Cirrus@Austlit

Richard Nile notes that in 2006 'a few million Australian workers are about to voluntarily leave their paid employment to be "unemployed at last". Among these are thousands of specialist researchers, writers and scholars, and hundreds of thousands of retiring professionals and aspiring intellectuals who hail from the first thoroughly educated generation in Australian history. That means we may be on the cusp of a golden era of Australian intellectual life.' In the light of this development, Nile reflects on the possibilities, particularly in the field of writing. He believes the web and print-on-demand books will contribute to a new ideas market.

Clarke argues that the fiction of Geraldine Brooks and Kate Grenville 'exploits our historical amnesia in order to please themselves and their audiences. Clarke concludes that 'Brooks and Grenville give us the then and now through the exploration of different viewpoints. They may privilege those of their less plausible and more enlightened characters, but in the process they also set modern faiths in dialogue with history. Their novels remind us of the immense distance travelled, and the value of carrying on. They do what historians cannot do, through the different, imagined voices that a novel can carry. They set up a conversation with the past. Ultimately, Brooks and Grenville offer dialogic "acts" of remembrance and that, surely, is a gift.'

Deborah Hope is the great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Samuel Marsden. It was with some trepidation therefore that she plunged into Roger McDonald's The Ballad of Desmond Kale with the character of parson magistrate, Matthew Stanton, 'unquestionably based' on Marsden.

Hope concludes that works like The Ballad of Desmond Kale and Andrew McGahan's The White Earth enable her to broaden the way she thinks about her story.

Using reviews of Paul Barry's Spun Out and Kate Legge's The Unexpected Elements of Love, Matchett comments on the effectiveness of reviewers. He concludes that 'the best reviewers do not play to their prejudices, nor do they pander to their pals. They do not just summarise or sermonise and while they should always strive to be polite, they certainly do not confine their comments to the genteel.'