AustLit

(Publication abstract)

'As university student Olivia Wells sets out on her quest to find an unpublished manuscript by Gloria Graham – a now obscure mid-twentieth century feminist and writer – she unwittingly uncovers details about a young woman found murdered. Strangled with a nylon stocking in the mangroves on the banks of the river in wartime Brisbane, the case soon became known as the river girl murder.

'Olivia’s detective work exposes the sinister side of that city in 1943, flush with greenbacks and nylons, jealousy and violence brewing between the Australian and US soldiers, which eventually boiled over into the infamous Battle of Brisbane. Olivia soon discovers that the diggers didn’t just reserve their anger for the US forces – they also took it out on the women they perceived as traitors, the ones who dared to consort with US soldiers.

'Can Olivia rewrite history to bring justice to the river girl whose life was so brutally taken? Even if the past can’t be changed, is it possible to undo history’s erasure?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'As a committed reader whose idea of leisure time involves a book, a comfortable seated position and a glass of wine, I rarely take notice of tech developments, especially in entertainment and gaming. Anything requiring a headset, in particular, elicits only disinterest and a sense of Gen-X incompetence. In short, I’m an unlikely candidate to write about virtual reality (VR), but my interest in the technology was piqued when I came across an article in Scientific Reports in February 2018 relating the findings of a team of researchers from the University of Barcelona who used VR to put perpetrators of domestic violence in the shoes of their victims.' (Introduction)

'Moving from Sydney to a Queensland cane town in the 1980s is enough of a culture shock – but spending your teens as part of a controversial religious group spreading conservative propaganda means being unwittingly thrust into a politically volatile era that would shape Queensland politics for years to come.'  (Publication abstract)