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Download DOC (83.04 KB) Evan is a nurse, a suicide assistant. His job is legal . . . just. He's the one at the hospital who hands out the last drink to those who ask for it.
Evan's friends don't know what he does during the day. His mother, Viv, doesn't know what he's up to at night. And his supervisor suspects there may be trouble ahead.
As he helps one patient after another die, Evan pushes against legality, his own morality and the best intentions of those closest to him, discovering that his own path will be neither quick nor painless.
Steven Amsterdam is the award-winning author of Things We Didn't See Coming (winner of the Age Book of the Year, shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction and longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award) and What the Family Needed (AWW Great Read and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC literary award). He lives in Melbourne with his partner where he works as a palliative care nurse.
The Easy Way Out dramatises a topical issue with striking qualities of imagination, humanity, intellect and humour.
Set in a recognisable yet somewhat dystopian near-future, the novel is narrated by Evan, a nurse who works as a dying assistant under a new law that allows voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill. However, legalisation does not dispel all ethical and emotional questions.
As Steven Amsterdam shows in a series of death-bed scenarios, the decision to end a life – even one’s own – is not always simple, and bureaucratic regulation makes it far from easy. Evan must walk the line between compassion and professionalism. In his private life he distances death through physical encounters with his friends Lon and Simon. And as he cares for his own rebellious mother, Viv, his principles are challenged and his motivations revealed. Amsterdam makes no judgments on a contentious subject but draws on his work as a palliative care nurse to portray the medical settings and challenges in convincing detail. He goes well beyond “case studies” to bring to life idiosyncratic characters in dynamic relationships.
The present-tense narration is vibrant, with a lightly modulated tone that allows readers to laugh as they contemplate life’s most serious questions in a sophisticated novel that is both thought-provoking and moving.
Ava Langdon is often not herself. Having fled her early life in New Zealand and endured the loss of her children, she now lives as a recluse in the Blue Mountains. Regarded by locals as a colourful eccentric, she dresses in men’s clothes and fearlessly pursues her artistic path.
All that matters to Ava is her writing. Words offer beauty and a sense of possibility when so much has been lost. But can they offer her redemption in her last days?
Poetic, poignant, and at times bitingly funny, this novel takes us into the mind of a true maverick.
Mark O’Flynn’s fiction and poetry have been widely published in Australian journals as well as overseas. His novels include Grassdogs and The Forgotten World, and he has published five collections of poems, most recently The Soup’s Song. He has also published the comic memoir False Start and a collection of short fiction, White Light. He lives in the Blue Mountains.
The Last Days of Ava Langdon is a novel notable for its elegant craftsmanship and its masterful blend of humour and pathos.
Based on the life of the eccentric novelist Eve Langley, it is a deeply appealing character study of an elderly woman, once a moderately successful writer, who lives alone in a tumbledown shack in the Blue Mountains, obsessively writing strange novels that no one wants to publish. Ava Landon is a marvellously quixotic creation. She wanders the streets of Katoomba, wearing a pith helmet and wielding a machete. Insisting that her name is Oscar Wilde, she is a defiant character who persists despite the world’s indifference and conducts herself with equanimity in the face of her impoverished circumstances and social isolation.
O’Flynn places us inside Ava’s mind, allowing us to understand her peculiar literary sensibility and the way it shapes her every perception. In doing so, he not only allows us to empathise with her but to understand that her madness and her dedication to writing are inseparable, integral to her personality.
Set over the course of a day and a night, The Last Days of Ava Langdon is a work of remarkable formal concentration. Composed with a poet’s ear and feel for the weight of words, its prose is rich and vivid and never less than beautifully rendered.
'Waiting' is a story of two odd couples.
Big is hefty cross-dresser and Little is little. Both are long used to the routines of boarding house life in the inner suburbs of Melbourne but Little, with the prospect of an inheritance, is beginning to indulge in the great Australian dream. Little's cousin Angus is a solitary man who designs lake-scapes for city councils, and strangely constructed fireproof houses. Angus meets Jasmin, an academic who races in ideas as much as her runners.
Philip Salom is a contemporary Australian poet. He has published fourteen books - twelve collections of poetry and two novels.
