AustLit

'Sometimes you need to leave a place to understand how emotionally important it is to you. I don't mean simply in a 'Home is where the heart is' way. Home for me, I've come to realise, is just as much about where many of my thoughts and memories continue to dwell.' (Publication abstract)

'Paul Daley talks to Marion Frith about how she wrote a novel about life after loss and human resilience in the midst of trauma – by telling the story through an unlikely friendship between two fictional characters.'

Source: Book It In.

'Paul Daley speaks to Chelsea Watego about why she says ‘fuck hope’ and why she wants to take her book, Another Day in the Colony, to Aboriginal readers in prisons.'

Source: Book It In.

'Craig Sherborne’s novel The Grass Hotel tells the story of caring for a mother who is declining with dementia. He talks to Paul Daley about his own complex upbringing – one that was affectionate, but also filled with stilted and misunderstood expressions of care.'

Source: Book It In.

'Bequeathed from memory to memory, these records remind us how recently central Australian Indigenous people felt the upheaval of colonialism'

'Anna Clark set out to write the history of Australian history. In grappling with the past, she faced up to the giants in her own family.'

'Dear Son is a searing anthology of letters by First Nations fathers and sons. Two of Australia’s best authors discuss the tenderness and strength of Indigenous masculinity, in conversation with author and journalist Paul Daley.' 

'Paul Daley talks to Tony Birch about finding affection on the so-called margins of the inner city, the injustice of climate change and Blak humour. Birch also describes why he doesn’t view his fiction as having a political message'

'One new friend is Charmian Clift’s Mermaid Singing, a memoir of trauma and self-discovery and a reminder of what could have been.'

'Mark McKenna’s short, elegant book Return to Uluru gazes inwards to the continental interior, metaphor for a nation’s yearning.'

'From award-winning journalist Paul Daley comes a gripping multi-generational saga about Australian frontier violence and cultural theft that will capture the national imagination.

'Morally bankrupt popular historian Patrick Renmark leaves London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he takes a commission to write the biography of his pioneering anthropologist grandfather.

'With no enthusiasm and even less integrity, Patrick travels to the former mission town in Australia's far north where his grandfather famously brokered 'peace' between the Indigenous people of the area and the white constabulary.

'Of course nothing is as it seems, or as Patrick wants it to be. Unable to lay his own son to rest, Patrick unwillingly becomes part of local lawyer Jericho Bakerman's quest to return the settlement's ancestral remains to Country.' (Publication summary)

'When contemplating the historical efficacy of this nation’s secular shrine, the Australian War Memorial, it is best to stand out front in the middle of Anzac Parade, look up towards Mount Ainslie and imagine what was originally intended.' (Introduction)

'I frequently reread the Australian novels of my youth – and few more so than George Johnston’s autobiographical “Meredith Trilogy” of My Brother Jack, Clean Straw for Nothing and A Cartload of Clay.' (Introduction)

'The actor, playwright and screenwriter’s first novel solidifies her take on Henry Lawson’s classic: first a play, now a book, soon a film'

(Source : Abstract)

'Kurnell is a no-fuss, unpretentious place given that it’s supposed to be the cradle of the nation. Stretching along a promontory that looks like a witch’s finger pointing west from the southern shore of Botany Bay, opposite Sydney Airport, Kurnell is a hotchpotch sprawl of fibro modesty and glass-and-steel ambition, where trailered speedboats rest on the verges and Aussie flags snap on front-yard poles. Nestled in Kamay Botany Bay National Park, Kurnell overlooks a mass of water lacking the frenetic beauty of luminous sails and green and gold ferries, and of some of the international signature structures of modernity, that characterise that other vast nearby inlet that the colonists instead chose as the harbour for their penal settlement.' (Introduction)

'Fifty years after Clean Straw for Nothing won the prodigal Australian writer George Johnston a second Miles Franklin award, the novel has aged as a rich critique of social change, cultural complacency and the rise of smug nationalism in Menzies-era Australia.' (Introduction)