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Some of Australia's best known writers share their wise and searingly honest experiences of losing a parent.
The classic postapocalyptic thriller with “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare” (The Times, London). Triffids are odd, interesting little plants that grow in everyone’s garden. Triffids are no more than mere curiosities—until an event occurs that alters human life forever. What seems to be a spectacular meteor shower turns into a bizarre, green inferno that blinds everyone and renders humankind helpless. What follows is even stranger: spores from the inferno cause the triffids to suddenly take on a life of their own. They become large, crawling vegetation, with the ability to uproot and roam about the country, attacking humans and inflicting pain and agony. William Masen ...
How one woman turned her life upside down to help those who needed it most - half a world away. Every orphan comes with a story. Every journalist has a story that stays with them. And everyone has the power to make a difference. From rural Queensland to rural China, China Baby Love is the story of moving mountains, one shovel at a time. Former foreign correspondent and host of ABC TV's ‘One Plus One', Jane Hutcheon introduces us to Linda Shum, a not-so-ordinary grandmother and widow from Gympie whose compassion for China's forgotten children inspired her to create an unlikely empire. The story of COAT (Chinese Orphans Assistance Team) and Linda's quest to help orphans, many with multiple d...
Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, 1987. Lark Watter had always planned to run away from her stifling suburban life in 1960s Sydney. At university she encounters an American, Tom, and with him the promise of escape. Following Tom to the other side of the world by freighter is a journey to freedom. But the adventure Lark has embarked on isn't quite what she had anticipated. Not on the way there, and certainly not in New York... A picaresque journey across the high seas and through the extremes of the '60s, Dancing on Coral was Glenda Adams' second novel and established her international reputation. This new edition comes with an introduction by Susan Wyndham. Glenda Adams was born in Sydney ...
Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture explores the relationship between gender, power, reputation and book publishing’s consecratory institutions in the Australian literary field from 1965-2015. Focusing on book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes, this work analyses the ways in which these institutions exist in an increasingly cooperative and generative relationship in the contemporary publishing industry, a system designed to limit field transformation. Taking an intersectional approach, this research acknowledges that a number of factors in addition to gender may influence the reception of an author or a title in the literary field and finds that progress towards equality is unstable and non-linear. By combining quantitative data analysis with interviews from authors, editors, critics, publishers and prize judges Alexandra Dane maps the circulation of prestige in Australian publishing, addressing questions around gender, identity, literary reputation, literary worth and the resilience of the status quo that have long plagued the field.
Preliminary Material -- Reading Feminism in Kate Grenville's Fiction /Susan Sheridan -- Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual /Brigid Rooney -- Author, Author!: The Two Faces of Kate Grenville /Elizabeth Mcmahon -- Madness and Power: Lilian's Story and the Decolonized Body /Bill Ashcroft -- “Africa and Australia” Revisited: Reading Kate Grenville's Joan Makes History /Kwaku Larbi Korang -- “Mobility is the Key”: Bodies, Boundaries, and Movement in Kate Grenville's Lilian's Story /Ruth Barcan -- Homeless and Foreign: The Heroines of Lilian's Story and Dreamhouse /Kate Livett -- “Impossible Speech” and the Burden of Translation: Lilian's Story from Page to Screen /Alice Healy -- Constructions of Nation and Gender in The Idea of Perfection /Sue Kossew -- Poison in the Flour: Kate Grenville's The Secret River /Eleanor Collins -- History, Fiction, and The Secret River /Sarah Pinto -- Learning From Each Other: Language, Authority and Authenticity in Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant /Lynette Russell -- Bibliography -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.
Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heads to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. During his circular walk along the Rhine, he contemplates the formative moments of his childhood. At the end of the week, Futh returns to what he sees as the sanctuary of the Hellhaus hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence.
‘Writers, their friends, enemies, editors, and publishers began to materialise out of the library’s archive boxes, and I found myself setting off in search of these elusive, eccentric, and often quarrelsome characters.’ With his unique and entertaining blend of memoir, biography, and literary detective work, Craig Munro recreates the lives and careers of a group of renowned Australian editors and their authors in a narrative spanning from the 1890s to the 1990s. Among those encountered on the journey are A.G. Stephens, who helped turn foundry worker Joseph Furphy’s thousand-page handwritten manuscript into the enduring classic Such Is Life; P.R. Stephensen, who tangled with an irasci...
War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre of war literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remains the privileged (and only canonised) war story. In Australia, although women have written extensively about their wartime experiences, their voices have been distinctively silenced. Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend calls for a re-definition of war literature to include the numerous voices of women writers, and further recommends a re-reading of Australian national literatures, with women’s war writing foregrounded, to break the hold of a male-dominated literary tradition and pass on a vital, but unexplored, women’s tradition. Sh...
This book brings together striking botanical art of Indian origin spanning a period of 300 years, focussing on the 18th and 19th centuries. Drawn mostly from original works held in the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, some of the paintings have never been published before. They showcase the richness and variety of art commissioned from talented, mostly unknown, Indian artists who made a substantial contribution to the documentation of the flora of the Indian subcontinent. A foreword written by Sita Reddy places the collections in contemporary context. The book concludes with works from a new generation of botanical artists in India, who excite interest today.