AustLit

'He did this amazing wall painting, this mural…It was a city, a Paul Klee or a Max Ernst city, a city of the mind perhaps, or of antiquity. A dream city. It was a wonderful thing. It took a few days and nights to do, beautiful days and nights. All the other men who lived in the donga watched it come clear. They loved it. And then other men in the camp heard about it too and came to look.

'An unknown man comes ashore at a remote beach on the New South Wales coast. He is taken into detention and sent, ultimately, to Darwin. His captors call him Thursday after the day upon which he was found. Thursday doesn’t speak, but instead paints an enigmatic mural on the wall of his donga in the detention centre. It is a city, a dream city, and when he finishes he says a single word: Isinglass.

'This latest offering from author Martin Edmond is a beautifully written portrayal of the shameful practices of the Australian gulag archipelago, and a compelling story of a man adrift in an unkind world.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Tasman Sea, precisely defined by oceanographers, remains inchoate as a cultural area. It has, as it were, drifted in and out of consciousness over the two and a half centuries of European presence here; and remains an almost unknown quantity to prehistory. Its peak contact period was probably the sixty odd years between the discovery of gold in Victoria and the outbreak of the Great War; when the West Coasts of both New Zealand’s main islands, and the South East Coast of Australia, were twin shores of a land that shared an economy, a politics, a literature and a popular culture: much of which is reflected in the pages of The Bulletin from 1880s until 1914. There was, too, a kind of hangover of the pre-war era and of the ANZAC experience into the 1920s; but after that the notional country sank again beneath the waves.

'This paper attempts recovery of fragments of that lost zone from a prospective standpoint: beginning the restoration of a Weltanschauung which, while often occluded, has never really gone away. It will be undertaken by focussing upon the story of the Melbourne born Lynch brothers and their cohort: Guy and Joe Lynch, George Finey, Cecil ‘Unk’ White and Noel Cook, all of whom migrated from Auckland to Sydney after World War One and worked in the 1920s as artists, caricaturists and cartoonists on various newspapers and magazines. Joe was sculpted twice in stone by elder brother Guy; as a soldier standing on a plinth in the war memorial at Devonport, Auckland; and, controversially, as a faun in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. Joe Lynch fell, or jumped, from a ferry one night and drowned in Sydney harbour; and thereby became the inspiration for Kenneth Slessor’s great elegy, Five Bells.' (Publication abstract)

Battarbee and Namatjira is the double biography of artists Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira, one white Australian from Warrnambool in Victoria, the other Aboriginal, of the Arrernte people, from the Hermannsburg Mission west of Alice Springs. From their first encounters in the early 1930s, when Battarbee introduced Namatjira to the techniques of watercolour painting, through the period of Namatjira’s extraordinary popularity as a painter, to his tragic death in 1959, their close relationship was to have a decisive impact on Australian art. This double biography makes extensive use of Battarbee’s diaries for the first time, to throw new light on Namatjira’s life, and to bring Battarbee, who has been largely ignored by biographers, back into focus. Moving between the artists and their backgrounds, Edmond portrays the personal and social difficulties the two men faced, while at the same time illuminating large cultural themes – the traditions and legacies of the Arrernte, the influence of the Lutheran church, the development of anthropology and the evolution of Australian art. [From the publisher's website]

'In ‘Eternities’, Martin Edmond chronicles lost and discarded things, people, places—the paradox is, the romantic desire for the ideal can be realized in dreaming. Meticulous research underpins the resurgence, via mechanisms of memory, portents-reading and hallucination, of the uncanny, seeping out of the detritus of past time. The intertexual transcends the dull mechanics of postmodern technique, emerging epically as the Koran, the Tora, Aztec lore and Old Testament parable populated with hitherto uncelebrated gypsies, thieves, dream-chasing hippies and murderers. ‘Eternities’ rolls with humanity, a secularized laughter and magic, as powerful as re-incarnation and pagan idol worship; such profound depth to the most innocuous recollections; revealing a Sydney crueler, kinder, more exotic and more magical than it ever was before: ‘It is as the book says—the redeemed world will be the same but not as this is. It’s theology without god....' (Publication summary)