AustLit

'Call of the Outback is a biography of Australian writer Ernestine Hill by Dutch/Australian writer and translator Marianne Van Velzen. Her interest in Hill was piqued as a child coming across The Australian Loneliness as part of her father’s English book collection. Her family, immigrants to Australia in the post Second World War period, came to use Hill’s text as both an aid to learning the language and as a cipher to understanding the new country to which they had come.' (Introduction)

'Charlie Ward’s A Handful of Sand is an epic historical work, meticulously researched and beautifully written, with at its heart the events that shaped the lives of the Gurindji in the lead-up and aftermath of the historic walk-off. Ward takes us through the events in close detail that surround the iconic moment in 1975 when an Australian Prime Minister passed a ‘handful of sand’ to a Gurindji elder.'  (Introduction)

'In his latest work Battarbee and Namatjira, New Zealand writer Martin Edmond juxtaposes the biographies of two painters, Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira, as a way to explore their personal and professional relationships and to highlight the creative processes and personalities of both men. Edmond uses events in the lives of his protagonists to redefine their experiences of success and failure, creation and destruction. Their intertwined stories unfold with the inevitability of a classical Greek play – inexorable and tragic.'  (Introduction)

'On the battlefields of the First World War, Albert Borella suffered chronic dysentery, toothache and was seriously wounded a number of times. He would see training in Egypt and extensive military action in Gallipoli and on the Western Front. In 1918 he was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military honour in the British Empire, for 'most conspicuous bravery in attack'. When the Northern Territory honours its Anzacs the name of Albert Chalmers-Borella is remembered with great pride as the 'only Northern Territorian to have received the Victoria  Cross'.'  (Publication abstract)