At last a spectacular tome for the many fans of Vincent Namatjira, one that will also win him new admirers. Originating from an exhibition at the Tarnanthi Festival and the Art Gallery of South Australia, this beautifully laid-out book from Thames & Hudson Australia captures the humour and intense vision of Namatjira’s career to date.

An anthology dedicated to the transnational history of psychedelic drugs and culture seems a timely enterprise. We are twenty or so years into what has become known as the ‘psychedelic renaissance’, the global revival of interest in compounds such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin centring on their use alongside psychotherapy as treatments for a growing number of mental health disorders.

The Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) recently published a special issue to mark the (presumed) halfway point of the Albanese Labor government. There was an editorial and nineteen articles. As you would expect, the verdict was mixed. The most striking thing to me, however, was that the authors had enough material to work with. A similar exercise for the Abbott and Morrison governments would have produced the problem faced by Old Mother Hubbard. The Turnbull government might just have provided her poor doggy with a bone, but one without much meat on it.

When Georgia Blain died at the age of fifty-one in 2016, the reading public was robbed of a superb prose writer in her prime. Her final and, some consider, best novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), achieved wide critical acclaim. Shortly after Blain succumbed to brain cancer, that novel went on to win or be shortlisted in a slew of national prizes.

This volume brings together two highly credentialled thinkers about moral and ethical matters: Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, founder of the animal welfare organisation the Life Conservation Association and the Buddhist Hong-Shi College, as well as a lecturer at Hsuan Chuang University.

That doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill is something their patients might say, and about as useless as declaring that dentists are forbidden from contracting toothache or that undertakers should live forever – seeing other people out, not themselves.

Back in the 1970s, when I went up to Katerina Clark’s place in Connecticut for the weekend, I was always a bit on my guard. Katerina was a wonderful and generous friend, but inquisitive. Being young, I had things in my personal life I wanted to hide. A silent tussle went on between us as she did her best to ferret them out (probably knowing from her other sources more or less what they were) and I stone-walled.

Few terms capture the imagined structure of European history as succinctly, and aptly, as ‘the Middle Ages’. Whether the era is being invoked fondly, casually, or with deep disdain, the term at once offers a comprehensive, normative account of civilisation and casts aspersions on those out of sync with it. It was designed to do just that. ‘The Middle Ages’ inserts itself as an antithesis between two seemingly cohesive periods: Antiquity and the Renaissance (the latter soon to be replaced by Enlightenment and then Modernity). It thus creates continuity by underscoring rupture, and stresses similarity through difference. Despite the era’s appeal to the Romantics and nascent nationalism in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, respectively, its poor reputation has been steady: from Jules Michelet’s quip about ‘the Middle Ages’ being ‘one thousand years without a bath’, to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where Marsellus Wallace famously vows ‘to get medieval’ on his torturer’s ass.

During a recent lunar eclipse, I marvelled as Earth’s shadow nibbled away the Moon’s light. This creeping shadow testified to the awesome movement of the celestial spheres, Earth inching along its trajectory around the Sun while the Moon fell around Earth until, on this special night, all three bodies were closely aligned in the same plane: Sun, Earth, Moon. A related alignment occurs each month, when the Sun’s light is reflected from the full, uninterrupted Moon. We can see it because the Moon orbits Earth in a slightly different plane from that of Earth’s motion around the Sun. But on this night, the Moon was passing through a point where these two planes intersected, so that Earth directly blocked the light from Sun to Moon.

Quentin Beresford, an adjunct professor in politics at Sunshine Coast University, has written and edited about a dozen books, including the excellent Wounded Country (2021), which dealt with the failure of water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin. His latest offering explores thirteen ‘business scandals’ in Australia. Beresford’s definition of a scandal is selective and eclectic. The scope of the book extends to corporate collapses but also to wage theft, climate-change denial, occupational health and safety failures, and the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites.