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This book has emanated from the University of Newcastle based upon the much needed research into the plight of Australian small businesses by the staff there. The book is intended to make such research findings available in a digestible form and the publication definitely achieves that goal.

Few families in Italian history have enjoyed a fame greater than the Medici whose name has become inseparably linked with the Renaissance. It is paradoxical, therefore, how little has really been known, until recently, of how Cosimo, the founder of its predominance in Florence, paved the way for the establishment of the power it was to exercise over that city. Nicolai Rubinstein, some years ago in his Government of Florence under the Medici, showed how its ascendancy was maintained through a complex system of electoral controls, but it is only now, with the appearance of Australian historian Dale Kent’s study, The Rise of the Medici, that a clear picture is beginning to emerge of the process by which the Medici first issued from the ranks of the Florentine ruling class to the position of dominance which they gradually consolidated over the six decades following Cosimo’s triumphant return from exile in 1434.

This is a book that is unashamedly intended for the Aunty market, not the arty market. It will flourish in circulating libraries and must have solved many a Christmas dilemma (the publishers, I’m sure, budgeted on that). It is happily and old-fashionedly enthusiastic in tone, and tells the story – as authorised – with admiration and lots of incident. As a Helpmann compendium, it is sufficiently detailed to warrant a sub-title such as ‘Everything You Wanted To Know About Robert Helpmann That He Wanted You To Ask’. And Elizabeth Salter did. The things Elizabeth Salter might have been afraid to ask, we can safely surmise the Aunties, also, would not really be interested in anyway. We meet, here Helpmann the Institution, the Public Performer (performer in public and private) whose surprisingly long career is, let’s face it, quite engrossing enough. Perhaps, even, the man IS the performance.

Sir Harry Chauvel, one of the founding fathers of the Australian Armed Forces, died in 1945. His involvement in the military and political history of Australia stretches back to the Boer War, through Gallipoli and Beersheba to the Volunteer Defence Corps of World War II. A.J. Hill’s affectionate and painstaking biography of Chauvel also implies concern for the present and future defence of the nation. At a time in popular repute when military sympathies of any kind are regarded as sabre-rattling, Hill’s book is welcome in both tone and content

‘To paint’, Ian Fairweather once observed, ‘one must be alone.’ True enough, you think, though hardly deserving of quotation. Down the years all kinds of artists have made the same observation, yet not many of them have been as consistently forthright when essaying the value and aesthetic nature of their lonely activity. Fairweather was an exception. ‘I paint for myself,’ he went on to add, ‘nor do I feel any compulsion to communicate, though naturally I am pleased when it seems I have done so.’

I know nothing of David Martin’s childhood or family, but I think that he must come from a long line of slayers of dragons, and that somewhere during the formative years of his childhood he listened to many adult conversations on social justice and human dignity. At any rate, his adult life has been spent dealing with dragons, in one way or another.

One of the joys of reading Jack Fingleton on cricket is that the personality of the author illuminates every page. It is not merely that Fingleton’s style is the man himself; his work transcends a Parnassian obsession with manner of expression. Just as one expects existentialism in every scene of a Sartre play and Shavian philosophy in every line of a Shaw prologue, the reader would be disappointed if he did not discover a highly individualistic and forceful view­point on cricket eloquently expounded in each chapter of a Fingleton book.