Kathy Mexted was a teenager when the possibility of becoming a pilot entered her head. The year was 1978, and she was airborne in a plane commanded by her father. The latter turned to his daughter and remarked: ‘If you’d like to learn to fly, I’ll pay for it.’ Nonetheless, it would take twelve years for the author to seriously pursue her piloting ambitions. This delay was due to several factors, not least of which was that flying has long been a ‘male dominated industry’.

Australian Women Pilots is Mexted’s attempt to write women back into Australian aviation history. Ten female pilots are surveyed in the book. They include Nancy Bird Walton and Mardi Gething, who fulfilled their flying dreams during the 1930s and 1940s. There is a chapter on Marion McCall, whose pilot adventures began in the 1990s, when she was approaching fifty.

The reader learns about Deborah Lawrie (née Wardley), who famously took Ansett to court in 1979 in a bid to work as a pilot. Mexted describes the state of affairs in the 1970s: ‘A woman in Ansett’s world was at home, in the office or until they were married serving onboard meals as air hostesses.’ Lawrie was no longer content to simply train future (male) pilots. She fought and won her right to fly for that airline, and was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in November this year.

Australian Women Pilots is impeccably researched and penned with journalistic flair. For example, Mexted writes of Port Moresby’s airport: ‘The place was memorable for its smells of betel nut, sweat and dogs, and for the groups of locals curiously eyeing the machinations of Western society.’

The women profiled in the book are largely unknown, which is disappointing given their achievements in a blokey industry. The text offers a fascinating glimpse into changing (and sometimes difficult to change) attitudes about women in Australian workplaces over the past century.

In the introduction, Mexted writes: ‘I want this book to inspire you to try new things and to know these stories of Australian women stepping up to the plate.’ Australian Women Pilots is a valuable read for historians of this nation, as well as for a general readership.

The cover of this book tells you pretty much what to expect. It shows the dancer Li Cunxin, evidently at rehearsal, facing the camera while over his shoulder peeps his wife, Mary. Add the subtitle, that this is the ‘untold story’ of Li Cunxin’s wife, with a foreword by the man himself, and it’s clear that this book might not have seen the light of day without the phenomenal success of Mao’s Last Dancer, published in 2003 and later made into a well-received film (Bruce Beresford, 2009). Even the title has echoes of its predecessor.

But this book is more than a sequel. Certainly, Mao’s Last Dancer is a great story of overcoming a repressive regime through sheer talent, intelligence, and determination to forge a career in ballet. But the story of Mary, née Mary McKendry of Rockhampton, is equally heroic.

The concept of ‘trespass’ first entered English law records in the thirteenth century. That this appearance fell between the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066 and the reformation of the English church by Henry VIII in 1534 is no accident. As Nick Hayes shows in The Book of Trespass, the process by which the English commons were enclosed by the statutes of the wealthy landowning class was slow but resolute; and it had everything to do with, on the one hand, the arrival of Norman delineations of property and, on the other, the disbanding of the monasteries that had worked in a bartering symbiosis with the people of the common landscapes of England.

During those long centuries, and forever since, the once permeable membranes of England’s countryside have been stoppered and barred into an impenetrable grid of privatised demesnes wherein some ninety-two per cent of the land and ninety-seven per cent of the waterways are currently locked away from public use. These estates are off limits whereas once, as James Boyce has revealed in Imperial Mud (2020), his study of the Fens, the indigenous population lived with a concept of ‘property’ that was related not to the material ownership of land but solely to communal rights of use and reciprocal cultural duties.

To start with the broadest of generalisations, artists’ biographies can be divided into three types: those that concentrate on the work; those that take the life as their focus; and the ‘life and times’ volumes that attempt to place the artist in her social and political context.

And then there is William Feaver’s massive 1,248-page, two-volume extravaganza on Lucian Freud (1922–2011). It had been Feaver’s original intention to produce ‘a brief account of Freud the artist’, but over time, as the pair became closer, the recorded reminiscences grew and grew and an understanding developed that Feaver would produce what Freud called ‘a novel’ after his death.