AustLit

'Australian literary biographies are often published with the hope of rekindling interest in forgotten figures. This was the case, one suspects, with both Frances De Groen’s 1998 biography of Xavier Herbert and more recently with Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick: A Life of Randolph Stowe, published in 2016. Anyone who has heard of Katharine Susannah Prichard (and sadly the numbers are dwindling) knows she was a fine author of both prose and plays, who flourished as a writer from the early 1920s to the 1960s. Scholars and readers of Prichard know she was also a committed communist. She gave speeches embracing Bolshevism on the Perth Esplanade in 1919 and attended early Communist Party of Australia meetings in Sydney. The controversies and the contradictions of Prichard’s life are, perhaps, less intriguing than her intimate moments, as Nathan Hobby shows.' (Introduction)

'The primary aim of Mark Hearn’s The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia is to chart interactions between the rise of Australian nationalism and the global conditions that facilitated this political establishment. By focusing on how ‘global exchanges’ (4) of various kinds contributed to ‘the emerging Australian nation’ (5), Hearn draws on recent fin de siècle scholarship by Michael Saler and others as he seeks to interrogate the older myths that were content to promote Australian culture as a repository of bush mateship and pastoral separatism. Instead, Hearn emphasises the impact of the telegraph, undersea cables and other new forms of communication technology, and he suggests convincingly how ‘Australia helped to shape the global fin de siècle’ (6), actively participating in the creative energies associated in manifold ways with the contradictory worlds of intellectual degeneration and progressive politics.' (Introduction)

'If the extraordinary women media professionals whose life stories are told in these two books were with us today, they would, no doubt, be greatly encouraged, and probably a little surprised, by the advancements made in diversity, inclusion and gender in the modern workplace. They might be equally disappointed that this welcome progress had taken such an age and that the road ahead is still a long one. The announcement on International Women’s Day 2023 that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had achieved gender parity in its workforce (including its executive cohort) would have been welcomed by the Trailblazing Women in Kylie Andrews’ book who faced gendered workplace discrimination at the ABC. While the latest ABC news is encouraging, a recent ‘Women in Media’ study (reported by The Guardian, 23 February 2023) indicates that Australian women are still ‘vastly underrepresented’ in the media sector and that, at the current rate of development, media gender parity would not be achieved for at least a decade.' (Introduction)