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In the twentieth century, the Jewish experience has been dominated by two extraordinary (and related) events: the Nazi holocaust and the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel. It is natural that they should be reflected in Jewish historiography, and especially in the large number of books, articles, and theses concerned with the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish communities around the world. In Europe, especially, where almost every national Jewish community was destroyed, historians (many of them survivors of the events they describe) have been struggling to come to terms with the way these things happened.

Simon Adams’s thesis is that capital punishment was crucial in how the West was won: ‘The gallows were a potent symbol of an unforgiving social order that was determined to stamp its moral authority over one-third of the Australian continent.’ But hanging was discriminatory; it ‘was never applied fairly or impartially in Western Australia’. Adams points to the fact that ‘there were 17 men hanged between 1889 and 1904, all of whom were “foreigners”: two Afghans, six Chinese, one Malay, two Indians, one Greek, one Frenchman and four Manilamen’, but not a single ‘Britisher’. Capital punishment was racist, reflecting the ‘distortions and prejudices of the British colonial legal system’.

What would Samuel Johnson have made of sports writing? Not much, I suspect. He believed literature should strike bold notes of moral activism, of ‘Truth’ with a capital T, be an edifier, not merely entertainment. That’s asking a lot of sports writing. Or it may just be asking a lot of Australian sports writing. I mention Johnson only because I happened to be reading his Lives of the English Poets before I began this lump of a book. I know it’s quite an imaginative leap from Johnson’s book to a sports writing anthology, but they are both, in their own way, catalogues of dead and forgotten people and their forgotten deeds. Whoever remembers John Pomfret or Thomas Sprat, seventeenth-century stanza-makers once thought worthy of Dr Johnson’s attention? Who remembers Clarrie Grimmett or Bob Tidyman, sportsmen of eras past, once thought worthy of the Australian media’s attention? Not even Johnson, writing at his verbally ornate best, could make an enthusiastic poetaster like me to want to bother with the Pomfrets and Prats. As for the Grimmetts and Tidymans – I’m a sportstaster with a quick thumb for flicking tiresome pages.

‘Dick Downing had a keen sense of what would make Australia a better country – for a strongly welfare minded economist – the knack of being in the right place at the right time.’ Thus Nicholas Brown, in his subtle and intelligent account of one of the shapers of Australia in the twentieth century.

This handsome set of volumes – this ‘library’, it might almost be said – is one of the finest large publishing projects undertaken in Australia over recent years. Dedicated to ‘those who have served in the defence of Australia, 1901–2001’, it is brought triumphantly to a conclusion by the recent issue of its Volume VII, An Atlas of Australia’s Wars. This climactic volume, lying open on your desk, spreads eighty centimetres wide and is a splendidly presented treasury of geographical and logistical information. Now we can make better sense of, for example, the plethora of existing individual unit histories. Many of these (despite their wealth of fine detail and personal information) have baffled our broader understanding. Now we have, set out before us, the land (or the sea, or the airspace) where the fighting took place, and can appreciate reality in a new dimension.

Seamless with his two previous collections, Behind the Moon is Jacob Rosenberg’s potted autobiography of a survivor of Lodz and Auschwitz, delivered from that hell, of which he writes with the kindness of an angel, into the heaven that Melbourne must then logically be. To be the poet of reality and not self-delusion is his reality, is his commission. The trouble he contends with is that his present is posthumous, for the contemporary world could never be charged with such reality. Heaven doesn’t exist.

The play of mirror images in this new work of Thea Astley is quite dazzling. She goes from strength to strength in her command of the crafts of narrative. The book is an enquiry into escape, not just any escape, but escape in an almost metaphysical dimension, in which losing oneself is the only way to find oneself. The novel appears to divide into two novellas, linked by the appearance of the villain, and I use the term advisedly, in both. However the two stories are so closely linked in theme, in motifs and in structure, that they are more like twin pictures that form a diptych.