Constant tropical rain makes a mush of hard old lavas. The end product is a brick red soil called laterite.

The novels of Kate Grenville, Peter Carey, and Kim Scott, in this respect, can only be regarded as literary forms that are produced in, for, and by a particular contemporary colonial culture.[…]We might find ourselves wishing for an adjacent Indigenous story of place and space, even reportage in the Careyesque sense, or an addled diatribe from Holland’s point of view, so that Holland’s own botanical obsessions might be more fully ironized – so that the character’s claim on the landscape might read as an imposition, a claim “by all other [here we read: English] national landscapes” on contested country.

But Lilburne's presence has been equally problematic for those historians who have examined the activities and attitudes of the fenmen whom Lilburne, and his Leveller colleague, John Wildman, temporarily led.

There was a lot of libertarian wrong-mindedness in his piece—some crazy ideas about tort reform, some misguided nonsense about allowing insurance companies to go across state lines...