Margaret Jones

In 1992, Fang Xiangshu collaborated with Trevor Hay, a mandarin-speaking Melbourne academic, on a non-fiction book, East Wind, West Wind, an account of Fang’s escape from China to begin a new life in Australia. Fang, who had met Trevor Hay in Nanjing, first came to Australia as an exchange scholar in 1984, was recalled for reasons which remained mysterious but clearly threatening, and spent a n ... (read more)

This is a massive book, as large in scale as the author himself, running to over 700 pages, and – at a rough estimate – to something like 300,000 words of text, lightened only by a few photographs, all of them of Gough Whitlam with friends and enemies. It is not a book for anybody who expects revelations, or even for more light to be shed on the events of 11 November 1975 when a single decisi ... (read more)