These two first novels confront the ongoing complaints of literary commentators that new novels are too often set in the past rather than dealing with present realities. Moving from the criticism of ‘literary grave-robbing’ by American author Jonathan Dee, Malcolm Knox has complained that most major Australian novelists tend to mine fantastic or historical subject matter rather than examining the culture of our daily lives. Knox takes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, a popular and critical success, as his model for a perceptive fictional treatment of popular culture. More recently, David Marr urged novelists to use contemporary settings to address what he calls the ‘new philistinism of John Howard’s Australia’.

David Kelly and Julia Osborne have set their novels predominantly in the Australian suburbia of the past few decades, and focus on attempts by liminal characters to negotiate their place in these sometimes-harsh environs. Kelly’s Fantastic Street presents what our prime minister might call the black-picket-fence view of Australian suburbia, a world of poverty, domestic conflict, broken families, and sexual abuse.

Alex has grown up in a family of oft-changing configuration: after his father’s infertility was discovered, his mother turned to adoption and fostering, which has resulted in a revolving door of damaged youngsters. Alex himself starts adolescence with more than his fair share of burdens: he was given away for adoption by his thirteen-year-old birth mother, he has striking buck-teeth, and his schoolmates have perceived his homosexuality. The adoptive father he loved is replaced by a stepfather who proves adept at all forms of abuse. These tensions are strengthened by the competition for maternal affection between the children, and the occasionally violent inter-sibling antipathies. As the novel opens, Alex has washed up at his mother’s house in Brisbane. He is on social security and living in a caravan in the backyard. He is there to care for her now that she has terminal cancer.

To an appreciable extent, this is a book that can be judged by the cover. In the auto-interview accompanying the publisher’s media release, Anthony O’Neill explains that he was motivated to write his second novel by a desire to ‘emulate certain classic tales of the macabre that emerged from the nineteenth century, arguably the greatest century for novels’. In particular, he states that The Lamplighter is ‘my attempt to write something like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, without it being a homage – I wanted it to live and breathe in its own right’.

O’Neill succeeds in this aim. It is no criticism of his work to observe that it is in large measure pastiche, a quality made manifest in the impressive ‘retro’ dust jacket whose design is clever and ironic, being at once the jacket and the book underneath that it appears to be covering. The central image of the lamplighter reflected in a child’s eye against the backdrop of a blood-soaked Victorian city is arresting, and captures the atmosphere as well as alluding to the events of the narrative.

The attention to self-conscious period detail extends to the endpapers, chapter headings, typography and even the pages themselves, which are roughly cut in the manner of a book of the time. It is not often that designers and publishers receive credit for the effort they put into book production, but this must be surely one of the best-made Australian novels of recent times. It is on a par with the UQP hardcover edition of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, itself textually an example of a kind of pastiche.

As a literary form, pastiche at its least consequential is merely a lampoon, a light-hearted parody. At its least ethical, it may have associations with forgery or plagiarism. But it can also be a serious, innovative, and reverential form of artistic expression. And it is this higher form of imitation – the original kind – that O’Neill assays.

William C. Clarke cuts an interesting figure. An anthropologist who has concentrated on Pacific populations, Clarke combined this discipline with an interest in poetry in his 2000 lecture ‘Pacific Voices, Pacific Views: Poets as Commentators on the Contemporary Pacific’. Clarke used his poetry as a vehicle for considering issues such as land tenure, corruption, and tourism. It is angry, astute poetry; this is not the tranquil Hawaii and Fiji of tourist literature. Such poetry is undoubtedly moving, despite Clarke’s echo of W.H. Auden’s assertion that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.

In A Momentary Stay, his first collection, Clarke persists in exploring politically charged issues. He draws attention to the ways we mistreat and misunderstand nature: how ‘the soil slides down slope / beneath the dearth of a bird’s song’. Politically, nothing may happen due to this collection; on a smaller scale, Clarke’s poetry inspires movement, in both poet and audience. As with all good poetry, thoughts are rearranged, positions reconsidered.

The title touches on, ironically perhaps, the meaning of existence. According to Clarke’s environmental understanding, we are simply ephemeral dwellers on this earth. The phrase comes from Robert Frost, who argued that poetry ‘runs a course of lucky events and ends in clarification of life … a momentary stay against confusion’. For Frost, the ‘momentary stay’ of poetry makes something happen; humans have the capacity to understand and order the world through art. It is through the unobjective, illogical language of poetry that we are invited to do both.

So it is for Clarke. In ‘Ecology’, he struggles against his desire to personify and sentimentalise nature, exploring instead nature’s command of order and logic: ‘I know the songs of birds / sound not for happiness / but to denote possession.’ Yet something happens and the poet is returned to that which he doesn’t ‘know’:

One of the puzzles of Australia’s diplomatic service is the comparative lack of informative memoirs by senior diplomats. Of the sixteen heads of Foreign Affairs mentioned in this book, only three apart from Richard Woolcott – Alan Watt, Alan Renouf, and Peter Henderson – have written memoirs (although John Burton wrote much about international conflict management, and Stuart Harris – more an academic than a public servant – has written about many international issues, especially economic ones). Some senior figures have contributed columns and articles, but many other senior and respected ambassadors have written nothing. Perhaps this is one reason for the lack of a profound appreciation of international affairs in Australia, which Woolcott so deplores. This book, however, is a substantial contribution to the literature, situated firmly in the realist tradition, and is probably the best memoir to date from a former Australian diplomat.

Woolcott begins with a homily about the need for Australia to ‘adjust to the region in which we are situated’. He laments the trivialisation and oversimplification with which external affairs matters are often treated, and the way in which domestic politics can inhibit best diplomatic practice.

Two Dick Woolcotts are known to the public. One is the distinguished senior diplomat, a rising star from very early in his career, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and holder of virtually every senior Australian ambassadorial appointment at one time or another; debonair, articulate, well-briefed, with an amazing ability to charm and persuade every prime minister from Robert Menzies to Paul Keating, and most major world leaders with whom Australia has dealt in the past forty years. The other Dick Woolcott is the evil genius of Australia’s East Timor policy, leader of the ‘Jakarta lobby’ in Foreign Affairs, who, as ambassador in Jakarta in 1975, exerted far too great an influence over the governments of the day and was blind to the rights of the East Timorese. Which is the reality and which is the caricature?