Early in the morning of 4 December, Overland lost a great friend and guide when John McLaren died. John was associate editor of Overland from 1966–1993, editor from 1993–1996, and a board member until 2014, when he stood down for health reasons to become, instead, an official Overland patron.

‘Publishers are not necessarily either philanthropists or rogues,’ it began. ‘As a working hypothesis, regard them as ordinary human beings trying to earn their living at an unusually difficult occupation.’ There’s a man who knows what’s what, I thought. Or something like that. Fundamentally, the truth of this observation, and the value of making it, I think remain. And finding that this book dated to 1926 in its original version, with this ‘extensively revised’ seventh edition being published in 1960, by which time there existed American, German, Spanish, Swedish, French, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Portuguese, Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Italian and Japanese editions, I was intrigued to read on.

Taking the delivery of funding away from the Australia Council and giving it to a government department represents a radical politicisation of arts funding and the overturning of the basic principles of arms-length public funding for the arts that were established and have worked very well, with bipartisan political support, over more than forty years.

I would love to hear Mr Hockey asked when the age of entitlement he has referred to began, and hear if there is any evidence or logic he could point to as the basis for this epochal claim. One suspects, on the basis of Treasurer Hockey’s other public statements, that there is not, and that this is a term intended to obfuscate rather than shed light on what has happened in the past, and what is happening now.

On a Tuesday evening in February this year I received a call from a mutual friend, Damien Williams, to let me know that David Wolstencroft had died tragically that day.

Anthony Burgess suggested the great value of the novelist's contribution when he stated that in writing his Malayan trilogy (1956–1959) he wanted to become ‘the true fictional expert on Malaya’. As Burgess indicates, writers of fiction can reflect and illuminate the nature of life within a specific place and time: the particular social codes, laws, practices and ideals their characters are making decisions within and about.