Jay Daniel Thompson

The front cover of Black Dust Dancing depicts the silhouette of a child playing on swings against the backdrop of a blood-red sky. This image suggests the suspense and dread that is missing from the novel, which is, for the most part, slow and uneventful.

 Dancing, set in a rural South Australian town, opens with young mother Heidi becoming puzzled by her son Zac’s sudden ill health. This malady is eventually attributed to the ‘traces of historic lead’ found in the black dust that blows through the town. Zac’s diagnosis is made by Caro, a local doctor who is having difficulties (albeit of an emotional kind) with her own daughter, and whose own health is threatened by her penchant for cigarettes and alcohol.

The Book of Emmett, Melbourne journalist Deborah Forster’s first novel, offers a relentlessly grim but nonetheless engagingly written and often quite moving look at a distinctly dysfunctional family.

The Best Australian Political Writing 2009 is a collection of articles about the political climate in Australia over the course of twelve months. In 411 pages, a range of prominent Australian writers analyse the events that made headlines in this country during what editor Eric Beecher describes as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime-year’.

Julian Halls’s novel The Museum is a recent addition to Australian gay and lesbian fiction. The text engages with an important issue relating to same sex-attracted men and women, but it is ultimately disadvantaged by a distinct sense of amateurishness.

Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? focuses on the unsolved disappearance of the eponymous figure. Hean was an environmental activist who vanished in 1972 while flying to Canberra to campaign against the destruction of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder, which was to be flooded for a hydro-electric scheme. The text is written by documentary film-maker Scott Millwood, who ‘offered a $100,000 reward for information that would lead to an answer to the mystery’.

In recent times, Queensland has developed a reputation as ‘an engine of national growth and innovation’. This reputation was boosted by the 2007 election of Queenslander Kevin Rudd as prime minister. In this edition of Griffith Review, subtitled ‘Hidden Queensland’, a range of contributors explore the evolution of the Australian state once best known ‘for its extremes of weather and politics’.

In Tasmania’s Wilderness Battles, Greg Buckman provides a history of the environment movement in Tasmania. He focuses on the various battles that have taken place between environment activists and those developers that have viewed Tasmania’s wilderness as being purely a source of profit.

Buckman opens with the Lake Pedder battle in the 1960s. This battle was waged between activists and the Hydro Electric Commission, and was significant for ‘its radicalising influence on the Tasmanian environment movement’. Buckman moves on to describe disputes over the Franklin River, the Farmhouse Creek forest and the Gunns pulp mill. Buckman concludes by arguing that Tasmania needs to adopt a more ‘enlightened view of wilderness’.

In A Good Death, Rodney Syme outlines his case for the legalisation of euthanasia. Drawing on his experience working with seriously ill patients over several decades, Syme (a medical practitioner) advances the controversial argument that ‘physician-assisted death’ is a humane response to ‘intolerable and otherwise unrelievable suffering’.