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In Ireland in 1795, young housemaid Elizabeth is arrested and charged with sedition. On the transport ship, confined to the captain’s cabin, Elizabeth must please and obey. As the captain’s ship wife, she survives one of the most notorious transportation voyages to New South Wales. Six convicts are flogged to death. This so exceeds the usual brutality of transportation that Governor Hunter convenes a magistrates’ court to hear charges against the captain. Shunned by her fellow convicts, scorned by free settlers, and pregnant with the captain’s child, Elizabeth must establish a home and a life in the rough town of Sydney. The Ship Wife challenges assumptions about female convict history. It tells the story of a real woman’s struggle for dignity and independence in an Empire built on slavery and injustice.
A teenager on the tram meets an old man claiming to be Jesus Christ. Six young women band together on a night prowl. A Filipino immigrant clashes with his eldest sister, who has brought him to Australia for a better life. And in a future where dogs have risen up against their owners, a mother is alarmed by her adolescent daughter's behavior. Through such diverse characters, Paddy O'Reilly takes us into the fringes of human nature—our hidden thoughts, our darker impulses, and our unspoken tragedies. By turns elegiac and acerbic, but always acutely observed, Peripheral Vision confirms O'Reilly as one of our most inventive and insightful writers.
'Locating Australian Literary Memory' explores the cultural meanings suffusing local literary commemorations. It is orientated around eleven authors – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eleanor Dark, P. L. Travers, Kylie Tennant and David Unaipon – who have all been celebrated through a range of forms including statues, huts, trees, writers’ houses and assorted objects. Brigid Magner illuminates the social memory residing in these monuments and artefacts, which were largely created as bulwarks against forgetting. Acknowledging the value of literary memorials and the voluntary labour that enables them, she traverses the many contradictions, ironies and eccentricities of authorial commemoration in Australia, arguing for an expanded repertoire of practices to recognise those who have been hitherto excluded.