AustLit

'Bruce Grant was raised in outback Western Australia but lived and worked at or near the centre of power in Australia for several decades, as journalist and foreign correspondent, diplomat, and advisor to governments from Menzies to Whitlam to Hawke and Keating. He spent periods researching and teaching within universities, including as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and was chairman of the Australia-Indonesia Institute and of major arts organisations, festivals and awards bodies. But throughout his life Grant has also been a successful writer, of film and theatre criticism, novels, short stories, essays, books.

'Australian High Commissioner to India (1973–1976), Grant was an early advocate of the importance of Asia, to Australia. With Gareth Evans he co-wrote Australia’s Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s (1991). His Indonesia (1964) remains a classic. In Subtle Moments Grant shares stories of public life, and its private dimensions, with literary aplomb and surprising candour, and, more than this, fascinatingly illuminates how Australia has changed over time, and how it might still develop for the better.' (Publication summary)

'He is an Australian businessman with a secret hope that Australia as a nation will count for something important in its region and the world. She is the daughter of an Indonesian mystic whose secret hope is that she will become the country's president. Each year she spends a night with her father in the graves of their ancestors. "Otherwise," she laughs, "I'm just a regular Sydney girl," or, as she sometimes says, "a ratbag feminist." She is against abortion and wants marriage and children. He believes that free love, like free markets, will find its own way. As a compromise, they marry in a secular ceremony in Prague and become crusaders for a liberal, democratic new world order. But Indonesian and Australian politics - and the Goddess of the Arafura Sea - conspire against them. ' (Publication summary)