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The war has made of Australia - a young community without traditions - a nation ... W.M. Hughes in a foreword to Patrick MacGill, The Diggers, London, 1919. By 1919 this was a received idea which had its source in the first dispatches from Gallipoli. During the war it was developed by newspaper editorials on Australian troops and popular books such as C.J. Dennis's Moods of Ginger Mick (1916); soon afterwards it was given its classic formulation by C.E.W. Bean in The Story of Anzac: The First Phase (1921). Subsequently its significance has been examined by many historians, including Inglis, Serle, Manning Clark, Robson, Horne, Souter and Gammage, and although it has been revised and qualified, it has never been denied. Sixty years or more after the events that inspired it, the idea was re-examined and upheld by W.F. Mandie in almost the same terms as it had been formulated by W.M. Hughes.1

Randolph Stow’s latest novel recounts a series of apparently motiveless murders in the murky atmosphere of an old Suffolk seaport. It reminds us that along with his famous descriptive power, Stow has always been adept at plotting stories which compel the reader with unobtrusive tact. The Suburbs of Hell is short and precisely constructed to concentrate the significance of every detail so that it has the satisfying richness of many longer books. This quality is typical of some of his earlier novels, but in The Suburbs of Hell he intensifies the suggestive power of a tightly inter-connected plot by using the conventions of the thriller. Not that the reader is simply compelled by the urge to discover who done it; there is a deeper significance in the book than this, hinted by the title, from a speech by Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi which is also one of the novel’s epigraphs.

The Paradise tram left from the Boer War monument outside the gates of Government House in Adelaide on the long route through the northeastern suburbs to the foot of Black Hill, where the River Torrens breaks out of its gorge in the Mount Lofty Ranges into the Adelaide Plain. At the terminus the maroon drop-centre trams changed tracks and waited by a stand of gum trees, through which the sun slanted across the blue-stone walls of an early settlement and the newer brick and sandstone facades of double-fronted bungalows with scalloped verandah walls, decorative renderings of stucco or pebble-dash and tapered columns inset with river stones. Among them were gaps for houses yet to be built, where smallholders continued market-gardening on the river silt. This was Paradise.