‘Most history is simply lost.’ By means of a regular biographical column in the Jesuit magazine Madonna published over the past twenty-five years, Father Edmund Campion has preserved pieces of Australian personal history that might otherwise have been neglected, if not forgotten altogether. In this, the author’s second collection of biographical sketches (following Great Australian Catholics, 1997), Campion focuses on extraordinary accomplishments achieved within outwardly ordinary Australian lives. Catholics, he demonstrates, have been involved in every aspect of Australian life, not just as priests and nuns but also, increasingly it seems, as lay people.

A priest in Sydney for more than sixty years and a former chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Campion writes within the short lives format without any apparent sense of constraint. The Catholic tradition itself supplies him with impetus as a biographer: ‘We human beings are story-tellers, we pass on our values through the stories we tell. This is particularly true of Catholics, who get their identity through their histories, which they see as salvation history linking them to the saving actions of Christ. So, for Catholics, doing history – passing on the values by telling stories – is a pastoral imperative. We must look where we have been in order to know where we are going.’

Jessica L. Wilkinson won the 2014 Peter Porter Poetry Prize with ‘Arrival Platform Humlet', a phantasmagoria of typographical and lexical invention whirling around a tune of the same name by Percy Grainger. This book performs the same service for his whole life and oeuvre, to stunning effect.

Grainger (1882–1961) is generally known as an interesting character first and a composer second. Wilkinson helpfully lists for us the various Percys on offer, among them the Folk-Song Collector, the Nordic, the Flagellant. This was a man who founded a museum in his own memory and who preserved a large part of the English folk tradition while also advocating ‘free’ machine-generated music.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of arguably the biggest single breakthrough in our knowledge of how immunity works. After years of uncertainty, it turned out that the immune system contains two major functional classes of white blood cells. One class recognises foreign organisms, such as invading bacteria or transplanted tissue from an incompatible organ donor, ultimately leading to their rejection and destruction by the body. The other class recognises foreign chemicals in the body, and responds by neutralising them with highly specific antibodies. These foreign chemicals include proteins on the outer surfaces of infectious viruses and bacteria. Once targeted by antibodies, invading micro-organisms can be overcome by the immune system. The diversity of potentially pathogenic organisms is immense. Consequently, the immune system must be incredibly complex and adaptable to withstand these ever-present challenges to our well-being. Nevertheless, many of the mechanisms determining its operation are now well understood, not least due to the internationally recognised research undertaken at Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

Remarkably, one of the greatest advances in public health and preventative medicine occurred well before the biological basis of immunity was known. The development of immunisation as a protective measure against deadly or disabling disease was a triumph of skilled scientific experimentation and observation, built upon generations of folk experience. As a result of immunisation programs around the world, once-widespread and potentially fatal diseases such as tuberculosis, tetanus, measles, and whooping cough have become rare or, in cases such as smallpox and polio, almost eliminated. Why, then, is there a perception in some quarters of the public that immunisation is somehow harmful, a dangerous procedure to be actively resisted? This is the question that award-winning essayist Eula Biss sets out to answer in On Immunity: An Inoculation.

Alex Skovron’s impressive volume of new and selected poems, Towards the Equator, drawn from all of his published work to date, shows him to be a writer of recurrent and abiding preoccupations. He cares passionately and sometimes rather fastidiously about culture (particularly European culture), and continually worries about words, books, and their import. He is formally accomplished, writing sonnets and other complex verse forms as well as delivering a collection of poised ten-line ‘sonnetinas’ and a group of meditative prose poems. He repeatedly questions the import of historical events and currents – in one poem history is ‘our cross and our salvation’ – and frequently quizzes the significance of time.

The prose poem ‘Encounters’ suggests the possibility of ‘a middle path’ between regret and hope – ‘between understanding nothing and too much’. Skovron often adopts this position in his work. His poems are full of hope – for the future of human culture – and certain kinds of regret – a general regret for human violence and intransigence. Mind you, in his ‘middle path’ Skovron knows and understands a great deal. It is just that his poems repeatedly demonstrate a reluctance to overstate his claims on knowledge and understanding.