Matthew Lamb reviews Flag and Nation by Elizabeth Kwan in "The Courier-Mail". "A senior researcher at Parliament House in Canberra, Kwan has produced Flag and Nation, a thorough and much-needed history of the transition from the Union Jack to the Australian national flag we know today (the blue ensign)...The evidence this book presents leaves the impression that no one can argue any longer, through citing 'tradition', that we should keep the current Australian (blue ensign) flag: because no such continuous and inclusive tradition in favour of the Australian flag exists."
In "The Bulletin" this week, Barry Oakley looks at three new debut Australian novels: Poinciana by Jane Turner Goldsmith "...is an impressively assured first novel, as insightful about personal emotions as it is about the political tensions that undercut them"; Grass Dogs by Mark O'Flynn, who "paints Edgar [the main character] with such sure and savage strokes that he is the novel, and the novel is him"; and Billy's Tree by Nicholas Kyriacos which "is told so well you could call this the great Redfern novel. But Kyriacos insists on telling us the stories of
too many others ... and the narrative energies gradually decompress."
Also in "The Bulletin" (just down the page a bit), Anne Susskind reviews Shadow Thief by Melbourne writer Marion May Campbell, whose novel is "is tremendously accomplished, literary and at times compelling, even scintillating. Although many of the topics are common to Australian women's novels - mothers and relationships and sex, often gay - it is about as far as it can get from chick lit, and the tedious, lengthy recounting of detail and dialogue which characterises too much local writing."