Major awards (apart from the two Commonwealth Poetry Book Prizes in London) include the Western Australian Premiers Prize (twice for Poetry and once for Fiction) and the prestigious Newcastle Poetry Prize (in 1996 and again in 2000). He has received several major Australian Council Fellowships.
In 2003 Philip Salom was recognised with the Christopher Brennan Award - a prize given for lifetime achievement in poetry, recognising a poet who produces work "of sustained quality and distinction".
Philip Salom’s Waiting is a reflective and subtly powerful novel that focuses on the lives of four very different characters: Big and Little, Angus and Jasmin. Big and Little are central to this novel, and their relationship and the issues they face are the focus of the world that Salom presents with a sharp eye for detail and the nuances of personal connections.
They are idiosyncratic and troubled, difficult and loving. They have found each other and a way of life that suits their needs and their sense of self. Angus and Jasmin are different in both their inspiration and aspiration, but they find in each other a sense of what they need to move through their lives. The conceit of “waiting” hangs over all the characters, who are in turn waiting for familial, financial and personal resolutions.
The novel vibrates with the language of the street and the speaking voices of the many characters is brilliantly captured by Salom, whose poetry background is apparent. The suburban rooming house which is central to the novel reverberates with wit and intensity and the cast of characters that live and die in this boarding house is achingly authentic. Their impoverished circumstances, daily struggles with health and mental capacity are all handled with sensitivity and a unique voice.
Waiting is a beautiful telling of the lives of ordinary people.
Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, expert on concrete and modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village. Surrounded and obstructed by the debris of his life, he is determined to be miserable, but is tired of his existence and of the life he has chosen.
When a series of unfortunate incidents forces him and his neighbour, Jan, together, he begins to realise the damage done by the accumulation of a lifetime’s secrets and lies, and to comprehend his own shortcomings. Finally, Frederick Lothian has the opportunity to build something meaningful for the ones he loves.
Josephine Wilson's second novel, Extinctions, won the 2017 Miles Franklin and the Colin Roderick Awards after winning UWA Publishing's inaugural Dorothy Hewett Award in manuscript form. Josephine is a Perth-based writer whose career began in the area of performance. Her early works included The Geography of Haunted Places, with Erin Hefferon, and Customs. Her first novel, Cusp, was published by UWA Publishing in 2005. Josephine has taught at Murdoch University, the University of Western Australia, and Curtin University.
Extinctions is a contemporary story of family disintegration and regeneration, rich with ideas and philosophical musing.
Professor Frederick Lothian, a former engineer, lives reclusively in a retirement village surrounded by memories of his late wife, Martha, and their family. Their life is represented by his treasured collection of Modernist furniture and countless possessions he can't let go. His adult children are absent, Callum disabled in an accident and Caroline researching an exhibition of extinct creatures while obsessed by her adoption and Indigenous origins. Frederick seems frozen in his self-centred history until a warm, bossy neighbour, Jan, breaks down his reserve.
Josephine Wilson moves fluidly between past and present, the minutiae of domestic life and the abstractions of academic thought, keeping control of an ensemble of interesting flawed characters. The elegant realist narrative explores ideas of family, inheritance and grief, as well as design and construction, enhanced by the physical and metaphorical significance of eggs, bridges, chairs and so on. There is both poetry and wit in the writing. Wilson’s cool intelligence and psychological insight raise an engaging story to a highly original level of literary achievement.
Eileen Chong’s new collection continues her exploration of the contemplative and the personal within subtly shifting contexts of food, love, history and culture. Lovers of her poetry will find much that is familiar and much that is new. Over the three volumes of work represented on this page the reader can map a transition from a precocious apprenticeship to a mature voice, through moments of light and happiness mixed with hints of grief and foreboding.
As always her technical confidence and linguistic sophistication allow her to offer poems which appear simple on the surface, transparent enough to appreciate at a first reading and yet which contain depths and resonances which repay repeated attention and thought. Through this combination of beauty and depth, Eileen Chong commands a wide and devoted following.
Eileen Chong is Sydney poet who was was born in Singapore. She moved to Australia in 2007 and took a Master of Letters at the University of Sydney. She won the Poets Union Youth Fellowship in 2010 and was the Australian Poetry Fellow for 2011-2012.
