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"From the winner of the 2014 Windham Campbell Prize"--Cover.
‘Mowed them down wholesale!’ With these words, a judge summed up the last great punitive massacre of Aboriginal people in Australia. Coniston, Central Australia, 1928: the murder of an itinerant prospector at this isolated station by local Warlpiri triggered a series of police-led expeditions that ranged over vast areas for two months, as the hunting parties shot down victims by the dozen. The official death toll, declared by the whitewash federal inquiry as being all in self-defence, was 31. The real number was certainly multiples of that. Coniston has never before been fully researched and recorded; with this book that absence in Australia’s history is now filled. As the last great mass killing in our country’s genocidal past but an event largely unremembered, it reminds us that, without truth, there can be no reconciliation.
Garreth Hoyle is a true crime writer whose destructive love affair with hallucinogenic drugs has sent him searching for ghosts in the unforgiving mallee desert of Western Australia. Heading north through Kalgoorlie, he attempts to score off old friends from his shearing days on Banjawarn Station. His journey takes an unexpected detour when he discovers an abandoned ten-year-old girl and decides to return her to her estranged father in Leonora, instead of alerting authorities. Together they begin the road trip from hell through the scorched heart of the state’s northern goldfields. Love, friendship and hope are often found in the strangest places, but forgiveness is never simple, and the pa...
Unaccountable Hours is a collection of three novellas that follow the fortunes of a maker of musical instruments, the ethical dilemma of a biologist and birdwatcher, and the romantic friendship between a young man and an aged woman - all firmly set in and defined by the Australian landscape. In The Luthier, musician Alton Freeman devotes his life to crafting a violin that will reproduce the perfect sound of Bach's Partitas and Sonatas, as played by his idol, musician Monica Erica Grenbaum. Ethical Man follows the biologist and birdwatcher Bartholomew Milner, who lives stringently according to his 'Milner's Ethic' and is put to the ultimate ethical test while on a research expedition in the A...
Antigone Kefala is one of the most significant of the Australian writers who have come from elsewhere; it would be difficult to overstate the significance of her life and work in the culture of this nation. Over the last half-century, her poetry and prose have reshaped and expanded Australian literature and prompted us to re-examine its premises and capacities. From the force of her poetic imagery and the cadences of her phrases and her sentences to the large philosophical and historical questions she poses and to which she responds, Kefala has generated in her writing new ways of living in time, place and language. Across six collections of poetry and five prose works, themselves comprising...
The past lives in every step. boots are here a symbol and a tool - a heel of feminine desire and a dirt-trodden shoe that cushions feet on paths to power and property, leaving trails of violence and pain. Memories jump and jar in these poems, loosening history from the grip of archives and footnotes to nourish the imagination, freeing me to speak back to my ancestors and the European men who co-created the edifices of 19th Century colonisation. boots looks in mirrors and across seas to dream big. At its restless heart, it draws history closer to my body.
It has taken a lifetime for me to see that the more afraid people are of the darkness, the further into it they will flee. Nearing the end of her life, Meggie Tulloch takes up her pen to write a story for her granddaughter. It begins in the first years of the twentieth century, in a place where howling winds spin salt and sleet sucked up from icefloes. A place where lives are ruled by men, and men by the witchy sea. A place where the only thing lower than a girl in the order of things is a clever girl with accursed red hair. A place schooled in keeping secrets. Moving from the north-east of Scotland, to the Shetland Isles, to Fremantle, Australia, Elementalis a novel about the life you make from the life you are given.
Set in pre-war Russia, contemporary Australia and Renaissance Italy, this novel's central story explores exile, memory and loss. At its centre is an ageing Russian emigre, a woman who claims to have nursed the poet Osip Mandelstam in his final days.
Annotation. Ruth A. Morgan completed her PhD at The University of Western Australia in 2012 and took up a lecturing position at Monash University in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the 2013 Margaret Medcalf Prize by the State Records Office of Western Australia for excellence in reference and research, and shortlisted for the Australian Historical Association's Serle Award for the best postgraduate thesis in Australian History. In 2013, Morgan was a visiting scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. She has presented at international conferences at Renmin University in Beijing (co-sponsored...
How can design processes assist in understanding the underlying and hybrid nature of water systems in our urban environments so that we can better prepare for the densification of cities and the impact of climate change? This book captures propositions and speculations around this question through design studies undertaken in three Australian cities: Melbourne's low-lying swampy areas, Brisbane's flooding river valley and Perth's deep groundwater network. Each of these cities has its own set of challenges around water, based on their particular natural environmental conditions and the radical modifications over 200 years that have fundamentally changed the way that water moves. The ambitious...