AustLit

'Black Tom Birch was the most feared and hated man in Van Diemen's Land. For four years he kept the colony in a state of terror. He was responsible for the deaths of dozens of settlers. He burnt their buildings and destroyed their livestock and crops. Newspapers raged against him. One demanded he be lynched on capture.

'Although he was three times in British custody, Black Tom Birch was never tried or punished. Instead, he defected, and history tells us that for the rest of his life he helped the British round up his own people for incarceration on a Bass Strait island.

'But history is wrong.

'Now, for the first time, the epic truth is told about this charismatic Aboriginal patriot and his unending fight against invasion. It is a heroic story - and a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.' (Publication summary)

'‘I wonder sometimes if the literary pests are writing memoirs: “The last time I saw her she was pale and sick but smiling bravely.”’ So mused the dying Gwen Harwood in a letter written a few months before she succumbed to cancer. Nearly two decades have passed since she wrote that, but no memoir or biography of the loved and estimable poet has yet appeared. While her poems and the two published volumes of her correspondence enable us to hear her speaking about herself and her life, and people and things that mattered to her, in these pages her friends and acquaintances – no ‘literary pests’ these – tell for the first time about the Gwen Harwood they knew, woman and poet. Their recollections are warm and affectionate, and sometimes surprising. Some might even be thought shocking.' (Source: Online)

'Self-revelations can bring tears - and self-revelation can be brought by tears. In his latest collection of stories Robert Cox focuses sharply on both kinds of personal, painful epiphany. '...celebrates the enduring importance of the short story form.' - Sunday Tasmanian'