Her first collection, Burning Rice, was published in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award 2012, the Australian Arts in Asia Award 2013, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2013. Her second collection, Peony, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2014. Painting Red Orchids (2016) is her third volume of poetry. A selection of poems, Another Language is published in the Braziller Series of Australian poets by George Braziller, New York.
Eileen Chong’s Painting Red Orchids reveals an introspective poet whose acute command of form and painterly sensibility deftly capture both the quotidian and intimate worlds and larger questions of cultural belonging, history and home. Travelling between the balconies of Sydney, Singapore Harbour and Hong Kong ferries, Chong’s poems delight in sensory and tactile detail, which the poet renders with precision and restraint, whether she is describing chefs making fresh dumplings behind a sheet of glass “dressed like surgeons”, or the notes of a zither that “shiver in the night air”.
Underlying the sensual pleasures of food, alcohol and sex, however, are deeper griefs: here, a mother’s miscarriage, funerals, intergenerational loss and change jostle for attention alongside the pleasures of the flesh. The poet also occasionally turns her eye to history’s silences and omissions to great effect, examining a black and white photograph of a Chinese miner during the gold rush, and the twin drumbeats of war and adolescence in the mind of Hua Mu Lan as she advances across a battlefield while posing as a man.
Overall, what impresses most about Chong’s poems is their music, imagery, formal control and sense of craft; this is a poet with a keen eye and ear who finds deep meaning in fleeting moments.
In 2012 poet and writer Joel Deane suffered a stroke. Suddenly he was a poet without language. The music and imagery of poetry, for so long the impetus of all his writing, would not come. Year of the Wasp charts Deane’s journey to rediscover his poetic voice.
From these deeply personal origins Deane’s third poetry collection rises to confront the realities of politics and culture, language and love in contemporary Australia. It is a journey of poetic transfiguration that produces a work of unrivalled power, emotional intensity, and insight.
Joel Deane is the author of seven books, including The Norseman’s Song, Catch and Kill: the politics of power, and Magisterium, and has written speeches for Labor politicians such as Bill Shorten, Steve Bracks, and John Brumby. He has been a finalist for the Walkley Award and the Melbourne Prize for Literature, and been shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award.
Joel Deane’s Year of the Wasp was written after the poet, speechwriter and novelist suffered a stroke in 2012.
There is a visceral sense of the poet reengaging with the world through language and imagery that starts with his experience in hospital where his immediate physical surroundings become the locus for several of his poems: “the air-conditioning was far too cold” and “his life repeats on the portable TV power-drilled to the hospital ceiling”.
In the second section, “Eight Views of Nowhere”, the poems move outwards from the hospital bed to address injustice and inhumanity on a larger scale, employing Greek mythology with metaphorical intensity and a tightness of phrasing. The poet brings an otherworldliness into this dark world using words that echo liturgical prayer: “and so I pray to the digital celestials / to program me this day / my daily bread.”
There is no self pity here; rather Deane uses the occasion of his stroke to reflect on life more broadly with moral, political, literary and biblical allusions.
The wasp motif is used repeatedly as both an internal buzzing in the author’s head, a distortion of the reality around the poet, and ultimately a marker of transcendence. This is a poignant and powerful collection that confronts the reader with the impermanence and beauty of life and the restorative power of poetry.
In his latest collection, Liam Ferney focuses on the deep contradictions at the heart of modern life. This is fast-paced poetry that is explosive, critical, and engaged.
Ferney uses the argot of politics and the internet to tackle religion, war, love, and late capitalism. Content is a hand grenade tossed into the middle of polite society. He charts and parodies a hypertextual world, engrossed in media while passionately critical of their effects.
Liam Ferney is the author of Popular Mechanics (2004) and Boom (2013), which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. His work has been published internationally and translated into Korean and Mandarin. He lives in Brisbane.
Liam Ferney’s Content puts the Age of Information in the cross hairs.
“Frumpy bloggers” serve up homilies and hot takes, while “the newspapers in this town / only report reliably / on gossip, slander & opinion”. Knowledge has up and fled and citizens – or “users” – are content with mere content. “We have made knowledge redundant,” Ferney writes in the poem “Summer Anthem”, just “in time for cigarettes & g&ts / at the pool”.
Like frogs that fail to leap from the boiling pot, we are anesthetised to our addiction to the vapid content of rolling entertainment that passes for news: “when the networks go down we all look / up from our smart phones,” he writes with wry accusation, “and ask – / what next?”
