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Shirley Walker
Shirley Walker’s most recent publication, The Ghost at the Wedding, won the 2010 Kibble Literary Award and shared the Asher Award (2009). It was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award.
This, the first major study of Xavier Herbert’s literary journey, is a superb work of scholarship. It is written with passion, good humour and a clear acknowledgment of the faults, both personal and literary, of its subject. Sean Monahan is an enthusiastic admirer of Poor Fellow My Country (1975). According to Monahan, it is not only the quintessential Australian novel, but also ‘one of the gr ... (read more)
The name of this collection, with its pastoral associations, is ironic. Here we have no neat opposition between the country and the city; instead the lyrical evocation of the countryside serves merely to emphasise the brutality that women suffer there as men exercise their economic power through sexual cruelty. This is particularly obvious in the first six stories, set in the previous generation, ... (read more)
This book contains two discrete memoirs: the first by Clifford Norman Button, a Presbyterian minister; the second by his daughter, Muriel Mathers. Despite immense social changes in the period they cover (1888 to the present), there are many similarities between the two personalities and their work in the world.
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Readers of Joanne Carroll’s first publication, the novellas In the Quietness of My Aunt’s House and Bad Blood (1996), will not be disappointed with The Italian Romance; it is a novel of great style. There is none of the slick optimism that we associate with popular romance; instead, it deals with the most important human issues and, at times, approaches tragedy rather than romance. True love, ... (read more)
In Across the Magic Line: Growing up in Fiji, Patricia Page comes full circle, returning with her sister Gay after an absence of fifty years to the enchanted islands of their childhood, reliving their memories and examining the very different Fiji of the present. Despite changes everywhere, the astonishing beauty of the islands remains, and the kindness of the Fijians is constant.
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Elizabeth Jolley’s many admirers will be delighted with this new collection of autobiographical fragments, philosophical pieces, short fiction (some previously unpublished) and a number of rarely seen poems. It is designed, according to its editor, Caroline Lurie, to demonstrate the ways in which Jolley channelled her life story into her fiction, creating ‘something more revealing, more artist ... (read more)
Each of these memoirs – Births Deaths Marriages: true tales, by Georgia Blain, and The After Life: A Memoir, by Kathleen Stewart – is the work of an accomplished novelist, and each writer is well aware of the risks involved in the shift of mode. If the novel, as Blain maintains, provides a place for the writer to hide, the memoir is the place of self-exposure, of speaking the truth, or a versi ... (read more)
These are both second novels by previously successful authors. Each has an atmospheric sense of place and a dominant female figure. In Beyond the Break, it is the flamboyant and dangerous Irene. In Out of Place, the matriarch Eve, a postwar Italian migrant, keeps her family together through her insistence upon the traditions and the healing rituals of the old world, including especially the cookin ... (read more)
I know what happensI read the book …(epigraph to Beachmasters)
Long term readers of Thea Astley have come to expect novels and short stories of finely tuned social satire which have increasingly employed Astley’s individual idiom: a richly textured and often baroque language of compressed meaning, of striking and original metaphor, of the incisively apt phrase which encapsulates character.
H ... (read more)