AustLit

'Prime ministers are better off co-operating with their biographers. Troy Bramston , who has experienced the ‘Keating treatment’, delves into the genre.' (Introduction)

'Two of Australia’s finest writers began by publishing poetry before switching to fiction in the 1970s. David Malouf’s debut novel Johnno appeared in 1975; Roger McDonald’s Gallipoli novel, 1915, four years later. McDonald has taken his time since, assaying rich yet untouched or little regarded seams of the nation.' (Introduction)

'Gerald Murnane has been at the game of fiction (or whatever it is he does) for a long time. His 1982 novel The Plains, with its dazzling invocation of the idea of landscape, made a world of readers realise fiction could be made abstract and lyrical.' (Introduction)

'Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.” So wrote American novelist Steven Millhauser. Two ambitious Australian novels, Sara Dowse’s As the Lonely Fly and Bram Presser’s The Book of Dirt, turn to fiction where history has failed and memory is fading.'

'We may be the most urbanised nation on earth, but for some strange reason we seem to think the bush still defines us. Whereas London­, Berlin or New York are celebrated by writers and urban explorers in the guise of flaneurs or psychogeographers such as Charles Baudelaire, or contemporaries such as Englishman Iain Sinclair, Australian authors — except crime writers — have no such tradition.' (Introduction)

'From the first day on the job, it is drummed into the heads of young journalists that the most importa­nt part of a story is the first paragraph. It should arrest the reader’s attention, grip the imaginat­ion and excite interest to read on.' (Introduction)

'The colonial fascination with northern Australia holds the key to understanding the Burke and Wills exped­ition of 1860-61. The north was well situated to increase trade and ­communication with Asian and British markets. Once explorers opened up northern Australia, the development of railways, ports and underwater telegraph cables would connect the isolated British-Australian colonies to the rest of the world.' (Introduction)