While many poets are satisfied to “play with soundbites while transnational market forces play with us”, Ferney proves himself to be the rightful heir to the great John Forbes by holding a mirror to machines of power that doubles as an indictment.
This is an exhilarating, frequently hilarious, language-driven poetry that shows us precisely where we’re at. It may not be the news we want to hear, but Ferney’s poems bring the news we deserve and undoubtedly need.
Antigone Kefala is highly regarded for the intensity of her vision, and her minimalism. Fragments is her first collection of poems in almost twenty years, since the publication of New and Selected Poems in 1998. It follows her 2008 memoir Sydney Journals, of which one critic wrote, ‘Kefala can render the music of the moment so perfectly, she leaves one almost singing with the pleasure of it’. This skill in capturing the moment is just as evident in Fragments, with its linguistic precision, its heightened perception and sense of drama.
Antigone Kefala has written four works of fiction, including The First Journey, The Island and Summer Visit, and four poetry collections, The Alien, Thirsty Weather, European Notebook and Absence: New and Selected Poems as well as the non-fiction work Sydney Journals. Born in Romania of Greek parents, she lived in Greece and New Zealand before coming to Australia.
Antigone Kefala’s Fragments is a searing enactment of memory. Time demolishes us all in little doses, so the poet contends, but the past is “a poison / we thirst for”. Shards of memory conjure the world in various states of evanescence: dreams evoke empty rooms in old houses, the floorboards gone, even the walls are thinning to mist – here and there the cry of birds pierce the enveloping silence.
We, like the poems, may “sink in light, disappear in silence”, but Kefala bids us to recall the “glossy beings” of our younger selves who head into the future innocent to what awaits us.
Kefala astounds with imagery that is intense, unsettling and always unexpected: at dusk in the coastal town of Derveni on the Peloponnese peninsula, fishing boats are “massive dark stones / planted / in a field of moonstone”. Light, fire and flowers are recurring motifs, as is the theme of “self-sufficiency”, which in the fierce austerity of Kefala’s mind finds its ultimate embodiment in death.
Fragments is a wonder of minimalism in which we find ourselves, like the poet, dancing in memory rooms growing bigger and bigger. It is a major work by a senior poet whose poetry continues to fascinate.
Randolph Stow was one of the greatest Australian writers of his generation. His seven remarkable novels and several collections of poetry helped to change the way Australians viewed their land and their literature.
In Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Falkiner unravels the reasons behind Stow’s eventual quiet retreat from the literary world. Meticulously researched, insightful and at times deeply moving, Falkiner’s biography pieces together an intriguing life from Stow’s letters, diaries, and interviews with his closest friends. Stow’s own story provides us with keys to unlock the meaning of his rich and introspective works.
Suzanne Falkiner was born in Sydney and grew up in western New South Wales. After graduating from the University of New South Wales she spent several years travelling in Asia, Europe and South America, and has lived in Paris, Umbria, and New York, where she completed postgraduate courses at Columbia University.
Following various jobs in book and magazine publishing in Sydney, from the mid 1980s she has combined being a full time writer with editing, book reviewing, travel and other journalism. In 2005 she was awarded a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Technology, Sydney.
This is a comprehensive biography of an important Australian writer, Randolph Stow, known to friends and family as Mick.
Suzanne Falkiner has undertaken extensive research and uncovered new material about an enigmatic novelist and poet who spent his final years as a recluse far from his country of birth. The text ranges from his childhood in wartime rural Western Australia to his formative years studying in Perth through to his years as a wandering ex-pat, and eventually as resident of the port town of Harwich Essex.
Stow’s brilliance was combined with personal battles against depression and mental illness and Falkiner handles this material with respect while never avoiding the truth of the writer’s life. In many ways this is a conventional biography but Falkiner’s curiosity and interest in the social and cultural context in which Stow worked, make it a compelling read.
Quicksilver begins in contemplation of a lizard deep in the heart of the outback but quickly moves to the Russia of Tolstoy and Gorky, and on to other lands and times, bringing into play universal questions about the essential nature of the human condition.
Rothwell’s chief subject is always the inland: the mystic Kurangara cult that flourished in the Kimberley; the story of the Western Desert artists; and the landscape word-portraits by the great biographer of nature Eric Rolls.
