AustLit

'Your Christmas lunch or dinner need not be constrained by those fussy and inflexible eaters within the family. A perfectly splendid meal can still be created with a broader range of ingredients than might normally be used for a festive occasion, along with some careful planning and preparation in the weeks before. Knowing well in advance of the dietary requirements of your guests will assist considerably, so you are urged to approach them with a checklist before finalising your menu. Modern families typically comprise vegetarians, vegans, non-pork eaters, seafood allergists and coeliacs, meaning your pantry should be comprehensive enough to provide anything from gluten free fruit cake to tasty alter-natives to roast turkey. ' (Introduction)
 

'Over a publishing career spanning a half-century from the early 1960s. Shirley Hazzard published four acclaimed novels: The Evening of the Holiday (1961), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003). These novels focus on the intertwined matter of low and loss: they rake her readers into complex moral territory, with the certainties and compulsions of sexual and romantic love tested throughout by individual vulnerability. At the same time, and much in the manner of novels written a century earlier, they take up what Harvard referred to as "public themes," that is, the substantial human matter of political and social life, played out against the backdrop of the globalising world of the second half of the twentieth century.' (Introduction)

In this essay, Cheryl Taylor writes about the poetry of novelist Thea Astley.

'Helen Garner's 1984 novella, The Children's Bach opens with a description and commentary on the famous photograph of Alfred Lord Tennyson and his family taken en pleine air at their house on the Isle of Wight in 1862:

'Dexter found, in a magazine. a photograph of the poet Tennyson, his wife and their two sons walking in the garden of their house on the Isle of Wight. To the modern eye it is a shocking picture: they are all, with the exception of the great man himself, bundled up in such enormous, incapacitating garments. Eye-line: Tennyson looks into the middle distance. His wife, holding his arm and standing very close to his side, gazes up into his face. One boy holds his father's hand and looks up at him. The other boy holds his mother's and looks into the camera with a weak, rueful expression. Behind them, out of focus, twinkles the windy foliage of a great garden. Their shadows fall across the lawn: they have just taken a step. Tennyson's hands are large square paws, held up awkwardly at stomach level. His wife's face is gaunt and her eyes are set in deep sockets. It is a photo of a family. The wind puffs out the huge stiff curved sleeve of the woman's dress, and brushes back off his forehead the long hair of the father's boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents' faces; though he is holding his father's hand, he is separate from the group, and light shows between his tightly buttoned torso and his father's leg.' (Introduction)

'Chloe Hooper's second novel, The Engagement (2012), was always likely to face a critical challenge. Her previous book was the multi-award-winning The Tall Man (2008), a non-fictional account of the death in police custody of an Indigenous man, Cameron Doomadgee, on Palm Island off the coast of North Queensland in 2004. Coinciding with Kevin Rudd's 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations, it was a timely work about racial injustice overshadowed by historical guilt, and was widely publicised and well received. In contrast, The Engagement, variously described as a thriller or a gothic novel, might seem frivolous, and so far has sparked no critical attention apart from reviews, most of which, while finding things to praise, also carried reservations. Owen Richardson in the Monthly-which in 2006 had published Hooper's Walkley Award-winning essay on the inquest into Doomadgee's death—thought that "it was hard not to think that Hooper's gift is slumming it a bit," and Geordie Williamson in the Australian was "not sure how successfully Hooper has held fantasy and reality in tension" (19). Kate McFadyen in Australian Book Review struck something of a common chord when she remarked: "Hooper masters all the generic plot devices, but her characters' responses and motivations do not always ring true...' (Introduction)