The Holy Well, by Colin Macpherson. Mopoke Publishing, 2007, $37.95.

Bren is born somewhere in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, in the late Bronze Age, about 3000 years ago, beside a loch. He is the son of the local chief, and is destined to succeed his father. James is born to ordinary parents in a working-class suburb of Melbourne in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Father of the House, by Kim E. Beazley. Fremantle Press, 2009, $27.95.

Apart from a regrettable interregnum in 1977–80, two Kim Beazleys, father and son, successively served in the Australian House of Representatives for some six decades from the death of John Curtin in 1945 through to the most recent federal election.

The Land I Came Through Last: A Family Memoir by Robert Gray.  Giramondo, 2008, $34.95.

“We are the children of our landscape,” Lawrence Durrell observes in Justine. “It dictates behaviour and even thought to the measure to which we are responsive to it.”

Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English by Bruce Moore. OUP, 2008, $29.95.

Film-makers who sprinkle multicultural accents around Australian history gild the lily. Ned’s broad Irish in Kelly films is the characteristic culprit, but graziers, politicians and officials from colonial times and later are typically given posh English accents and anything European is likely to be grasped loudly.