Non Fiction
Loving This Planet by Helen Caldicott & Waging Peace by Anne Deveson
Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk
Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist by Brigitta Olubas
Every Parent’s Nightmare: Jock Palfreeman and the True Story of His Father’s Fight to Save Him from a Lifetime in a Bulgarian Jail by Belinda Hawkins
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature edited by Jane Stafford and Mark Williams
Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century by Paul Kildea
Wandering through the Mawson collection at the South Australian Museum one winter afternoon, I stare through the glass at the reconstruction of my great-grandfather, Douglas Mawson’s room in the hut, the sound of a moaning blizzard in my ears. The eerie sound of the wind coming through the installation, so familiar to Mawson and his men, is strangely alluring. There is something calming, almost hypnotic in its rhythm and repetition, as if I am literally being drawn into their world and their time. Yet I am also aware of its destructive force. John King Davis, who was captain of the Aurora on Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), 1911–14, likened it to ‘the shriek of a thousand angry witches’, its constancy keeping them ‘for a seeming eternity the pitiful, worn out impotent prisoners of hope’. Some entries in Mawson’s diary comprise only one written word, ‘blizzard’, followed by successive days of ‘ditto’.
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