The main concerns of this essay are the nature and intensity of the literary experience in the setting of the increasingly popular literary festivals in Australia.

Make It Australian, Gabrielle Wolf's very readable history of Melbourne's Australian Performing Group (APG), is an engaging and comprehensive account of the contribution of a seminal theatre company to Australian culture. Wolf's straightforward style and well researched choices find lasting relevance for the APG and the book deserves a wide readership.

One of the noticeable things about this volume is its place of publication. Australian publishers seem increasingly to be leaving it to elsewhere, Germany in particular, to publish substantial volumes of Australian literary criticism. It is not clear that this volume would have found a publisher in Australia.

ALS 23.1, with its war-related articles was, for a now 'old' (in more ways than one) Second AIF army man, a most interesting issue. The articles prompt some reflections which may be of interest. They relate to the continued presence of World War I in the public memory; Gallipoli's overshadowing the battles in France in the Australian mind; Australia's so-called unnecessary wars from mid-1943; and a few observations on service life.

Henry Lawson had hoped for recognition by the British literary world, and felt that his two-year stay in England was the 'high tide' of his literary career. But he also later referred to it as 'that wild run to London that wrecked and ruined me' ('The Lily of St Leonard's'), and most commentators have agreed that his creative and personal deterioration began around 1902 after his return. Late that year the Bulletin's Red Page commented: 'Lawson's London sojourn, short though it was, did not improve him, and, if he wishes to retain the great Australian appreciation he has won, he had better see to his "boyangs" and hump the faithful "Matilda" again. England is no place for Lawson' (22 Nov. 1902). This essay will use evidence previously unavailable, overlooked, or misinterpreted, to suggest that prevailing views of this episode in Lawson's career should be reconsidered.

Scholars of Australian literature are more likely than most to recognise the name Ida Leeson and to connect it to that venerable institution, Sydney's Mitchell Library. Leeson was the head of the Mitchell Library from 1932 to 1946 and played a critically important role in shaping the collections upon which so many of us have since drawn in our research on Australian literature and history. What fewer people may know, however, is that Leeson was the first woman to hold the post of Mitchell Librarian, and her appointment initially provoked considerable public controversy, reminding us (yet again) how often men's achievements are taken as valid and deserved, while women's are read as a sign that something has gone terribly wrong with the system. Banner headlines at the time proclaimed with horror: 'Woman Likely to Be Appointed'. As Sylvia Martin amply demonstrates through her analysis of this pivotal episode, Leeson's life and career can tell us much about the struggles of earlier generations of women graduates in the professions, about the class and gender politics of professional advancement in this period, and about the crucial role played by particular individuals in the formation of the nation's great cultural institutions.

Read It Again is the fourth collection in Chris Wallace-Crabbe's critical career, a career that has run alongside, or perhaps beneath, a rich and productive poetic career. Since Australian literary critical discourse is so tissue-thin, it is a contribution to be profoundly thankful for. Each of his collections of essays and extended reviews is built in more or less the same way: there is a central core of concerns that the other pieces relate to either closely or tangentially. These concerns have changed as the career has progressed and reflect interestingly on the changing fashions of scholarship and literary criticism since the 1960s. This is not to suggest, though, that Wallace-Crabbe is in some way an innocent or calculating reflector of the Zeitgeist, for beneath the concerns I have been describing is a fundamental interest in the nature of poetry—his own art. Over his career, we have the sense of a man asking pretty much the same basic question but asking it in academic and critical contexts which have changed rapidly.

This article examines the collaborative writing relationship between author Dymphna Cusask and the autobiographical subject Catherine Elliott-Mackay. It also considers the contribution of Caddie to Australian women’s writing and the history of women’s work.

The author’s approach is ‘to use quantitative reading data to analyse the circulation of Victorian written culture in a range of Australian colonial contexts, and to construct from that analysis locally situated re-readings of well-known and lesser-known novels’ (275). By looking at library records and establishing borrowing patterns, Dolin examines reading culture in colonial South Australia, using as an example the reception and impact of Dickens’s Great Expectations.