Arnold Schoenberg rarely missed a punch. Whether in music theory, composition, or the fraught polemics of his age, he communicated with a clarity of purpose verging on the tyrannical. Visiting Schoenberg in California during his last years, the conductor Robert Craft commented on ‘the danger of crossing the circle of his pride, for though his humility is fathomless it is also plated all the way down with a hubris of stainless steel’. Harvey Sachs is worried that music lovers of the twenty-first century are failing to appreciate the continuing significance of the composer despite, or perhaps because of, this armour-plating. Addressed to the musical ‘layman’, Sachs’s ‘interpretive study’ is a passionate, occasionally self-doubting essay intended to demonstrate why Schoenberg still matters. Schoenberg’s five chapters follow a chronological track, attempting to account for most of the fifty-odd opuses of Schoenberg’s oeuvre, within a rich context of his life’s turbulent course. His chapter titles dramatically reflect the struggle – battle lines, war, breakthrough, and breakaway – of both his life and his works. Sachs popularises, refreshes, and sometimes refutes the stainless-steel images passed down in the sanctioned texts of musicology, many written by Schoenberg’s acolytes.

His account of the music naturally pays particular attention to two stylistic turns for which Schoenberg is renowned: his move around 1907–8 from the ultra-chromatic tonality of late Romanticism to ‘beyond tonality’, where, as the composer stated, ‘the overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be counterbalanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent a key’; and in the early 1920s when he moved to regulate this new atonality through orderly ‘composing with twelve tones’, often known as serialism. These are difficult concepts for Sachs’s layman to understand, let alone musically to enjoy, and Sachs tries to find the simplest possible explanations. His commentaries on the First Chamber Symphony (Op. 9, 1906) and Pierrot Lunaire (Op. 21, 1912), for instance, portray innovative compositional techniques as well as their aural and social reception. This helps the reader to understand why Igor Stravinsky, then companionable enough to Schoenberg, heralded Pierrot as ‘the solar plexus as well as the mind of early twentieth-century music’.

In the film Almost Famous (2000), director Cameron Crowe’s alter ego, fifteen-year-old William Miller, doggedly pursues his dream of breaking into rock journalism. He cold-calls legendary music journalist Lester Bangs (marvellously played by a dishevelled Philip Seymour Hoffman). Next thing we know, he is commissioned by Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres to head out on the road with fictitious band Stillwater to write a story that ends up on the cover of Rolling Stone. If only it were that easy.

Rock journalism, in its infancy, was fuelled more by passion than good sense. With few literary models, and virtually zero financial return, it was mostly a case of making it up as you went along, while endeavouring to stay abreast of a fast-evolving field. Music journalist Samuel J. Fell’s Full Coverage: A history of rock journalism in Australia fills a welcome gap in the history of journalism, charting as it does the rise and fall of the local music magazines, along with their founders and contributors, that helped shape our perceptions of rock music, and associated genres, in this country.

Well-informed debate on national security, never more important than now, depends on reliable accounts of historical episodes, ones not distorted by latter-day political or diplomatic sensitivities. For more than a century, Australians have benefited from a tradition of official histories of the nation’s involvement in conflicts and peacekeeping operations, for which governments of all persuasions have given independent historians access to all relevant official records, publishing their works without political or diplomatic censorship.

Since C.E.W. Bean was commissioned to create the twelve-volume official history of Australia’s involvement in World War I (1920–42) Australians have generally accepted that official historians present as full and fair an account as possible, without being obliged to a follow a partisan or governmental line. For their part, governments have usually accepted that independent ‘warts and all’ accounts are not only more credible but also more useful than those constrained by an official line.

Two recent episodes have called this tradition into question. Publication of an official history of Australian operations in the East Timor crisis of 1999, Born of Fire and Ash, was delayed for three years by the clearance process conducted by government agencies, principally the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). When the volume was finally published in late 2022, those agencies pointedly declined to give it an official launch or to promote it in the way that governments had previous official history volumes. Secondly, after decades of clothing its signals intelligence (sigint) activities in secrecy, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has been the subject of the almost simultaneous publication of both a volume of ‘official history’ and another which pointedly declares itself an ‘unofficial history’.

In 2023, a broken engagement might be followed by tears, the division of possessions, and a reliance on family and friends. It might even involve a few trips to the therapist. But up until the mid-to-late twentieth century, Australian men and women’s heartbreaks could also see them take a trip to court to charge their partner with breach of promise of marriage.

Alecia Simmonds’s Courting: An intimate history of love and the law uses court records and newspaper reports to tell the history of nearly one thousand cases of breach of promise. She unpacks the ‘lacerated feelings’, the gifts, the gossip, the letters and poems of the couples whose relationship led them not to the altar but to the courtroom. There, to a captive audience, they told their tales of love and loss, seduction and betrayal, deception and desperation.

In more than 400 pages, Simmonds offers a provocative and compelling history of the ‘texture, language and politics of romance’. Courting offers readers a history of emotions, romantic material culture, courtship, and dating, as well as insight into the historical pathologisation of love, the rise of the counsellor, and the patriarchal hue of the Australian legal system. It does so through ten case studies from colonial Sydney to early-nineteenth-century Jamaica, Paris in 1848, 1850s Bathurst, late-nineteenth-century Hong Kong, the ‘Syrian Colony’ in Redfern in the 1890s, the pearling towns of Broome in the early 1900s, and depression-era Perth. Simmonds lingers upon the twists and turns of each case, and offers nuanced arguments about the role of location, race, class, and gender in love, especially when subject to the law.