This splash of books demonstrates that the vigorous publishing for the young adult market embraces subjects as varied as mental illness, bullying, sleuthing in medieval times, crime in the present, defending an occupied Australia and two dead mothers; and is written across the genres of realism, fantasy and historical fiction. But how much is enticing to the adolescent reader?

Swallow the Air won the 2004 David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers. Judging by this slender volume of work, the choice was a judicious one. Thematically, Tara June Winch’s début effort travels along the well-worn path of fiction based on personal experiences, with the protagonist propelling the narrative through a journey of self-discovery. In this respect, Swallow the Air nestles snugly in the semi-autobiographical framework favoured by first novelists, but the sophistication and subtlety of the prose belie Winch’s age; she is twenty-two, but writes with the élan of those much more accomplished. Swallow the Air can either be read as a novel with short chapters or as a series of interlinked short stories.

After the death of their ‘head sick’ mother, fifteen-year-old May Gibson and her older brother Billy are left in the care of their aunt, who, though loving and well-meaning, is nonetheless imprisoned in a spiral of gambling and alcohol abuse. Her predilection for brutal men also causes much grief in the otherwise happy household. A nasty altercation one night with the latest ne’er-do-well beau finally shatters the family, and the siblings are left reeling in its wake. Billy resorts to mind-numbing drugs to escape from his own private hell, while May leaves home and begins her peripatetic wandering. Hitchhiking across the land from the east to the north coast, she is on a mission to trace the footsteps of her ancestors. With a black mother and a white father, questions of self-identity and heritage continually plague her. Long abandoned by her father, and separated from her mother, May is doubly bereft; though part of both cultures, she belongs wholly to neither.

Perhaps only John Shaw Neilson and Judith Wright have brought an equal sense of place to Australian poetry: the sense of place as a fact of consciousness with geographic truth. But in his latest collection, Biplane Houses, Les Murray considers more airy habitations – flights, cliff roads and weather – and the collection has a matching airiness that is only sometimes lightness. Take his sequence, ‘Nostril Songs’, a set of poems about smells and their messages: playful, fluid with small shocks of precision. It is the longest sequence in this collection. That is to say, Biplane Houses has no sequence with the weight of Murray’s 1972 sequence, ‘Walking to the Cattle Place’ or ‘The Idyll Wheel: Cycle of a Year at Bunyah, New South Wales, April 1986–April 1987’; nothing with the reach of his 1992 sequence, ‘Presence: Translations from the Natural World’. All the same, there are poems here to equal any he has written. ‘The Welter’, for instance, which begins:

How deep is the weatherfront of time

that advances, roaring and calm

unendingly between was and will be?

A millisecond? A few hours? All secular life

worldwide, all consequences of past life

travel in it. It’s weird to move ahead of ¼

Here that word ‘weird’ helps define the character of this collection: its light touch and quizzical kind of seriousness; its sprezzatura.

It is an airiness to equal the idea of air in this collection: crowded with smells and weather and all that endures, like the past, out of reach or out of ken but, in effect, momentous:

Tropopause, stratopause, Van Allen –

high floors of the world tower

which spores and points of charge

too minute to age climb off the planet.

                                    ‘Airscapes’

One thing is certain: Mussolini would not like this book. Indeed, it is exactly the sort of writing that would rouse Il Duce’s ire. In the last disintegrating days before his ignominious end, when Mussolini realised that his erstwhile allies, the Germans, had outmanoeuvred him, that members of his inner circle were frantically making arrangements to flee Italy, and that partisan uprisings had set Lombardy and the Po Valley alight, the archbishop of Milan offered what was supposed to be a soothing observation: that Il Duce should take heart that he would be remembered by history. Enraged by this assurance, Mussolini declared: ‘History, don’t talk to me of history. I only believe in ancient history, in that which is written without passion and long afterwards.’