AustLit

'I bought Bernadette Brennan’s informative and entertaining A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work second-hand in Ganesha, a bookshop on the main street of sleepy Sanur, Bali in December 2018 (having run out of holiday reading). Garner had fascinated me since the film of her debut novel Monkey Grip (1982), directed by Ken Cameron and starring Noni Hazlehurst as Nora and Colin Friels as Javo. I had also been fortunate to know Dr Brennan during her tenure at the University of Sydney, and it was exciting to find such a book among piles of romance novels and crime fiction. A Writing Life has a chronological structure and incorporates biographical detail about Garner in order to illuminate aspects of her writing and it treats all her outputs, fiction, non-fiction, and the film scripts for The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992) and Two Friends (1986).' (Introduction)

'This slim volume of poems by Australian Peter Eason may be broadly situated in the genre of spiritual writing despite the brevity and gnomic quality of much of the verse, and the fact that some of it is earthy and comical. Eason’s delightfully humorous “Autobiography” characterizes his life path as learning “much about nothing” and arriving at the certainty “of knowing everything” (p. vii), and it and the extract from Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjali” point toward Rob Johnson’s “Foreword,” which tackles the question of what it means to be a mystic, Eastern or Western, in the contemporary world. Johnson notes that, while Eason is aware of mystics like Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart, he rejects “Christianity’s insistent differentiation of creator and creature, God and the individual soul” (p. xiv). The poetry’s insistent celebration of nature and identification of human life with the cycles of nature on Earth and as part of the wider cosmos testifies to the accuracy of this assessment.' (Introduction)

'Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the contemporary world, accompanied by the (usually religious) phenomenon of pilgrimage, may be understood as an instance of the medieval manifesting in the modern. On 12 October 2002 Paddy’s Irish Bar and the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali were bombed by Islamic terrorists, an attack in which 202 people, from twenty-one countries, died. Twenty of the dead were from Sydney’s Eastern suburbs, and six were members of the Coogee Dolphins football team. In late January 2003 Coogee local Christine Cherry of the Beach Street Gallery Laundrette revealed to the media that, viewed in the afternoon sun, the fence on the headland that had been recently renamed “Dolphins Point” in honour of the dead appeared to resemble the Virgin Mary. Crowds flocked to Coogee to see the apparition (which technically was not an apparition because it was a trick of the light that made a fence post appear like a statue of the Virgin) and there was a short-lived media frenzy, interviewing “pilgrims” (Protestant, Catholic, New Age, not religious at all) and reporting on acts of vandalism that imperilled the fence through which “Mary” became visible.' (Introduction)