AustLit

'Midnight Oil introduced me to radical politics in the 1980s. Their lyrics opened my eyes to how the world and its problems were greater than my teenage narcissism had allowed. By the time I was studying literature at university, my journal of choice was naturally Overland. Established in Melbourne in 1954 by anti-Stalinist members of the Communist Party of Australia, Overland still prides itself on being the only radical literary journal in Australia, though others have made ground, attesting to an increased radicalism in literary culture generally.' (Introduction)

'Flyaway is a strange beast of a book. It’s a Gothic fairytale set ostensibly somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean, in a bush district, but Kathleen Jennings’ debut novel could really be located in just about any small Australian town, in any dusty outpost where memory “seeped and frayed … where ghosts stood silent by fenceposts”. Bettina Scott is the unreliable narrator at its core, a young woman who, unlike her mother, is graceless and unlovely; there are intimations that tempestuousness and insolence also reside closely beneath her surface.' (Introduction)