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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

The lectures collected for this book focus on transpersonal expression – heightened states of feeling, emotion, and deeper regions of the psyche, from the Paleolithic (so-called rock art), to the medieval (Solomon Ibn Gabirol), to the modern (Rilke), and postmodern (Haruki Murakami). This study suggests the psyche is hard wired for spiritual experience, for aesthetic and ethical expression, and that transpersonal expression in literature and the arts is a universal human exploration of perhaps a fundamental ground of being. The focus of the chapters provide evidence for these suggestions: mysticism in Gabirol, Rumi, and Rilke; reckoning with suffering in Murakami’s postmodern fables; spiritual failure and grace in the triptychs of Bosch, Beckman, and Bacon; epiphany in Basho, Suthorn Pho, and contemporary world travel haibun; altered states in Romantic ballet; metaphysical space in Ra’anan Levy’s painting; epiphany and social communion in Paul Theroux’s travel writing; sustaining the world in modern Aboriginal art; the nature of «big mind» consciousness as internal space; visitation to the heavens in world petroglyphs and pictographs; «absolute metaphor» in traditional American haiku; and spiritual spaciousness as a key element in haiku.

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.

Rex Ingamells, the Jindyworobaks chief, was a teacher at Unley High School when I went there as a student in 1946. He resigned soon afterwards, leaving his legacy, a Jindyworobaks anthology of Australian verse, ~hich produced in me an aversion to my native muse which was not completely eradicated until I discovered the poetry of Les Murray. Because of it, failed to benefit from the courses in Australian literature given by Brian Elliott at Adelaide university, a loss which I now regret. The fault was all mine; through complacency and compliance with the prevailing fashions in culture, I lost an opportunity available to few people at the time, for whatever might be said for or against the original Jindyworobaks, they must be given credit for insisting on the value and relevance of Australian literature in a world still prone to the cultural cringe, and there could not have been.many schools and universities in the forties and early fifties which tried seriously to develop an appreciation of local culture.

'The dominant impulse in the new writing in Australia is now an internationalist one (wrote Michael Wilding in 1975) ' ... younger writers are concerned with being writers, with creating verbal artefacts, with relating to other writers, in California and Argentina and Europe and New York and Asia'. He expressed a similar view in his editorial of the Australian Stand and developed it in the recent ALS devoted to new writing.'

A wide-ranging collection of essays centred on readings of the body in contemporary literary and socio-anthropological discourse, from slavery and rape to female genital mutilation, from clothing, ocular pornography, voice, deformation and transmutation to the imprisoned, dismembered, remembered, abducted or ghostly body, in Africa, Australasia and the Pacific, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain and Eire