Biography
Brett Whiteley: Art, life and the other thing by Ashleigh Wilson
Notwithstanding the fact that he died alone in a hotel room following a heroin overdose at the age of fifty-three, Brett Whiteley led what for an Australian artist ...
... (read more)Our Man Elsewhere: In search of Alan Moorehead by Thornton McCamish
You have to admire the professional writer who describes the chore of churning out the daily ration of words as 'like straining shit through a sock', ...
... (read more)The subtitle of this compellingly readable biography of Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes AO QC borrows the underlying philosophical metaphor of the independent Bar ...
... (read more)When David Bowie died in January 2016, Simon Critchley received many invitations to reflect on the pop star, in part because he had published a collection of brief essays ...
... (read more)The last love song: A biography of Joan Didion by Tracy Daugherty
For many young writers, Julian Wasser's 1968 Time magazine photograph of Joan Didion posed in front of her yellow Corvette remains the epitome of cool ...
... (read more)Hoping to travel to Vienna in the summer of 1950 through a part of Austria then under Soviet control, Bernard Smith sought an interview in Prague with an officer ...
... (read more)Ethel Livesey was a piece of work. By the time she stood trial in 1946, she had already served several terms in prison. The serial fraudster had accumulated more than ...
... (read more)Arnold Zable may be unafraid of pain, but he is no masochist. Masochism wants to control pain: Zable is much more of a liberator. Since the publication of his first book ...
... (read more)ink in Her Veins: The troubled life of Aileen Palmer by Sylvia Martin
In her new biography, Sylvia Martin tells us that Aileen Palmer wanted to be remembered as a poet. Until now, she has been best known as the elder daughter of Vance ...
... (read more)Outback Penguin: Richard Lane’s Barwell Diaries edited by Elizabeth Lane et al.
On 7 September 1922, seventeen-year-old Richard Lane left England on a six-week voyage to Australia, not to set foot in his home country again for three and a half years. For much of the intervening time he would work as a government-funded 'Barwell Boy', or indentured farm labourer, on small rural holdings outside Adelaide and in western New South Wales.
Ri ...