An Oka kamikaze rocket bomb
Sits in the vestibule, its rising sun
Ablaze with pride.
Names of the fallen are on CD-ROM.
The war might have been lost. The peace was won:
A resurrection after suicide.

For once I feel the urge to send my thoughts
Your way, as I suppose these people do.
I see the tide
Come in on Papua. Their troop transports,
The beach, our hospital. Over to you:
Why was one little miracle denied?

After they made our nurses wade waist deep
They picked their targets and they shot them all.
The waves ran red.
Somehow this is a memory I keep.
I hear the lost cries of the last to fall
As if I, too, had been among the dead.

Those same troops fought south to the Golden Stairs,
Where they were stopped. They starved, and finally
The last few fed
On corpses. And the victory would be theirs
If I were glad? That’s what you’re telling me?
It would have been in vain that your son bled?

But wasn’t it? What were you thinking when
Our daughters died? You couldn’t interfere,
I hear you say.
That must mean that you never can. Well, then,
At least I know now that no prayers from here
Have ever made much difference either way,

And therefore we weren’t fighting you as well.
Old people here saw the Missouri loom
Out in the bay
And thought the end had come. They couldn’t tell
That the alternative to certain doom
Would be pachinko and the cash to play

A game of chance, all day and every day.
In that bright shrine you really do preside.
What you have said
Comes true. The DOW is down on the Nikkei.
The royal baby takes a buggy ride.
The last war criminal will die in bed.

Kate Grenville is a brave woman. For some years now, the representation of Aboriginal people by white writers has been hedged about by a thicket of post­colonial anxieties, profoundly problematic and important but too often manifested as hostile, holier-than-thou critique, indulging, at its most inept, in wilfully skewed readings of the fiction in order to fit the thesis. As if that were not enough, there has also been a bit of a backlash over the last year or two against the writing of any kind of historical fiction, on the grounds that contemporary Australia is quite awful enough to be going on with, and badly needs to be addressed by its artists.

Grenville, aware that one way of confronting the present is to interrogate the past, has forged ahead undaunted with a novel that tells a story of the convict system, Australian contact history, and the depredations of white settlement. She will no doubt be branded a black-armband novelist by one side and a cultural appropriator by the other. And in presenting the emotional complexities and moral dilemmas of all the various players, she will get into trouble with almost everybody. But readers with no predetermined case to prove and no ego investment in any particular critical position will take this novel as it comes and will make up their own minds about it.

The Singing is the inaugural publication in the Varuna Firsts series, a collaboration between the Varuna Writers’ House and Brandl & Schlesinger. Both should be applauded for bringing a distinctive new voice into Australian writing; not to mention the honour due to the prodigious talent of Stephanie Bishop herself. Bishop has written a haunting novel with a seemingly simple story: love gone awry. A woman runs into an ex-lover on the street (neither protagonist is named), and this meeting throws her back into the story of their past. The two narratives – her solitary life now and the tale, mainly, of the relationship’s end – run in parallel. The novel’s energy, however, is ruminative rather than linear, circling around the nature of their love, pressing at the bruises left by its collapse.

The traits women are encouraged to develop nowadays, such as outwardness, attitude, assertiveness, and professionalism, did not characterise Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984). Family snapshots showed the young woman with tousled hair, guileless face, and buck-toothed smile: a neat-figured, long-skirted Edwardian tomboy after the style of Australian heroines in novels by Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce. The older woman in family photographs still had the tomboy grin; conversely, when she showed a public face, the mouth was closed and the eyes steady behind glasses.