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This book, researched, written, and published in the United States, fulfils an immediate Australian need. Sweat on that you local academics, publishers, and timid promoters of the Oz product. It is called ‘A guide to information sources’, which makes it sound very ‘Australian Literary Studies’, but in fact it is an eminently readable, browsable volume.

For many years there has been little study of politics and elections at the state level in Australia. It seems to have been assumed that only national politics is really important, and that voters made very little distinction between state and federal politics. Thus, the conventional wisdom on electoral behavior had it that voters reacted fairly predictably on the basis of their early political socialization and in response to a set of vague images of the parties which was generated largely at the national level and changed only slowly.

One of the great merits of Phillip Deery’s presentation is the way in which he shows the immediacy of the coal strike: its great significance in changing the lives of the miners and in transforming the political situation in New South Wales. It was a time of great bitterness, in which those who expected the interests of the Labor movement and the Labor Party to converge, considered themselves betrayed. Nor did the swiftness of the Chifley government in moving to crush the miners’ strike garner them any favour in the public’s eyes. The public considered the hardships brought about by the coal strike to be merely the latest in a series of events that seem destined to threaten their comfort and standard of living. The communists were blamed for the strike, probably unjustly, for although there were communists among the miners, the vast majority were non-communists with legitimate grievances against the mining companies.

Jessie Street, the subject of this biography, is one of the women we have ignored. She is an important figure in our history, but few people know much about her life. She was involved in feminist and socialist movements, in the Labor Party, in campaigns for Aboriginal rights and in the movement for world peace – in a long active career which spanned the years 1911–70.

Norm, the major television star of the Life Be In It campaign has encouraged us to seriously consider walking in order to enjoy the landscape around us more often than we generally do. This book sets out to encourage families to try this at some twenty bush, coastal and historic locations in and around Melbourne.

The last couple of years have seen a revival in the post card – not your glossy view card of opera houses, kangaroos and koalas (I am told popular postcards of our furry friends sell in the millions over a year), but a much more small circulation kind which, because of its limited interest, can’t be sold in normal card outlets. Hence the tear-out, four per page, thirty-two per book, post card extravaganzas sold through normal book channels.

Coaches and journalists are the high priests of sport. The former determine the liturgy; the latter explain, comment on, and provide judgments and recommendations for reform to the great unwashed. Roy Masters has performed both roles. He coached the rugby league clubs Western Suburbs (1978–81) and St George (1982–87) and has for two decades been a font of insight, mainly on rugby league, for readers of the Sydney Morning Herald. His journalism has combined intelligence, larrikinism and an eye for the absurd.

It opens with an enigmatic statement – ‘It might take two hundred years’ – (what might?) – and then presents an enigmatic situation. Amidst Australian bush images and scraps of Aboriginal sounding stories, there is someone called Fox wandering around.

Fox, we soon learn, is a young chap called Jim Fox who is making a mysterious trip to Sydney from a farm he once lived on somewhere up the Murray.

He’d expected to be able to just go to places and remain anonymous, for people to just accept his presence as easily as he did theirs, with only the questions which could be answered by your own observations.

He was wrong, of course. People do ask him where he’s from and where he’s headed for and why he’s going there. Fox never says much, but no one minds; people only say affectionately ‘you’re a strange bugger, Fox’ and buy him beers, and give him rides, jobs, money, places to stay, and all the best advice they know.

B.A. Santamaria is given to self-dramatization. His autobiography (1981) was subtitled Against the tide but he was not metaphorically explicit as to whether the tide was going out or coming in. For myself I do not want to think of Santamaria behaving with Canute-like megalomania; I prefer to envisage him backstroking towards shore with a rear-vision snorkel, spouting against the undertow of inevitable social change, and praying for some apocalyptic dumper to preserve him from the future agoraphobic shock of an ever-widening ocean.

Telling one’s own story comes naturally: we are all in some sense autobiographers. There is nothing new in the urge to seek a pattern in a life while living it, to advertise an ego, to explain, confess, justify, understand – or simply to say ‘I was there’. What is new is the comparative ease with which the urge can be accommodated and the ‘self-life’ made into text.

The current interest in the narratives of ‘ordinary people’ is attested by the extraordinary success of Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life. It may also be seen in some recent and important scholarly enterprises such as the nineteenth century Australian women’s diaries published by Lucy Frost in No Place for a Nervous Lady or the oral histories from which Janet McCalman constructed inner urban Richmond in the depression years as Struggletown.