AustLit

'Ron Radford shows how an elderly Englishman became the first notable white Australian landscape painter'

'A few years ago, I had occasion to re-read The Lucky Country. It stood up well, and although dated (naturally) the book holds its place alongside Trollope and Hancock as a contemporary response that has become a classic account of Australia. But as Ryan Cropp makes plain, this bestselling book – which apparently has never gone out of print – is only one of a couple of dozen. For a man who, when asked how he would like to be described on his tombstone, said ‘writer and talker … and luncher’, Horne was astonishingly productive. When well into his sixties, he wrote seven books in five years. And at the very end – co-written with his wife Myfanwy – he even managed one on dying.' (Introduction)

'Richard Flanagan’s latest book is an extraordinary meditation on Tasmania in the world' 

'A centenary history traces the fits, starts and tensions surrounding Melbourne University Press'

'Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith were giants of the world of Australian books and writing from the 1940s to 1980s'Lilliput', in this dual biography, is the world of literary magazines in Australia between the 1940s and the 1980s. Here Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith, of the journals Meanjin and Overland, were determined, driven visionaries. Both were very human-and occasionally bruised-believers in and workers for a better nation. The book ranges from before the Menzies era and the Cold War, through the Whitlam period and beyond to the challenges of the 1980s. It shows how the editors constantly aimed for a culture more liberal, diverse and developed than the one then prevailing. Their publications may have lacked resources and economic return, but they nonetheless possessed authority, regularly providing stimulation for their readers and for the nation. In finely wrought detail, Jim Davidson - the second editor of Meanjin - traces the commitment of Christesen and Murray-Smith to this ambitious cultural project and how it attracted many of the key writers and thinkers of those years. There are pen portraits of many of them, as the reader is taken behind the scenes. Emperors in Lilliput exhibits the enlightened creative spirit animating these journals at their best. It is at once captivating biography and rich social history.'  (Publication summary)

'Melburnians above a certain age will remember Coles in Bourke Street. Unknown to most of them, it stood on the site of another Coles, Cole’s Book Arcade, for half a century probably the most famous shop in Australia. Its founder, Edward William Cole, is now the subject of an engaging biography by Richard Broinowski.' (Introduction)

'Mateship is so central to the traditional view of Australia that John Howard wanted it written into the preamble of the Constitution. But Brenda Niall asserts in Friends & Rivals, a fine account of four female writers, that “mateship is the antithesis of individualism. When women question or confront their destiny, cracks appear.” Half a beat behind The Bulletin writers — rhapsodising about mateship in “the real Australia” — there were several women who ignored it, worked their way around it and, in one case, challenged it directly.' (Introduction)

'Australian classical music. Not quite an oxymoron, but certainly an unfamiliar phrase. Yet Australian literature has been promoted by a battery of university courses overseas, following the beachhead established by Patrick White’s Nobel Prize. Similarly, Australian art has twice had great moments of impact: the Whitechapel exhibition of 1961 for the Nolan–Boyd generation, and now the continuing worldwide interest in Aboriginal art. Our rock stars have repeatedly made worldwide reputations; in classical music, Australian singers have regularly risen to the top. But classical composition has been something else. Apart from the quirky Percy Grainger – deftly working in small forms, sometimes with large resources – no Australian composer has had a significant influence overseas (though Brett Dean is shaping up as a contender). Grainger had to abandon Australia to do so, eventually taking out American citizenship.' (Introduction)

'The name of Julia Sorell – the granddaughter of an early governor – never quite died in Tasmania. A faint memory survived of a high-spirited young woman who was the belle of Hobart, a woman who broke hearts and engagements, including one with the current governor’s son. (It was also rumoured – with political intent – that she seduced his father, Sir John Eardley-Wilmot.) An element of scandal arose all the more readily because her own mother had deserted her father for a military man, and had run off with him when he returned to his regiment in India.'  (Introduction)

‘I was written out of the family story. This book is my attempt to write myself, and my mother, back into it.’

'In this singular memoir, historian and biographer Jim Davidson writes about his fraught relationship with his authoritarian and controlling father, whose South African background and time in Papua New Guinea and Fiji prompted his own post-war mini-empire of dominance. A manipulative and emotionally ferocious man, he rejects his son and creates a second family, shutting Jim out and eventually disinheriting him, but never really leaving him alone.

'Traversing territory across Australia, South Africa, India, and London, this beautifully written book tells of a time of crushing conformity, sharply reminding us that some experiences can never be written out of our personal histories. ' (Publication Summary)