AustLit

Relfecting on the history of racial divides among Australians, Keneally concludes: 'At the beginning of 2007, I drink to the value of a temperate attitude, of tranquility rather than unnecessary racial fever. There is a wealth of other stuff, from sovereign corporatism to Iraq to our water crisis to nuclear waste storage, to keep us adequately anxious'.

Ungerer and Martin Jones create a fictitious student roaming the bookstores of Australia's universities. Their student gains impressions of the portrayal of government policy relating to terrorism via readings of fiction and non-fiction works.

The authors decide that the student might conclude 'that either the literary and academic world inhabited a paranoid delusion or that the fascist Australian state was incompetent. For despite the apparently totalitarian controls of the anti-terror laws, government, police, bureaucracy and media all seem to tolerate, and even encourage with generous funding grants, the academic and literary exposure of their authoritarian ambitions.'

Sayer describes the process of disguising individuals' identities during the editing phase of her memoir Velocity. Many names and minor details were changed to avoid defamation suits.

Responding to Beveridge's three poems - 'The Cast', 'Eagle Point' and 'The Book' - published in the Australian Literary Review, December 2006, Taskis declares although the three works 'make sense and follow the general pattern of poetry ... they are certainly not so.The fact they are printed to look like poetry does not make them so.' He believes there is a need to find 'a name to distinguish such works from both prose and poetry'.

Judith Beveride responds to Harold Taskis's claims that her published works do not qualify as poetry.