Some autobiographies are like novels, some resemble suites of lyric poems, some would seem to be educative tracts and others shade into history. From time to time one is published which reads as though a life of talk had somehow made itself over into book form. Patsy Adam-Smith’s Hear the Train Blow is certainly such a narrative, giving the impression again and again that we are not reading but sitting around enjoying a long, bright evening’s yams.

In this book everything seems brisk, lively and casual. From the beginning of chapter one, which tells us that ‘My parents were railway people and we lived beside the tracks all our life’, to the point where seventeen-year-old Patricia Jean is about to leave as a VAD on a troop train we are taken through the plain events of a working-class girl’s growing up. It all sounds perfectly fair dinkum. As the author writes in her prologue, ‘Hear the Train Blow is a true story.’ And country railways made up a world remarkably rich in stories.

Of course there is always a paradox in our saying that something is true and that it is a story. Stories resemble other stories. The plain, brute facts of life begin to take the traditional shapes of stories as soon as somebody makes them into stories. Life keeps on imitating some kind of art or other.

Serge Liberman is that unfashionable thing, a committed writer. Not committed to a party-line, of course, but to a literature of engagement with humanity. A parable that seems to illustrate his view of the artist’s role is provided by a story entitled ‘The Poet Walks Along High Street’. The poet, Gabriel Singer, walks along a street pointed towards ‘Erehwon Creek’, peopled by allegorically named figures. In this imaginary place the inhabitants are offered a ritual cleansing, announced in the manner of an evangelist’s message. But there is violence in the streets. The slogan over the hospital echoes the viciously ironic slogan that welcomed victims of the holocaust to the concentration camps: ‘Cleansing Makes Free’. The poet watches friends and acquaintances being sent into the ovens:

He was a poet, an artist, not a man of action. His brief was to create order from disorder, beauty from discord, truth from confusion. Not for him was it to compound violence with violence or confound common sense with derring-do. Nor was it in his power – let others do it! – through ill-judged action to alter events. What had been – if, indeed, it had truly been – had had to be. For this was the way of the world. And if others had been cleansed, purified, purged and, in that way, redeemed, it was because they had shown reason for it ...

It’s a favour to no-one to call him (certainly never her) ‘a modern Henry Lawson’ – as the back cover of Bruce Pascoe’s collection proclaims – because of the large and difficult questions that are raised. What does the name ‘Henry Lawson’ mean? ‘The Loaded Dog’, or ‘Water Them Geraniums’? The writer of humorous stories about the bush where life is animated by a huge and comic spirit, or of ones about living in the bush that leave you feeling dismayed and chilled to the bone? And who is this epithet aimed at? For some Lawson is the face on the ten-dollar note; for others he’s the successful Australian writer who went to England and failed to make any impression, returned, and then lived long enough to mourn his own decline as a writer, ending his life as a miserable drunk; for still others he’s one of the first writers you read at school.

The point here is that Australian culture is not so homogeneous that the name Lawson can be taken for granted. And what does it mean to call a writer a ‘modern’ Henry Lawson? The idea seems to include some notion of resurrecting the past; perhaps the kind of rewriting of the popular mythology of men and the bush and country life. The trap here is a kind of complacent nostalgia. Murray Bail’s story ‘The Drover’s Wife’, which is as much about Russell Drysdale’s painting as it is about Lawson’s story, is instructive here. Bail’s story is a reading of the painting, and its power comes from the way it unlocks the story hidden in the details of the painting while at the same time telling another side of Lawson’s story. This is a story that deals with disappointment and loss, the soured marriage of the speaker and his wife, the bush and the way it means, to each of the characters. But its carefully sustained and ruthless economy wipes out even the possibility of nostalgia and sentimentality. Some of Pascoe’s stories are set in the bush; most are about men’s lives; some of them tell those lives as heroic struggles; others deal in a kind of pathos that reaches for Frederick McCubbin’s The Bush Burial but, inevitably, leaves the reader short changed because that particular kind of pathos doesn’t really work for anyone anymore.

To have or not to have children: a dilemma made possible by technological advances and the consequent loosening of social roles. Once, having children was both an almost inevitable result of adult sexual activity and, generally, a desired one. For most people, being an adult member of a society implied having and taking responsibility for children. And for many people it still does. But it is now possible for people to choose when to have children, or to choose not to have them at all. No Children by Choice is a collection of interviews with men and women who have chosen not to have children; Mature Age Mothers is a collection of interviews with women who have not had children until they are over thirty (except for Junie Morosi who had three children in her teens and another child at forty-five).