AustLit

'Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which turns fifty this year, owes a share of its longevity to the modern folklore of vanished white women that has swirled around sites like Hanging Rock in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges since the nineteenth century. Lindsay’s Gothic legend still clings to this unique rock formation. The tale’s enduring appeal and unsettling allure arises from a mist of fact and fiction, casting a magic unspoiled even by the kitsch tourist injunction at Hanging Rock Reserve to ‘Experience the Mystery.’ No matter how often the story is demystified, its ghost lives on in urban legend, with all the appearance of an actual unsolved crime. The mystery lives on in the inescapable question: did it really happen?'  (Introduction)

'By the fifth page of Wayne Macauley’s fifth novel, Some Tests, the title is already a kind of refrain. Or at least the words – some tests – recur and resonate with a vague, tuneful importance. By the novel’s middle section it becomes an ominous chant, like the phrase that punctuates a nauseating chorus. Protagonist Beth Own, a middle-aged nurse with two young daughters and an accountant husband hellbent on costly renovation, is instructed by her locum doctor to take ‘some tests’, and then ‘some more tests’, and then some ‘proper, rigorous tests’. And it seems that she will go on taking these tests, and learning of the need for even more tests, with scarcely the time to wonder what the tests are about or what they could mean. She can only suspect that there is something critically wrong with her. And although only a ‘lethargy and general unwellness’ has befallen her, it seems, sometimes, during her journey towards more and more tests, that she might even die.' (Introduction)

'The publication of Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers in 2003 gave Australia what the country desperately needed for the new millennium: a founding story in which the human beings who encountered each other in 1788 could finally become part of the national imagination.' (Introduction)