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If you didn’t read Meg Stewart’s gentle, courteous Autobiography of My Mother when it was first published in 1985, no matter. This second edition was precipitated by the research of others. ‘What My Mother Didn’t Tell Me’, the title of the additional chapter, is that Margaret Coen, Meg’s mother, had a long affair with Norman Lindsay in the 1930s. Lindsay was married, in his fifties; Margaret in her early twenties. The first edition is hardly altered, and only the new chapter challenges Coen’s reticence, causing us to think hard about oral history.

It is remarkable how death has loomed so large in the social sciences over the past couple of decades. From mangled bodies to mediated mass killings, from the medicalisation of dying to the ‘snuff’ movies of hardcore porn: death obsesses the sociological imagination.

According to a recent government survey of child and youth health, around five per cent of young people over the age of twelve suffer from a major depressive illness. Sources of such depression, according to the survey, include stressful events, trauma and heredity. Increasingly, the origin of the illness remains unknown. These disconcerting figures indicate the need for intelligent and accessible discussion about mental health in young adult literature. Both GriEVE and What Does Blue Feel Like? oblige. The first investigates the painful mechanisms of grief and mourning; the other, clinical depression triggered, amongst other things, by abortion.

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum, the Weekend Australian editorial devoted considerable time to savaging the dominant 1970s model of indigenous development, most closely associated with Nugget Coombs: a ‘neo-pastoralist dream [that was] philosophically flawed, a fatal fusion of romanticism and Marxism’. Helen Hughes, in an excerpt from Lands of Shame in the same newspaper, echoes the sentiment, labelling the re-creation of remote communities ‘reverse racism’. Hughes writes: ‘a few courageous leaders are demanding an end to welfare dependence, but their voices are drowned out by articulate élites.’ Enter Noel Pearson, whom the paper’s editorial applauds, along with John Howard. The Australian also published an edited version of the fifty-page article ‘White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for a Radical Centre’ that appears in Griffith Review 16.   ‘White Guilt’ puts flesh on Pearson’s well-known objection to welfare and his emphasis on individual indigenous ‘responsibility’. He looks to early black-American models of liberation, including those of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, for inspiration. It will surprise no one to learn that Pearson favours Washington’s approach, in which ‘blacks should secure their constitutional rights through their own moral and economic advancement’, over Du Bois’s call for ‘ceaseless agitation’. Pearson firmly believes that public policy should encourage the most disadvantaged people in society to change the way they think about themselves, rather than the way the majority thinks about them. While acknowledging that racism originates at a systemic level, Pearson argues that it is a ‘terrible thing to encourage victims … to see themselves as victims’. The consciousness of Bill Cosby, he suggests, would be a good role model. Pearson draws extensively on the black American Shelby Steele, who argues that white guilt, in the form of affirmative action, for example, erodes black agency by making blacks feel helpless: ‘agency’, Steele believes, ‘is what makes us fully human.’

I realise it is a stretch, but imagine The Da Vinci Code with brains. No, that’s not fair: it obviously takes brains of a kind to top best-seller lists for several years. So try thinking of how a serious intellect, as distinct from a facility for page-turning compulsiveness, might have gone to work on it. Such effort won’t tell you all you need to know about Matt Rubinstein’s new novel, but A Little Rain on Thursday is inter alia about old manuscripts, church history, subterranean chambers, Templars and libraries – and it is compulsive reading.

It may be the global unease of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that is causing Australian writers and thinkers to focus more and more on ‘place’: on the fractures and fissures between the homogenising impulse of the nationalist project, on the one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of constructing Australia as a sociological monolith. The current issues of these two journals explore the profound differences between one ‘place’ and another: between Australia and Elsewhere, mainland and island, the mansions of the haves and the degraded housing estates of the have-nots; between state and state, city and city, city and bush, inner-city homelessness and outer-suburban sprawl. And if you expand the concept of ‘place’ into its metaphorical dimensions, there’s almost nothing you can’t discuss, from the buzz-phrase ‘the space of memory’ through the class-bound notion of ‘knowing one’s place’ to L.P. Hartley’s classic ‘The past is another country; they do things differently there’.

The Gospel of Gods And Crocodiles rewrites the boys’ own adventure tale of the nineteenth century. In an intertextual gesture, R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) is the favourite book of one of Elizabeth Stead’s main characters. The thrill of conquest and the titillation of cannibal atrocities typical of Ballantyne’s imperialist fiction are thus replaced by a humanitarian concern with competing foundational myths and the clash of cultures. Stead’s narrative opens, like Genesis I, with the creation stories: the moon and crocodile legends of the unnamed coral island, situated ‘two degrees below the equator’. The arrival of white missionaries brings the attempt by the newcomers to overwrite this indigenous mythology with the Christian message. With this comes the inevitable introduction of Western ways.

Most of you will have heard of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), but for those who have not, it is the peak lobby group of the community welfare sector. ACOSS’s website will tell you that its aims ‘are to reduce poverty and inequality by developing and promoting socially, economically and environmentally responsible public policy and action by government, community and business while supporting non-government organisations which provide assistance to vulnerable Australians’. ACOSS has seventy member organisations, including eight Councils of Social Service at state and territory level, and another four hundred associate members. Every year, Council of Social Service staff lobby federal, state and territory politicians and bureaucrats with proposals and budget submissions. And every year, bureaucrats and ministerial staffers craft careful speeches for politicians game enough to face the Council’s tough questions about budgetary allocations.

The roll-call of Australian female singers of the past resounds like a comforting resurrection of anachronisms: Ada Crosley, Florence Austral, Gertrude Johnson and the epitome of stardom, Melba. The name Amy Castles represents another thing, as Jeff Brownrigg’s recent addition to the cultural history of early Australian songbirds attests. Born into a Catholic and unmusical background in Bendigo in 1880, she was destined to suffer a condition not unknown to musical novitiates: vastly more hype than talent or accomplishment.

If you found the film Candy (2006) hard to swallow, with its junkie protagonists emerging from years of heroin addiction still looking like Hollywood film stars, then The Crimes of Billy Fish may be just what you need. Sarah Hopkins’s first novel has more in common with Luke Davies’ gritty novel Candy (1997), on which the film was based, than with the film’s improbable charms.