Alan Atkinson
Scurvy
Dear Editor,
All authors are perhaps oversensitive to reviews of their books, but I have never been tempted to quarrel with a reviewer until now. Alan Atkinson’s review of Scurvy: The disease of discovery (April 2017) contains a ...
Fellowships galore
News from the the Editor's Desk in the August issue of Australian Book Review.
... (read more)Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture by Angela Woollacott
The Europeans in Australia: Volume 3: Nation by Alan Atkinson
High Lean Country: Land, people and memory in New England by Alan Atkinson et al.
Swept away
Dear Editor,
I was among the many swept away by Elisabeth Holdsworth’s essay, ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’ (February 2007). From the moment she confided, ‘I have returned to the Netherlands to have a specific conversation with the past’, I became an intent listener, almost an inter-loper, following this haunted child’s return after decades away, back to her heritage, Zeeland – ‘The land of my nightmares’.
I do not know the stark Calvinist low country of dunes and ‘massive dykes’, though I flew over it often enough at night. I followed the returning child entranced and often shocked: the fearful Nazi reprisals, the deliberate flooding of the hard-won lands; brother executing brother; the unofficial motto of the province even: ‘never forgive, never forget.’
... (read more)