and folklore of his country – or if one wished to help a visitor to Australia to an appreciation of all those circumstances from 1788 to the present day which have shaped the characters and characteristics of those who inhabit this vast continent, then this book is it.

In an authorial note Fay Zwicky describes her collection of stories as thematic rather than chronological.

They are all concerned more or less ironically, with the growth of a writer’s consciousness which may help to account for the varying degrees of stylistic density and the shifts in personae.

The first seven stories, the Helen Freeman sequence, offer a retrospective view of Helen’s struggle to establish a female identity in a world dominated by men and by masculine edicts and rituals. Taking a hint from the introductory note, these stories reflect, in essence, the stages in the author’s personal development from her youthful recollections of her family during and after the Second World War to her marriage and separation. It is arguable whether these stories should be treated as the discontinuous narrative of one life, though they can be read that way. They are not, however, an autobiography. 

Gwyneth Dow has edited a collection of essays that forms a relevant and coherent whole. The authors seek to salvage what they see as ‘the good things’ in education reform of the late sixties and early seventies, reform that had weaknesses which were the result of ‘faulty thinking, poor social analysis, romantic psychological theories, slip-shod pedagogy’. The contributors to this book are Rory Barnes, Gwyneth Dow, Rod Foster, Noel P. Gough, Bill Hannan, and Doug White. Gwyneth Dow points out they do not all share the same ideological positions, but they are clearly in fundamental agreement about curriculum reform, a more democratic approach to teaching and to the running of schools, and a more socially aware view of teaching and teacher education.

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Gordon S. Wood lamented the current dominance of ‘monographic history’, a dominance which he claimed has brought ‘chaos’ to the discipline of history. Most works, he argued are so specific and technical that they are comprehensible only to a few specialists in each field. The title of this book might suggest that here is yet another study designed only to appeal to that hardy little band of historians who spend their professional lives grubbing through the records of early America.

On his first day at St Patrick’s, East Melbourne, Vincent Buckley was ‘flogged and flogged’ by a Jesuit priest in ‘an incompetent fury’. It is an experience that many of his readers will easily recognise, though their remembered lambastings were more likely to have been incurred at the hands of the Brothers and, unlike Buckley’s, would have been a continuing feature of school life.