The poems of Ern Malley must be on the way to becoming the most reprinted collection of twentieth-century Australian poetry. As Max Harris says in his essay, one of the pivots of this book:

More than forty years on, after his death from Graves’ disease and his burial at Rookwood Cemetery in 1944, after twelve editions of his collected poetry in the intervening years, Ern Malley is alive and well and living as an Australian literary legend.

Ern Malley is more than that. He has become an international literary legend, and I suspect that with Michael Heyward’s book on the affair the international fame will accelerate. The several essays or ‘commentaries’ in this A&R edition explain why, if we do not know already. They give this edition its special value, though it fits in well with other recent discoveries of the 1940s in the same A&R series – the poems of James Gleeson and Alister Kershaw. These have all been the enterprise of Tom Thompson in his period as literary editor, and they have been useful additions to our understanding of that still surprisingly untilled area.

In the advertising world there’s a new and controversial trend towards catering for the X-Generation; that is, consumers with a two-second attention span, and we’re not just talking about teenagers on rollerblades.

By comparison, it’s hard not to be a little cynical about the current plethora of anthologies: commercially packaged publications for the literary equivalent of the X-Generation rather than inspiringly crafted reading where the whole offers more than the sum of the parts.  

Even the reviewers become lazy; counting up the gender balance of contributors and concluding that the book ‘is good for dipping into’. Fortunately this Anthology of Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing shines through the mass of mediocre publisher’s fundraisers as an example of the difference a committed and careful editor can make when assembling source material under a common theme.

Jane Gallop has explored the often-bitter rivalry between sisters for the love of the father, and increasingly, for self/love.

Helena Michie, ‘Not One of the Family’

Marianne, now looking dreadfully white, and unable to stand, sunk into her chair, and Elinor, expecting every moment to see her faint, tried to screen her from the observation of others, while reviving her with lavender water.

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

A few years ago, there was a great song on the radio, a song about remembering riding with an assortment of brothers and sisters in the back seat of the car. I don’t even recall the name of the song, much less the name of the band, but there was a line in the chorus that used to wipe me out: ‘And we all have our daddy’s eyes.’

In those inherited and shared resemblances. a sibling is a perennially deranging presence, a reminder that the boundary between self and other is by no means as clear as our culture would have us assume. Women already know this better than men. Women’s bodies participate in other bodies, can feed, breed, and accommodate them; theory and experience as well as analogy suggest that women’s ego boundaries are correspondingly less fixed. (‘As they used to in our childhood houses,’ says Beth Yahp, ‘people in London can tell we are sisters by our shadows’.)