Several years ago, on two separate occasions, Drusilla Modjeska and David Marr called for Australian fiction writers to address directly the state of the country in its post-9/11 incarnation. ‘I have a simple plea to make,’ said Marr in the Redfern Town Hall in March 2003, delivering the annual Colin Simpson Lecture: ‘that writers start focusing on what is happening in this country, looking Australia in the face, not flinching … So few Australian novels – now I take my life in my hands – address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live. It’s no good ceding that territory to people like me – to journalists. That’s not good enough.’ Six months before Marr’s lecture, Drusilla Modjeska had published in Timepieces (2002) an essay called ‘The Present in Fiction’, which raised, from a slightly different direction, some of the same issues:

Why are so few people writing novels about the lives we are living right now, here in Australia? Why this retreat of fiction into history, I hear people say, naming one novel after another set in the pre-modern past … too much of our recent fiction has become safe; our novels have lost their urgency, protected by the soft glow of ‘history’.

Fremantle’s first real newspaper, The Herald, saw the light of day in a building on the corner of Cliff and High Streets on Saturday, 2 February 1867. The brainchild of two ex-convicts, James Pearce and William Beresford, it soon became the main voice of opposition to colonial autocracy, as well as the voice of Fremantle itself. William de la Poer Beresford (to give him his full aristocratic name) was an eccentric Anglo-Irish cleric who had been transported for forgery in 1858, and was a ripe sixty-eight years old when The Herald began. James Pearce came from more humble origins. Convicted of felony at the Gloucester assizes, he was transported in 1851. Keen on literature and amateur dramatics, he was secretary of the Fremantle Literary Institute for four years. Together with Beresford, and another upper-class forger, James Elphinstone Roe, he produced the liveliest and best-written newspaper in the colony for the next twenty years. Nevertheless, The Herald had a rocky beginning when a reader pulled off an ingenious but obscene literary joke at its expense.

Handsomely illustrated, beautifully produced and authoritatively written, Gavin Fry’s monograph on Albert Tucker aims to establish him as an important artist within the Australian twentieth-century canon. Fry begins his introduction with the statement that Tucker ‘was a man who inspired strong feelings and his work likewise required the viewer to make a stand. Many found his work difficult, some even repellent, but the artist and his art demanded attention. Equally gifted as a painter, and possibly more so as a draughtsman than his contemporaries Nolan, Boyd and Perceval, Tucker belongs with this élite who revolutionised Australian painting in Melbourne in the 1940s.’ But is this really so? Was Tucker really so much better than his contemporaries, or even as good as them?

Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) suggests that the Babel fish, which, when inserted into the ear, offers instant translations of any alien language, cannot have evolved by mere chance. Similarly, proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) argue that, as Robyn Williams summarises, ‘there are parts of the natural world so complex and engineered with such precision that only a very smart intelligence, not blundering selection, could account for them’. But whereas ID seeks to bolster faith in (a neo-conservative) God, the Hitchhiker’s Guide proposes that the Babel fish, impossible to create by evolutionary chance, actually proves the non-existence of God:

‘I refuse to believe I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’