Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Archive

This is the largest and most eclectic of Wilding’s four collections of short stories so far. Its 284 pages include stories ranging from ninety pages and two. Mostly written in the first person, they range in space between England and Australia, go back to the childhood of the narrator(s) (sometimes identified as Mike or Michael, making the autobiographical inferences irresistible) and in mode range from social realism through to the surrealistic modes of ‘What it was like, sometime

... (read more)

In Grade 5 social studies we ‘did’ Australia. After Captain Cook and the first fleet and settlement, and a couple of lessons spent drawing Aboriginal mia-mias and weaponry came the explorers. Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, Hume and Hovell, Major Mitchell, Burke and Wills Captain Sturt, and Edward John Eyre … Their names and achievements were committed to memory as surely as the three times table. But as our sticky hands traced maps from our atlases onto lunch wrap paper and into our exercise books – there to be outlined in accident-prone Indian ink, and the dotted lines of exploration marked – the explorers somehow failed to grasp our imaginations. We experienced little sympathy with their effort or their suffering, and only a mechanical recognition of the importance of their discoveries.

... (read more)

The Great Mint Swindle was one of the most outrageous frauds in the history of Australian crime. On 22 June 1982, the closely guarded Perth Mint handed over, without a murmur, $650,000 worth of gold bars, which were never to be seen again. Not a shot was fired, not a person threatened. It was all done with three fake building society cheques, which the Mint accepted without question. The mastermind behind the ingenious swindle never showed his face.

... (read more)

In the UK Bookseller, the self-named ‘organ’ of the VAT-proof Thatcherland, the gossip columnist, one Horace Bent, speculated that Simon and Schuster International were running their New York eyes over Thomson Books UK. However, Thomson, the umbrella sheltering Nelson from the noonday sun, along with pedigree icons Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, and the slightly more louche Sphere and Abacus paperback lists, has chosen the dignified flippancy of Penguin over any other suitor. My source was impeccable, Penguins never lay eggs that don’t hatch, and the news is now yesterdays, unless of course you happen to be a Nelson employee crystal-gazing into the Penguin pond!

... (read more)

Keith Willey died on 6 September 1984. He had just submitted the manuscript of what was to be his last book. A study of Australian humour in adversity titled You Might As Well Laugh Mate, it summed up the man, not least in his last days. Sardonic, self-effacing, unashamedly Australian.

... (read more)

In her book Gather Your Dreams Magda Bozic, a post-war European immigrant, demonstrates that all migrants have a ‘tale to tell’ about their experiences in coming to terms with their adopted homeland. Hers is not a horrific story of hardship or overt discrimination but an account of day-to-day incidents recalling early feelings of displacement, the gradual settling in over a period of twenty years, an eventual visit back to her place of birth and finally her return home to Australia.

... (read more)

The Way It Is by Michael Sharkey

by
May 1985, no. 70

On page 87 of Michael Sharkey’s The Way It Is, there is a photograph of the poet reading the National Farmer (a weekly rural newspaper), which shows what happens when you lock up the well-read in a small rural town. Armidale mightn’t Pontus or Bandusia, and you don’t have to have crossed Augustus or have been befriended by Maecenas to get there, but once you are, it certainly changes your idea of ‘the way it is’. Drought, rain, frost, journeys, and drunkenness, obsession with the weather in general, and an almanac of solar and lunar occurrences becomes the raw material of your verse – as it was for those other rural exiles in the Tang dynasty, Li Po and Tu Fu.

... (read more)

Before I came across this attractive and instructive book, I knew very little of the art of Sam Byrne, thinking of him merely as one of a group of outback ‘primitives’ based on Broken Hill, the Silver City, of whom the best known is Pro Hart.

... (read more)

In Australia, few publications regularly review children’s books for the information of the general reader/buyer. ASA chairman, Ken Methold, suggests that Australian writers need to advertise their varied skills and publicise their works. I agree.

... (read more)

It was my good fortune to be born into a family for whom books and paintings had a central place. My parents subscribed to an excellent lending library and were adventurous readers of novels. During the Depression they could not often afford to buy a painting, but they went to art shows and Sunday visits to the Art Gallery of New South Wales were frequent in my childhood.

... (read more)