AustLit

'This book is likely to anger many readers. Saltwater is about Cathy McLennan’s time as a barrister for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service on Palm Island and in Townsville in the 1990s. Aged twenty-two and faced with a heavy workload, she was confronted with heartbreaking cases of violence, trauma, and neglect. Other lawyers in the office came and went, but the Aboriginal field officers remained constant. Throughout, there are reminders that Palm Island is a beautiful place with forests and crystalline water, despite its being referred to as ‘the most violent place on earth outside a war zone’.'

(Introduction)

'For the most part, the burgeoning 1980s nostalgia industry in Australia tends to overlook the fact that back then the states seemed to be engaged in a kind of Sheffield Shield of venality, competing to see which would prevail as the most politically debauched. One might have thought of the Queensland of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Terry Lewis and the New South Wales of Abe Saffron and Roger Rogerson as topping the table, but Western Australia, like its cricket team of the period, was definitely no slouch.'

(Introduction)

'The Birdman’s Wife is about passion, obsession, and ambition. Narrated by Elizabeth (Eliza) Gould, the novel relates her marriage to, and creative partnership with, zoologist John Gould. Opening with their meeting at the Zoological Society of London in 1828, Eliza’s narrative charts the years of her collaboration with Gould – including the time spent in the Australian colonies classifying and illustrating the native birdlife – as a result of which she came to be celebrated ‘not just [as] a wife and mother’, but as a zoological illustrator in her own right.'

(Introduction)

'E.B. White once said there were three New Yorks, comprised of those who were born there (‘solidity and continuity’), the daily commuter (‘tidal restlessness’), and the searcher on a quest, the latter giving the city its passion and dedication to the arts. In The Museum of Modern Love, this third type is drawn to Marina Abramovíc’s The Artist is Present, a simple yet profound performance stretching over seventy-five unrelenting days, in which Marina unflinchingly meets the gaze of a series of individuals in a gallery.'

(Introduction)

'Why do you write?

To work out what I think, which requires digging through the received ideas and lazy generalisations that clutter the surface of my mind, and crafting the language to describe what I’ve found. I also have a strong desire to communicate certain things.'

(Introduction)