What was your pathway to publishing?

I was about to land a cadetship with The Age, or so I thought. When I missed out, I applied for a job as a publishing assistant with Cambridge University Press. Before long I was working in CUP’s Sydney office, a terrace in Surry Hills. Bits of crumbling wall would fall onto our desks, so manuscripts were often covered in sand. It has always been a glamorous industry, but one I’m very glad I fell into.

What was the first book you published?

An arcane legal studies book, the name of which I can’t remember – not such an auspicious start. But I do remember the second or third: Tom Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia (1996) – an early career highlight, and a book that made me realise what Australian history could be.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Structural editing, yes; copyediting, no.

In July 1986, an ascendant Midnight Oil joined forces with the Northern Territory’s trailblazing, predominantly Indigenous Warumpi Band and embarked on the joint Blackfella–Whitefella tour of remote Indigenous communities in the Western Desert and Top End. The bands would perform for more than a dozen communities, from Warakurna, Western Australia in the south-west to Groote Eylandt on the Gulf of Carpentaria to the north-east, taking in, among other places, the Pintupi community of Kintore; the Luritja, Warlpiri, Anmatjira and Aranda settlement (and Warumpi Band home-ground) of Papunya, and the Gumatj centre of Yirrkala. Strict Rules is then-music journalist Andrew McMillan’s breathless, kaleidoscopic account of that tour. Originally published in 1988, the book is reissued here to coincide with Midnight Oil’s The Great Circle world tour, and includes a new epilogue from frontman Peter Garrett.

When the Oils and Warumpis hit Docker River, the Fraser government’s historic Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976) was barely a decade old. Indigenous rejection of a century of missionary round-ups, forced settlement, and decades-old policies of assimilation was a recent development. The Northern Territory into which Midnight Oil plunged headlong was the site of a nascent sovereignty movement agitating against the twin-colossi of mining and militarisation. The Cold War still loomed large, and US forces were an uneasy presence in the Territory. The bands’ entry into many of the tour’s stopping points required that they first obtain permits from the relevant community councils.

Steven Spielberg may be the most beloved filmmaker alive, but this has rarely stopped critics from patronising him. ‘Such moods as alienation and melancholia have no place in his films,’ the New Yorker’s David Denby wrote on the occasion of Spielberg’s seventieth birthday – a sweeping claim that could hardly be more wrong. In truth, these moods have always been central to Spielberg’s unsettling Romantic vision. Think of the telephone linesman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) yearning to escape his family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); the trick-or-treaters roaming suburbia at sunset in E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial (1982); and all the Lost Boys – and sometimes girls – who wander through subsequent films from Empire of the Sun (1987) to Catch Me If You Can (2002) to The BFG (2016).

Happily, Molly Haskell is a more sensitive observer than Denby. Steven Spielberg: A life in films has the virtue of paying attention to the films themselves, not merely to their maker’s public image as a cheery, wholesome entertainer. This is doubly impressive considering that Haskell has never been an ardent fan. In her introduction to this compact book, she admits to doubting whether she was the best writer for the job,  given that Spielberg’s ‘great subjects – children, adolescents – and genres – science fiction, fantasy, horror, action-adventure – were stay-away zones for me’. This is an understandable statement coming from Haskell, a pioneering feminist film critic best-known as the author of the classic study From Reverence to Rape (1974), which belongs on every buff’s bookshelf. Far from sharing Spielberg’s boyish interest in gizmos and extraterrestrials, Haskell regards such fixations as straightforward symptoms of arrested development, grounded in fear of adulthood and especially of adult relationships with women.

A persistent fascination attaches to those who help break the new wood, and so it is with Bernard Smith (1916–2011). His contribution is foundational to the study of the arts in Australia. Smith was for more than sixty years the country’s leading art historian, but he was also an educator, curator, newspaper critic, collector, memoirist, and biographer. Even as an artist his work has acquired an aura of significance. When I was last at the National Gallery of Australia, one of the large and rather tenebrous canvases he painted in the early 1940s was hanging alongside work by James Gleeson as an example of early Australian surrealism.

The Legacies of Bernard Smith arose from a series of symposia held at the University of Melbourne and the Power Institute in 2012, a year after Smith’s death at the age of ninety-four. There are twenty-one chapters in all, covering many and various topics. It is an interesting collection, but I suspect that we still don’t have a clear vantage on Smith’s long and distinguished career, and that there is much more to say about his influence.