Like it or lump it, Catholicism is enormously influential in Australia. This is true even just in terms of raw statistics. The Catholic Church is the largest religious body in the country, with 22.6% of the population self-reporting as Catholic in the 2016 Census. It is also Australia’s largest non-government employer, with around 230,000 people working for the church (ACCIR, 2017). This figure excludes voluntary organisations such as the St Vincent de Paul Society with 20,736 members and 41,152 volunteers (SVP, 2016). However, despite the popular stereotype, Australian Catholicism is not a monolith controlled from Rome. It is a vast amalgam of semi-independent entities – dioceses, parishes, missions, religious orders, lay organisations – all with varying degrees of autonomy.

Almost uniquely in the world, Australian governments fund around seventy per cent of the church’s work, its ‘ministry’ or ‘mission’ in theological jargon. Only dioceses and parishes are self-funded. What justifies this vast enterprise that governments, theoretically, could run themselves? The Catholic claim is that, inspired by the Gospel, the church is offering an alternative to state-run, secular institutions. But what specifically is this alternative? And what does it imply for the separation of church and state in a pluralist democracy like Australia?

Richard Avedon never considered himself a photographer, much less (the horror!) a fashion photographer, yet in sixty years of peripatetic productivity (1944–2004) he revolutionised that field and reinvented photographic portraiture. His work in the fashion industry – as a photographer and, often, creative director of advertising campaigns for Versace, Calvin Klein, and Dior, among others – brought fame and the money to fund the projects that nourished him and for which Avedon believed he would be remembered.

‘He realized that his fame was built around that accomplishment, which was, after all, very real and very large and quite remarkable, but he also knew that being a fashion photographer was, in the universe of fame, a strange thing to be,’ writes Adam Gopnik, one of the nearly dozen voices who eulogise Avedon at the end of Norma Stevens and Steven M.L. Aronson’s controversial and engrossing biography.

Richard Davis is admirably determined that major Australian musical artists whose careers were attenuated by illness should not fade into oblivion. In Wotan’s Daughter (2012), he chronicled the career of Marjorie Lawrence, afflicted by polio just as she had become one of the world’s leading dramatic sopranos. Now, in Close to the Flame, he has given us a biography of Stuart Challender (1947–91), whose undoubted talent was beginning to be recognised internationally as he succumbed to AIDS. But whereas Lawrence’s pre-polio performances took place entirely overseas, the major part of Challender’s career was in Australia, and his influence on Australian performers and composers was profound.

Vivian Maier has received the kind of attention most photographers and artists can only dream of – multiple monographs, documentary films, commercial gallery representation, extraordinary public interest, and now a biography. However, all this activity and acclaim has occurred posthumously. In her lifetime Maier’s mammoth output, estimated at 150,000 photographic exposures and hundreds of reels of silent movie footage, wasn’t known. She didn’t take photographs for public consumption, for publication, or for exhibition – she took them for herself. Photography was her obsession, but its outcomes came perilously close to total obliteration. Maier – ill, old, and poor – was unable to meet the payments on her storage units in Chicago and so, without her knowledge, the contents were sent to auction where small-time collectors purchased her undeveloped films, negatives, and prints. This alone explains her attraction; the mysteriousness of her origins and her secretive life as the ‘nanny photographer’ have only increased it.