AustLit

'Dymphna Cusack's books were best-sellers in Australia and more than thirty other countries in the mid to late twentieth century. Radio and television adaptations of her novels and plays reached audiences across three continents. Her works continue to provide a valuable record of people within their cultures engaging with the socio-political issues of the particular time and place. Her two novels that dealt with the impact of World War Two on the lives of ordinary Australians at the Home Front - Come in Spinner (1951) and Southern Steel (1953) - were immediate best-sellers and have never been out of print. Southern Steel brought her legendary status in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley where (in early 1937) she had already earned a reputation as an advocate for the working class. At the opening of the new Cessnock High School she publicly denounced the then Minister for Education for his government's health policies (or lack thereof) vis- -vis malnutrition in the children of the mining families of the Hunter at the height of the Great Depression (North, RN). Come in Spinner was later made into a popular ABC-TV mini-series. Produced in 1989, the DVD has kept its place in the ABC's backlist as a valuable resource in social history classes.'

Source: Abstract.

'As "paradoxical as a platypus"; a combination of "Mrs Pankhurst and Mary Poppins"; a vivaciously "fascinating little rascal" (Roe 533, 568, 172). Such endearments by colleagues, friends, and suitors alike of the effusive Stella Miles Franklin allude to the intriguing puzzles associated with her life and works. "secretive and outspoken; loyal in friendship yet prickly and even at times malicious," she has been described as "gregarious, witty and deeply depressive" (Martin 89.1). "This great bag of words" (Roe 127), to coin Franklin's own phrase, describes the enigma that is Miles. Indeed, describing the irrepressible Franklin reminds me of a saying from my childhood, "there's nowt as queer as folk." And Franklin was as oddly queer as they come: a quirky thinker and compulsive writer who left behind a bewildering quagmire of stories, novels and plays, some in fragments, some scrawled over in indecipherable scribbles, and some edited, carefully bound, and yet still roundly rejected by publishers.'

Source: Abstract.

'During an eleven-year career (1830-1841) as a sketcher, painter and lithographer, Elizabeth Gould designed and composed more than 650 hand-coloured lithographic plates of birds: these included the 50 birds depicted in Charles Darwin's ornithology section of The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1840); hundreds of lithographs of European species, and illustrated monographs about the popular novelty genera: the toucan and the trogon. In 1838 the British illustrator travelled to Australia with her husband, John Gould, a publisher, writer and ornithologist, to collect specimens for The Birds of Australia (1840-1848). The two-year project involved significant expenditure and risk; the Goulds' three youngest children, Charles, Eliza and Louisa, remained at home in London, in the care of their maternal grandmother. Between 1838 and 1840 Elizabeth, along with her eldest son, John Henry, resided in Hobart and Scone, where she completed sketches, drawings and paintings of the continent's bird species and flora. During her stay in Hobart, she gave birth to another son, Franklin Tasman. Unfortunately, Elizabeth did not live to see the completion of her research, since she died from puerperal fever in August 1841, following the birth of her daughter, Sarah, a year after her return to England. At the time of her death, Elizabeth had finished designs for 84 hand-coloured lithographs and an unknown number of preparatory drawings for the remaining 520 bird species the Goulds had surveyed and collected. The Birds of Australia, a seven-volume natural history of the continent's birdlife, featuring 600 hand-coloured lithographic plates, was an immediate success and the collection continues to be discussed and dissected today. Yet, in spite of Elizabeth's contributions, the work is usually celebrated as being from the hand of her husband, John Gould.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Representing rape as wrong, and not avoiding the violence of it, has been the focus of many feminists' work for the past forty years. Various rape theorists have provided deconstructive analyses of how legal and media genres, as well as romance novels and feature films, shape how rape is understood and what it can mean. Fantasy literature is one more culturally powerful genre in which rape is narrated, but this genre has been largely neglected by theorists, and there is certainly room for more analysis of how rape is represented in fantasy fiction, given that the genre is widely read and popular-and, like other popular genres, has some power to reinforce and naturalise, or to challenge, rape culture. Moreover, as fantasy literature is often associated with frivolous escapism, it may be in a position to insidiously reinscribe patriarchal assumptions about sexual violence. If fantasy literature is not taken seriously, if its sexist affirmations of rape culture are dismissed as symptoms of a retrograde genre, then the processes by which it perpetuates rape culture go unchallenged. While most scholarly works about fantasy literature, feminist and otherwise, have surveyed a large number of texts, if we are to take fantasy literature seriously, a closer textual analysis is required. Paying close attention to the way language and narrative structures used by fantasy literature interact with rape narratives in non-feminist fantasy texts, helps elucidate some of the ways narrative can operate to depoliticise representations of sexual violence.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.