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Early in Gail Jones’s novel Black Mirror (2002), an Australian artist dives into the Seine to retrieve a bundle that may contain a drowning baby. Before rising to the surface, she experiences a kind of epiphany in the face of possible death – ‘a willed dissolution, a corrupt fantasy of effacement’. Later she revisits the experience in dreams, swimming through a surrealist underworld of discarded bric-a-brac: plainly, a metaphor for dreaming itself, as an act of plunging into mental depths and searching for hidden treasures.

'I am very annoyed and disgusted with the discrimination, prejudice, ridicule and scorn, with possible disgrace and ruin of my reputation, and good name, if my family, friends, associates and colleagues ever discovered that I express my ‘feminine personality’ by dressing completely as a woman. And yet, because of my ‘feminine personality’ I consider myself to be more compassionate, more understanding, and certainly more relaxed and happy, than the average male.’ Thus wrote the president of a group of heterosexual transvestites to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

The handsome reissue in one volume, by Collins, of Australian Legendary Tales with illustrations by Rex Backhaus-Smith, is a most welcome addition to current publications for Australian enthusiasts and certainly well overdue.

Audrey Tennyson, in a letter to her mother in January 1903, wrote: ‘About my letters … would you ask somebody to buy at Harrods a japanned tin box for holding them … the great thing is to keep them together as if they are in several places they are likely to get put away and forgotten. I am afraid they won’t be worth publishing but they may be of great interest to the boys some day – and Hallam might perhaps make use of them for a book on Australia.

Nicolette Stasko’s poetry is as far from the postmodern baroque as it is possible to be. This is not to say that her work lacks awareness of contemporary theories of art, but rather that her style eschews self-consciously clotted imagery, radical syntactical dislocation, and the production of high-sounding obscurities. There is nothing rebarbative here. At their best, the limpid surfaces of these poems invite the reader into aesthetic experiences where the pictorial is rendered with such clarity that the images resonate deeply. As we might expect from a poet who writes one of her best sequences in response to Cezanne and another following Van Gogh, the most satisfying of these poems recreate that moving stillness characteristic of figurative painting.