AustLit

'This week, on the ABR podcast, we feature a special conversation between author and journalist David Marr, historian Mark McKenna and ABR’s Georgina Arnott, recorded in the middle of September 2023, one month out from the Voice referendum. The subject was David Marr’s new book, Killing for Country: A family story, which takes the reader to early nineteenth-century New South Wales and follows the bloodshed of invasion as it tracks north.' (Publication abstract)

This first-ever collection of Australian poet Judith Wright's nonfiction is a compelling portrait of a prescient voice on modern Australia.

'Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of the best-known Australian poets of her generation. Born into a pioneering bush family, her commitments to environmental protection, history writing and obtaining recognition for First Nations people drew her in new directions and assumed a major role in her life. She was the first president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, a founder of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a member of the Aboriginal Treaty Commission.

'This selection of her nonfiction, the first of its kind, brings together essays, speeches, family history, correspondence, memoir and criticism to reveal the personal and philosophical threads that bind together her work and life. It makes plain the shifts and transformations in her thinking, and the female friendships - in particular, with writer and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal - that opened her to new perspectives and connections.

'This addition to the Australian Thinkers series shows what happens when a poet talks about a nation. It reveals a way of thinking about Australia - its land, history and culture - that draws on the best of human possibility.'  (Publication summary) 

'The name Zora Cross was destined to become a household one, said publisher George Robertson in 1918. One hundred years on, the first Cross biography has now been published, a debut for Cathy Perkins, an editor at the State Library of New South Wales. For this, Perkins deserves a toast. Cross was a hugely significant literary figure in the Australian interwar period whose life story demonstrates, among other things, that intellectual, creative women of this period could not exhibit the same eccentricity and impracticality routinely shown by their male counterparts.' (Introduction)

'In recent years Australian historians have begun to show the ways in which Australia’s black history has simultaneously been concealed and disclosed over a long period of time. This article focuses on one such example of this phenomenon – a 1937 fictionalised family history by the Western Australian writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman – and seeks to uncover the unusual set of biographical, historical, intellectual and generic factors that spurred her to raise questions about this black history rather than look the other way. At the same time, we examine the ways in which Drake-Brockman herself turned a blind eye to the Drake-Brockmans’ entanglement with another racial history.' (Publication abstract)

l'Judith Wright (1915–2000) remains a giant figure within Australian art, culture and politics. Her 1946 collection of poetry, The Moving Image, revolutionised Australian poetry. She helped to establish the modern Australian environmental movement and was a key player in early campaigns for Aboriginal land rights. A friend and confidante of artists, writers, scholars, activists and policy makers – she remains an inspiration to many. And yet, as Georgina Arnott is able to show in this major new work, the biographical picture we have had of this renowned poet-activist has been very much a partial one.

'This book presents a more human figure than we have previously seen, and concentrates on Wright’s younger years. New material allows us to hear, directly, thrillingly, the feisty voice of a young Judith Wright and forces us to reconsider the woman we thought we knew.' (Publication summary)