Quicksilver masterfully takes us in search of the sacred through place and time, in an enchanting reverie of calm wondering.
Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Belomor, Heaven & Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior. He is a senior writer for the Australian.
This is an ambitious book, both in form and content, but one the judges believe has the power to change Australians’ understanding of their land and history.
Nicolas Rothwell uses a form – the essay – which is not always easy to carry off but which here amplifies his efforts to describe the nuances of our national history and culture.
Rothwell has created a work of art and an act of reconciliation through his stories of landscape, memory and meaning. His work is elegant and complex and he skillfully links ideas, events and people across the hemispheres, making surprising and rich connections between the ancient lands of Australia and Europe and beyond.
Rothwell’s rendering of landscape and place is deeply sensual and evocative. He encourages us to think outside the usual metropolitan focus. He demands our attention be given to an Australian landscape both familiar and alien and one with which he deeply connects.
Rothwell is a practiced and erudite observer and Quicksilver is a book that showcases his breadth of reading and reflection on issues of place and identity.
The judges described this book as contemporary in its outlook - a book of our time – but one, which will endure.
No matter how practised we are at history, it always humbles us. No matter how often we visit the past, it always surprises us. The art of time travel is to maintain critical poise and grace in this dizzy space.
Through portraits of fourteen historians, including Inga Clendinnen, Judith Wright, Geoffrey Blainey and Henry Reynolds, he traces how a body of work is formed out of a life-long dialogue between past evidence and present experience. With meticulous research and glowing prose, he shows how our understanding of the past has evolved, and what this changing history reveals about us.
Tom Griffiths is the W K Hancock Professor of History at the Australian National University and the author of Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (2007), Forests of Ash: An Environmental History(2001) and Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996). His books and essays have won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism, including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2008, the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate, and the Douglas Stewart and Nettie Palmer Prizes for Non-Fiction.
This is an impressive book that creatively explores the discipline of history as a craft that has made a considerable mark on Australia’s cultural identity.
In Tom Griffith’s vivid and accessible narrative history, the history and writing are shown to be both profound and idiosyncratic. Across fourteen chapters, each of which focuses on a significant writer, the reader is taken on a journey through Australian history. This is a book about the ideas that have shaped the writing of our history; its ambition is to expand our definition of Australian history and how we understand the stories of our past.
Griffith is a fine writer, at ease with his material and his concepts, who here demonstrates a capacity to combine historical data with analysis, biography and social commentary.
A world-famous Australian writer, an inspiration to Robert Hughes and Clive James, a legendary war correspondent who also wrote bestselling histories of exploration and conservation . . . and yet forgotten? In this dazzling book, Thornton McCamish delves into the past to reclaim a remarkable figure, Alan Moorehead.
As a reporter, Moorehead witnessed many of the great historical events of the mid-20th century: the Spanish Civil War and both world wars, Cold War espionage, and decolonisation in Africa. He debated strategy with Churchill and Gandhi, fished with Hemingway, and drank with Graham Greene, Ava Gardner and Truman Capote.
Thornton McCamish is a freelance journalist and writer. He was editor of the Big Issue (Australia) magazine from 1996 to 1999. His book Supercargo: A Journey Among Ports (2002) was published by Lonely Planet. Thornton received a 2013 Merlyn Myer Biography stipend to write Our Man Elsewhere - awarded on the strength of his outstanding proposal.
This is a highly readable biography of a significant Australian writer whose work was widely read in the 1950s and 1960s but who today is less well known in his home country.
Thornton McCamish gives us a generous, but not uncritical, portrait of Alan Moorehead – one of our earliest 20th century expats- and brings his journalism and non-fiction books back into the frame for a new generation of readers. But McCamish does much more: this is a book about the biographer’s journey of discovery of his subject. In the process, McCamish gives us a clever and well-observed picture of a mid-20th century world in which the push and pull between Australia and Europe defined our culture. Moorehead was essentially a “middlebrow” writer and McCamish has done a brilliant job of placing his work in the wider context of Australian history.
This is a book about a passion for writing, but it is also about culture, class and the challenges of the biographer.
Genius, friend, rival: this is the story of four pairs of artists whose intense relationships spurred and shaped their art.
