How does Arnold Zable do it? After two finely wrought, deceptively simple books on Holocaust themes, he has brought out another, linking tales of the Greek island of Ithaca with the stories of his parents, Polish Jews, and their contemporaries who settled in Melbourne just before or just after the Annihilation, as Zable prefers to call the Holocaust.

In Youth, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee (who has recently taken to the Adelaide Hills) continues the project he began with Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life (1997). We are told by the publishers that this is a novel; indeed, the use of the third person throughout makes this plausible. But there is little doubt that it is autobiographical, if not autobiography; if it is a novel, then the claim resides essentially in its being an exploration of mood and feeling, rather than external events – with perhaps an occasional fictional elaboration. Whatever the case, Coetzee is intent on tracking the Siberian wastes of himself.

This is done with singular ruthlessness as the central character struggles to find self-realisation. Determined to stand alone at the age of nineteen – self-supporting, scornful of family, at odds with South Africa (while not being at all political) – he constantly interrogates everything he does, or is about to do, and lurches into a compensatory passivity. In Cape Town, an older, more experienced woman moves in on him – on rather than with, since ‘he can’t remember inviting her; he has merely failed to resist’. For a time, until he finds himself falling behind in the class, he is attracted by the purity of mathematics. He will be an artist, he decides, a poet. But he is also fatalistic: destiny is to reveal itself, in part through experience, whatever that may entail. Art, if necessary, must come out of the contemptible side of himself. It has plenty of opportunity. In Cape Town, an unenthusiastic coupling results in the girl having an abortion, which she has to arrange and pay for herself. In London, he effects a particularly bloody deflowering and, although the girl is a close friend of his cousin, cannot stir himself to make a phone call after the event.

What is it about Paul Keating that so fascinated his retainers? Six years ago, John Edwards wrote a massive biography-cum-memoir taking Keating’s story to 1993. Now Don Watson has produced an even heftier tome. Narrower in chronological span – 1992 to 1996 – Watson is broader in his interests, more personal, more passionate. While not the masterpiece it might have been, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart remains the most compelling contemporary portrait of an Australian prime minister. Paul Keating has found his Boswell.

Recollections is really three books in one: a subtle and sympathetic analysis of the many facets of the twenty-fourth prime minister; a narrative of high – and low – politics in the Keating years; and a compendium of the political wit and wisdom of Don Watson.

‘... the reasons why anybody is an expatriate, or why another chooses to return home, are such personal ones that the question can only be answered in a personal way.’

Patrick White, 'The Prodigal Son'

At seven o’clock on the morning of 2 February 1999, I was due at the Memorial Hospital in North Adelaide to relieve my older sister at my mother’s bedside, where she had been all night. The alarm was set for six. At five-thirty, I was woken by the phone; my mother had died, as we had known for a couple of days that she would, from complications following a cerebral haemorrhage. Before it happened, she had been fragile but functional; we had worried in a general way about her health, which had never been good, but nobody could have predicted or prevented the manner of her death.

By the time we left the hospital, the sun had risen and the family had already begun to reconfigure itself; with the lynchpin and peacemaker gone, it remained to be seen whether my father and his three daughters could close ranks and carry on. We walked out of the cool, hushed building into an Adelaide summer morning, through a rose garden whose perfume had begun to be liberated by the heat; every day it had wafted up to and through the open window of the room where she lay. She had been a student of roses, and their tender nurse; she grew them in each of the four gardens of her adult life.

She was unconscious for several days before she died, and nobody really knows what, or how much, unconscious people can take in. She died peacefully in a pretty room at a quiet hour with her first-born at her bedside; it’s as much as anyone could reasonably ask of death. But I hope she knew those roses were there. I hope she took them with her.

‘During the past ten years I had turned myself into a kind of public animal ... giving talks, programming festivals, making friends, making enemies ... I missed the anonymity and absorption of my twenties. I wanted to write again. I wanted, simply, to be.
(Peter Rose, Rose Boys)

Eighteen months earlier, in the winter of 1997, I resigned from a lectureship in the Melbourne University English Department after working there for seventeen years; I gave my six months’ notice, and, five days before Christmas, I drove home to Adelaide for good, with my thighs covered in little round black bruises from bashing into the corners of tea-chests late at night when I was too exhausted from packing to walk in a straight line. It’s 750 kilometres, and I sang the whole way.