AustLit

'Captain Robert Scott’s second doomed expedition to the South Pole is the stuff of legend. He and his comrades were beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen and then died in extraordinary blizzard conditions. The saga is the subject of what’s generally reckoned to be a literary masterpiece – The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard – and its enactment of pain and heroism is central to Patricia Cornelius’s play Do Not Go Gentle, in which the struggle becomes a metaphor for the emotional life of a group of people in an aged-care home.' (Introduction)

'Journalist and author Martin Flanagan attended a Catholic boarding school in Tasmania from 1966 to 1971. It was after a third priest from his time at the school was convicted of sexual crimes that he began this memoir. It was 2019, George Pell’s guilty verdict was being challenged in the High Court, and the debate around paedophile priests was raging. Everyone in the media seemed certain about what happened in schools like his and yet, for Flanagan and his brothers, none of it was clear at all. Not that he doubted the victims – in a 2007 trial, he had given evidence against one of the priests – but as a journalist he knew how unreliable memory could be. Perhaps now was the time to see what he did remember.' (Introduction)

'There’s an art to writing the journalistic yarn, and Walter Marsh has it. Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire is his biography of the youthful Rupert Murdoch, documenting the kingpin’s rise and rise. In plain but far from dull prose, Marsh shows how Murdoch’s father, Keith, tried to leave his son an empire. Instead, young Rupert was the heir to a fight: “His father’s colleagues and rivals were descending on his inheritance like seagulls on a bag of chips.”' (Introduction)