Matisse and Picasso. Manet and Degas. Bacon and Freud. De Kooning and Pollock. Eight of the most significant modern artists; four pairs linked by friendship and a shared spirit of competitiveness.
Absorbing, informed and provocative, Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry offers revelatory insights into the ways in which these major artists influenced and changed each other—and into their ultimate quest ‘to be unique, original, inimitable; to acquire the solitude, the singularity, of greatness’.
Sebastian Smee is the Boston Globe’s art critic. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 and a winner in 2011. His writing about art has appeared in many of the leading papers in Australia, the UK and the US. He grew up in Adelaide.
The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art by Mr Sebastian Smee
The Australian Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sebastian Smee has written a subtle and complex exploration of the affection and competition experienced by four sets of friends - all of them male artists.
Smee looks at how these friendships affected the work of the eight men - Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas; Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock; Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Smee’s decision to examine the lives of some of the West’s most important artists through the prism of their friendships is original and adds to our understanding of their work. In the process, Smee offers intelligent and universal observations on the deep connections between love, friendship, competition and envy.
This is a very well-written book, which showcases Smee’s expertise and knowledge as an internationally acclaimed art critic. But the text is accessible, informative, entertaining and interesting. It’s a book based on a smart idea, which has been beautifully executed by a confident and mature writer.
Matthew Flinders and George Bass, two obscure young men from Lincolnshire, arrived in Sydney in 1795 determined to achieve greatness. Flinders wanted to be an explorer ‘second only to Cook’, Bass a naturalist, another Sir Joseph Banks, and a rich Sydney trader. For eight years these two pursued their destiny. Their voyages changed the map of Australia, and Flinders gave it its name. But then it was all over. This book is historically rigorous, yet its protagonists’ fascinating and contrasting characters and the extraordinary events of their lives make it as gripping as any novel.
Josephine Bastian is the daughter of a Danish goldminer and a school teacher of Irish descent. She spent her childhood in the bush and lived for several years on the goldfields near Mudgee, NSW, where her mother started a one-teacher school. She attended the University of Sydney on a government scholarship and subsequently took a higher degree at London University. She has travelled widely, and worked in several countries as teacher, author and editor; her writing includes articles, radio documentaries and history.
The passion of Bastian’s title operates as a theme throughout this important book. The narrative that emerges is a much more intimate story about the relationship of Flinders and Bass than has previously been told. Setting these men against the context of their families and those they left behind, importantly the author considers the effect of these tumultuous lives on others. With a strong sense of the value of archival research, the author’s fresh approach uses new material and brings the context of exploration and the Imperial need for mapping to light. The people and their relationships are seen as constrained and contained by the larger project.
Grounded in diaries and primary sources, the author gives a wonderful insight into this period in Australia’s history. The book is very readable and accessible and deserves to be read and appreciated by a large audience. It explains and reminds the reader of the incredible energy, dedication, and sacrifice of the explorers of this time as they attempted to map, understand and claim new lands.
Chester Wilmot (1911–1954) was a renowned Australian war correspondent, broadcaster and writer. Covering the North African battles of Bardia, Tobruk and Derna, the disaster of the Greek Campaign, the epic struggle along the Kokoda Track, the invasion at Normandy and the defeat of Nazi Germany, his voice stood above all others during BBC and ABC broadcasts throughout World War II.
Following the war he continued reporting and published The Struggle for Europe, his classic account of the Normandy invasion, before he was tragically killed in 1954.
Valiant for Truth charts Wilmot’s exceptional life as he reported key events of the twentieth century.
Neil McDonald is a film historian and author. His books include Kokoda Front Line: the amazing story of legendary Australian war cameraman Damien Parer (Hachette 1994, 2004, revised edition 2012). He is co-author with Peter Brune of 200 Shots, a pictorial account of Australian fighting on the Kokoda Track.
Peter Brune is bestselling author of A Bastard of a Place: the Australians in Papua; Those Ragged Bloody Heroes: from the Kokoda Trail to Gona Beach 1942 and most recently Descent into Hell: The fall of Singapore – Pudu and Changi – the Thai Burma railway.
This book is to be commended for its well-researched and well-documented World War II accounts. Chester Wilmot was an Australian journalist and war correspondent. The authors of this sensitive biography illustrate that Wilmot was a reporter with integrity and a strong moral code. At times this led to Wilmot finding himself at odds with censors, who were known to redact large sections of his reports, for fear that his accuracy would aid the enemy.
