Australia’s obsession with Greece goes back a long way; it has not always been as warm as we might like to think. The George Johnston–Charmian Clift–Sidney Nolan kind of love affair with the islands could sometimes turn a bit sour: think of Patrick White or demeaning references to the ubiquitous Olympic Café in films and stories. The temptation of writing in these well-established furrows is to exploit the subject matter rather than explore it.

There is male dancing, but no Zorba the Greek handkerchief-waving, in Arnold Zable’s new novel. In poignant fact, he reminds us of the earlier reception of Greeks in this country, during World War I, when our pleasant forbears – challenging etymology among other things and denying any connection with forbearance – rioted, smashed and looted Greek stalls and stores, and chased off those early refugees. Our cultural practices were entrenched from an early age. ‘Go back to where you fuck’n came from’: I’m not convinced that would have been the idiom in 1917. Where is the great sanguinary expletive? But you get the message. As against which the narrative invites us into a circle of listeners: ‘The fire is burning. And the fire loves you.’In Australia that reads as more threatening than welcoming.

Sea of Many Returns, only approximately a story, is rather an interweaving of stories which define the culture of Ithaca last century, and of those Ithacans who relocated to Melbourne, some of them via Kalgoorlie, and the tension of the unsevered links between them, links between brothers and families, intimate and extended. In this it develops the manner and mannerisms of Zable’s well-received Café Scheherazade (2001). Nostalgia is the underlying and crippling malaise of the Ithacans too, the pain of home-longing.

In the days of the Great Anzac Revival, it is unusual to find an Australian VC who has not been the subject of a biography. Here we have one of the most famous of them all – Arthur Blackburn (1892–1960). I was surprised to find that this is the first biography of him.

He has been well treated by Andrew Faulkner, who has written this book with admirable verve and restraint. The verve obviously came from finding a congenial figure such as Blackburn to write about; he was a soldier who surely deserves the much overworked appellation of ‘hero’. The restraint brought to this labour of love is worthy of note. Faulkner neither claims that Blackburn, nor his Tenth Battalion, nor Australia, won either World War I or II single-handedly. Other authors of recent works on the Australian role in these wars could do worse than read Faulkner’s account to appreciate how heroism and nationalism can be placed in context.

Antarctic exploration began with Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of the continent (1772–75) and continued intermittently until the first two decades of the twentieth century. Douglas Mawson’s three expeditions coincided with what has been called the ‘heroic era of Antarctic exploration’, beginning with Robert Falcon Scott’s British National Antarctic Expedition (1901–4) and ending with Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–17). Four out of the twenty expeditions undertaken in this period stand out: those of Roald Amundsen, Mawson, Shackleton and Scott. However, the present-day polar adventurer Ranulph Fiennes has argued that Mawson did not achieve the fame of the other three, even in Australia, because he survived his explorations and died in old age.

Not only does Emma McEwin, Mawson’s great-granddaughter, wish to counter this relative neglect and to place his achievements within the context of polar exploration, she aims to tell his personal story through the love letters that he and his then fiancée, her great-grandmother Paquita, wrote to each other during his second voyage, the Australian Antarctic Expedition (1911–14).

Anthony Lawrence is a brilliant poet whose books are surprisingly uneven: this new volume, Bark, though, is a decided success. The best of his poems are usually those which are built around a confrontation between poet (carrying a fairly heavy backpack of personal trauma) and the natural world. This can be quite explicit, as in the fourth poem of a generally comic suite, ‘Bestiary in Open Tuning’, in which a ‘five metre white pointer / ... made a pass’ at the poet swimming in ‘over a thousand, sun-shafted feet / of Great Southern Ocean’. The double meaning of ‘made a pass’ is significant: there is an erotics involved here, as well as the simple evaluative movements of a predator.

In a pair of poems at the beginning of the book’s second section, the confrontation gets ratcheted up in intensity. In the first, the author is caught in a northern cyclone and spends the night of the storm’s passing huddled beneath table, reading a meteorology textbook by torchlight. The second concerns itself with the various nasty stingers of the tropical shore. The mode is comparative (‘bluebottles are less than a minor irritation’), but at the top are the box-jellyfish which teach us that the word ‘agony’, ‘falls so far short of the mark as to render it redundant’. The poem finishes with a victim who, while waiting to die, can hear and understand waterbirds talking to each other. As in the case of Siegfried, revelations about the natural world are given to those who stake all.