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At a time when China is being seen as the next superpower, both sweatshop and powerhouse for the global economy, political courtship on the part of interested governments is accompanied by grassroots hostility. Such ambivalence is not new.
Donald Horne (1921-2005) was perhaps the best known Australian intellectual of his era, after Manning Clark. He made his name as editor of The Bulletin magazine, and confirmed his reputation with his book The Lucky Country, an ironic and influential critique of the Australian way of life first published in 1964. In his memoir Into the Open (2000), Horne recalled experiences, people, books and ideas that shaped his career as a journalist, writer and thinker. The extract published here focuses on the formative years leading up to the writing of The Lucky Country.
How did a Southern town become one of the most important music centers in America? This fascinating book explains it all and includes a full-length CD with 12 recordings of some of Nashville's most famous artists from the early days of Music City.
Booker Prize winner and Living National Treasure, Thomas Keneally still divides critical opinion: he is both a morally challenging stylist and a commercial hack, a wise commentator on society and a garrulous leprechaun. Such judgements are located in the cultural politics of Australia but also linked to ideas about what a literary career should look like. ‘Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine’ charts Keneally’s production and reception across his three major markets, noting clashes between national interests and international reach, continuity of themes and variety of topics, settings and genres, the writer’s interests and the publishers’ push to create a brand, celebrity fame and literary reputation, and the tussle around fiction, history, allegory and the middlebrow. Keneally is seen as playing a long game across several events rather than honing one specialist skill, a strategy that has sustained for more than 50 years his ambition to earn a living from writing.
A history of the festival known as Adelaide Writer's Week and the people who have taken part in it over the last forty years.
Arguably Australia's most influential political journalist, Alan 'The Red Fox' Reid covered Australian politics from the 1930s to the 1980s. During his career he was both a chronicler of, and a player in, Australian politics. In this book Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt take us into a Machiavellian behind-the-scenes world of recurrent plots, crises and leadership challenges, and show how it was possible for a skilled journalist to help shape both public perceptions and actual outcomes of political power plays.
A world-famous Australian writer, an inspiration to Robert Hughes and Clive James, a legendary war correspondent who also wrote bestselling histories of exploration and conservation . . . and yet forgotten? In this dazzling book, Thornton McCamish delves into the past to reclaim a remarkable figure, Alan Moorehead. As a reporter, Moorehead witnessed many of the great historical events of the mid-20th century: the Spanish Civil War and both world wars, Cold War espionage, and decolonisation in Africa. He debated strategy with Churchill and Gandhi, fished with Hemingway, and drank with Graham Greene, Ava Gardner and Truman Capote. As well as being a regular contributor to the New Yorker, in 19...
This is the first comprehensive study of one of the world's most gifted and exciting writers. It follows Peter Carey's career from the nightmare-haunted stories of The Fat Man in History and War Crimes to the madcap satire of Bliss, from Illywhacker's picaresque landscapes to Oscar and Lucinda's glittering achievement, and the powerfully confronting vision of The Tax Inspector. Dancing on Hot Macadam is a lucid account of Peter Carey's fiction and its intriguing critical reception. It explores his preoccupation with imprisonment and metamorphosis, and the desire of his characters to escape from bewildering roles, relationships and societies.Dancing on Hot Macadam is another volume in the excellent Studies inAustralian Literature series ... It is a sound and persuasive critique thatgets much better as it goes along.Times Literary SupplementThe book contains a lot of ideas ... and will be the base from which to drawthe map of Carey's fiction as it develops further.Julian Croft Weekend Australian
Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45 explores the queer dynamics of war across Australia and forward bases in the south seas. It examines relationships involving Allied servicemen, civilians and between the legal and medical fraternities that sought to regulate and contain expressions of homosex in and out of the forces.