Wilmot was an extensive traveller having gone to both Japan and Europe before World War II. In these contexts he noted and wrote of growing nationalism, racism, and what he regarded as developing fanaticism. In a prescient and informed manner Wilmot contextualised and historicised these feelings.
As a war correspondent Wilmot was witness to battles in Europe and Papua New Guinea.
As a broadcaster for both the BBC and ABC he became a trusted commentator by both the general audience and members of the military.
This comprehensive and finely researched book sheds new light on the career and experiences of one of Australia’s most renowned War correspondents. Of particular note is how the book deals with Wilmot’s early years, which provide good insight into his life at that time.
John Murphy’s Evatt: A Life is a biography of Australian parliamentarian and jurist HV Evatt. Remembered as the first foreign minister to argue for an independent Australian policy in the 1940s and for his central role in the formation of the UN, Evatt became leader of the Labor party in the 1950s, the time of the split that resulted in the party being out of power for a generation. Murphy places Evatt in the context of a long period of conservatism in Australia, treating his personal life as just as important as his controversial and eventual tragic public career.
John Murphy is a professor of politics at the University of Melbourne. He is also Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Arts. He writes prolifically on Australian social and political history and is editor of the Australian politics and policy series in Melbourne University Publishing's Academic Monograph series. He is author of many books, including Harvest of Fear: A history of Australia's Vietnam War (Allen & Unwin, 1993); Imagining the fifties: Private sentiment and political culture in Menzies’ Australia (UNSW Press, 2000) and was a contributor to Half a Citizen: Life on Welfare in Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2011).
This is an excellent book, by an established and respected scholar. With polish and complete control of the material John Murphy has written a book that captures the extraordinary public and private life of Evatt.
Murphy’s portrait of Federal Labor leader Herbert Vere “Doc” Evatt is revealing and definitive. Murphy’s careful research has shown Evatt to be a combination of brilliance and dedication though occasionally foolish; given to grandiosity. Across a career that led him from jurist to the youngest High Court judge onto a NSW State and later Federal politician; and perhaps most importantly as Australia’s foreign minister involved in the establishment of the United Nations.
This book revises the orthodoxy of Evatt and provides valuable insights into Australia’s political and social history. The work is mature and objective, yet it is a very accessible book at the same time. Undoubtedly this will be the “go to” book on Evatt in future years.
Fifty years ago, a group of striking Aboriginal stockmen in remote Northern Territory heralded a revolution in the cattle industry and a massive shift in Aboriginal affairs. This book tells the story behind the Gurindji people’s famous Wave Hill Walk-off in 1966 and questions the meanings commonly attributed to the return of their land by Gough Whitlam in 1975. Written with a sensitive, candid and perceptive hand, A Handful of Sand reveals the path Vincent Lingiari and other Gurindji elders took to achieve their land rights victory, and how their struggles in fact began, rather than ended, with Whitlam’s handback.
Charlie Ward is a writer and historian, based in Darwin. He worked in the Gurindji communities of Kalkaringi and Daguragu between 2004 and 2006 and then as a researcher with the Stolen Generations' Link-up program in Alice Springs. Now an oral history interviewer with the National Library of Australia, Charlie’s work has appeared in journals including Griffith Review, Meanjin and Southerly. A Handful of Sand is his first book.
More than 50 years ago, in very top of the Northern Territory, two-hundred Gurindji, Mudburra, and Warlpiri workers walked-off the remote Wave Hill cattle station and declared themselves to be on strike. Led by the now legendary Aboriginal leader Vincent Lingiari these men set in motion a new future, which led to better pay, more control and ultimately land rights.
A Handful of Sand is a significant book by a young researcher who has worked in and studied indigenous communities for many years. The story has been covered at length in the press, however this book provides a perspective missing from much daily journalism.
Charlie Ward deals with the complexities of the Wave Hill walk-off and the return of the Gurindji land in a sophisticated manner. The narrative is honest and told with an appropriate reticence: Ward is an insider/outsider who never loses his professional judgement nor his respect for the protagonists in this inspiring but sometimes tragic story.
