Just really quite good.

This volume emerged in an all-too-brief period of Whitemania in Australia, which received its first seeds when he won the Nobel Prize in 1973 but didn't properly emerge until around 1981, when White published his autobiography and - given age, ill-health and other factors - stepped back from his sometimes frantic writing schedule. The writer then became a much more familiar figure in public discourse, especially in the often fraught 1980s which opened up debates on nuclear material, globalisation, the gay rights movement, and of course the eternally contested Australian bicentenary and all it stood for. From these final years in White's life, we receive a variety of subsidiary material for collectors, including analytical volumes, his late works for the stage, David Marr's gorgeous biography and accompanying collection of White's letters, and this bundle of public miscellany.

Editors Christine Flynn and Paul Brennan sought to collect every piece of writing and speaking that White had made in the public arena - noting that some could not be found. The collection commences, fortuitously, with The Prodigal Son, a 1958 piece for the journal Australian Letters. By this point, White was in his 40s, with two largely forgotten early novels, a third - The Aunt's Story - which had proven too outré for provincial Australians - and two further novels, The Tree of Man and Voss, recognised masterpieces across the English-speaking world even if not everyone quite understood the point. Most of his output lay ahead of him, and White's mystique was further aided by a) the still rudimentary media machine of the 1950s, and b) his decision to live somewhat in exile on a property outside of Sydney with his partner, Manoly Lascaris. (All of this would change too, in the remaining 32 years of White's life, of course.)

The Prodigal Son is a declaration in equal parts defiant and celebratory. Defiant because White makes it clear that Australia idealises the ordinary and beatifies the uncomplicated. It is a cry he would echo throughout his life for greater ambition, artistry, and - frankly - eliteness in the arts. But also this piece is congratulatory for it takes as its core subject White's decision to return to Australia after the War, and make it his home. Indeed, White is rather remarkable for this. Well into the 1950s and 60s, it was common for Australian artists and writers of even minimal talent to make their home in Europe or North America. Australia's geographic and cultural isolation, combined with its natural conservatism, low government funding for arts, and relatively small audience share, led the average citizen to care more about bush ballads or crime novels than art. While Australia had its fair share of wits and poseurs, there were very few "great" writers who chose to spend their whole life on the continent; Martin Boyd, Christina Stead, Randolph Stow, Shirley Hazzard... brilliant ex-pats were many, brilliant returnees few. Equally as importantly is White's cry that the ordinary can yield the extraordinary for a talented, insightful writer. He was determined not just to live in Australia begrudgingly, but to make it the centre of his literary oeuvre. This aim might not seem so precious to us now; the generations of writers born during and after WWII would make it acceptable. At the time, though, this was White nailing his thesis to the door of the church of Australian culture.

What follows- speeches and pieces from 1969 to 1989 - is a varied and uneven array of thoughts and arguments, for White had many varied and uneven thoughts and arguments to give. But this should be a standard volume for any collector of White's output. ( )