He is an historian who interrogates his material to dissect the complex issues of the state versus individuals and the internal tensions between generations of established leaders and younger Aborigines with different ambitions and capacities.
Subhi is a refugee. Born in an Australian permanent detention centre after his mother fled the violence of a distant homeland, life behind the fences is all he has ever known. But as he grows, his imagination gets bigger too, until it is bursting at the limits of his world. The Night Sea brings him gifts, the faraway whales sing to him, and the birds tell their stories.
The Bone Sparrow is a powerful, heartbreaking, sometimes funny and ultimately uplifting hymn to freedom and love.
Zana Fraillon was born in Melbourne, but spent her early childhood in San Francisco. Zana has written two picture books for young children, a series for middle readers, and a novel for older readers based on research and accounts of survivors of the Forgotten Generation. She spent a year in China teaching English. The Bone Sparrow won the 2017 ABIA Book of the Year for Older Children.
Told poignantly and authentically through the naïve lens of the irrepressible nine-year-old Subhi, this powerful story is timely and important.
Subhi has known only one life - behind the razor wires in a detention centre. His world is confined, brutal and with many hardships. He longs to meet his poet father, wishes his mother would have enough energy to tell him her stories of Burma again, dreams of a beautiful Night Sea that brings him treasures, and talks to the wise-cracking Shakespeare duck. With his rebellious friend Eli, Subhi runs “packages” around the camp, a dangerous pursuit.
Jimmie, a young girl who lives near the centre, provides a second narrative voice, with a number of clever parallels to Subhi’s story. Jimmie has her own struggles: she is grieving for her mother and yearns to be able to read. When Jimmie discovers a way into the centre, an unlikely friendship results. Jimmie brings Subhi thermoses of hot chocolate and Subhi reads out Jimmie’s mother’s stories. But tensions are rising in the centre and soon violence erupts and tragedy strikes.
Set against the harshness and brutality of life in the detention centre, The Bone Sparrow celebrates human courage, spirit and imagination; the power of story, especially in our understanding of self; the importance of friendship; and our right to freedom. It is a beautifully written story, deeply layered and with rich imagery and evocative use of language. The motif of the Night Sea is particularly moving and the humour of Subhi’s Shakespeare duck provides some welcome relief to his dire circumstances.
Honest, deeply affecting and thought provoking, The Bone Sparrow is a story that stays with you long after the last page.
A powerful, captivating story about Alice, who is reaching out to express herself through her beautiful-broken words, and Manny who is running to escape his past. When they meet, they find the tender beginnings of love and healing.
Glenda Millard is a highly respected author who writes for children of all ages. Her novel A Small Free Kiss in the Dark was the Winner of the 2009 Queensland Premier's Award for young adults, Honour Book in the 2010 CBCA awards for older readers, shortlisted for the 2010 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and included on the Honour List for the 2012 International Board of Books for Young People. Glenda has also written many picture books, including The Duck and the Darklings, illustrated by Stephen Michael King, which was Winner of the 2016 WA Premier's Literary Awards for children's books.
Alice has been the victim of a traumatic attack by some young men who live in her small town of Oktober Bend. The trauma has left her unable to communicate easily with others and she mostly stays at home. She is, however, a gifted poet and it is largely through these that she communicates with the outside world. Much of what we learn about her as a character comes from her thoughts and poetry.
Into her life comes Manny, a former boy soldier who has also been the victim of trauma. His gentleness and protectiveness, despite all he has suffered, is in stark contrast with the local boys who attacked Alice. He is intrigued by the mysterious, anonymous poet who leaves poems tucked in odd places around the town (such as behind the timetable at the bus stop) and he follows this poetic trail to discover that it is Alice who is writing them. In a sense, the two are the ‘outsiders’ in the town and the friendship they form becomes a turning point for each of them.
The book is written with a dual narrative so we hear alternately from Manny and Alice. Each of these voices is authentic and convincing. Alice’s sections are seamlessly interwoven with her poems and the device adds a richness and complexity to the narrative. There is a cast of peripheral characters who drift in and out of the story and each of them is strongly drawn and convincing. The climactic scene of a flood in the town is dramatic and convincingly realised and allows for the construction of a scene of moving forgiveness when Alice, despite her fear, helps the ringleader of the gang which attacked her. This is a cleverly constructed book with great depth and which is both poignant and profound.
