Paul Brunton
Paul Brunton is Emeritus Curator, State Library of New South Wales and an Honorary Associate of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney. He was Senior Curator, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, from 2002–12 and Curator of Manuscripts from 1986 to 2001. He is preparing an annotated edition of the original handwritten journal and logbook of William Bligh kept on HMS Bounty, 1787–1789, for publication by Allen & Unwin.
The first volume of the Australian Dictionary of Biography appeared in 1966, the sixteenth in 2002, by which stage the series included persons who had died prior to 1981. This one-volume Supplement includes those who were for one reason or another omitted from the main volumes. It is an impressive achievement. There are 504 biographies, written by 399 authors. Almost all are well written and caref ... (read more)
Nigel Starck has read a lot of obituaries. His doctoral thesis was on the obituary and newspaper practice, and he teaches obituary composition in South Australia. This book, though, rarely rises above the commonplace. I suspect it is written as a text for students; the final chapter is ‘How to Write Obituaries’. Even students would find the content fairly undemanding. A chapter telling us that ... (read more)
This eagerly awaited volume is the last in a trilogy which will recount the history of the book in Australia. The first volume, which will cover the years to 1890, is in preparation. Volume Two, A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, edited by Martyn Lyons and John Arnold, was published in 2001.
What is a history of the book? The present volume ... (read more)
This book consists of sixteen essays based on papers delivered at the symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities held in Hobart in 2004. The title of the book was the theme of the symposium. A conference must have a theme, of course, or no one would ever fund the participants, but individual speakers do not always address it, or they do so tangentially. We have all been at conferences w ... (read more)
This volume is the fourth and last dealing with Australian writing in this American series of reference books. All four volumes have been edited by Selina Samuels; the editor and contributors are Australian. Fifty-seven writers who produced their first major work after 1975 are included.
What is literary biography? According to the DLB advisory board, it is ‘career biographies, tracing the deve ... (read more)
The final volume of the diaries of Donald Friend covers the years from 1966, when he was fifty-one, to 1988, the year before his death. For a little over half this period (represented by more than two thirds of the diary entries), Friend lived in Bali. He did so in some splendour, waited on by a retinue of houseboys and visited by the distinguished and the celebrated. This was before mass tourism. ... (read more)
My Brilliant Career, the book Miles Franklin published in 1901 when she was twenty-one, cast a shadow over her entire life. It sold well and made her famous for a time, but it did not lead to the publication of more works. The glittering literary career foretold by the critics did not eventuate, at least in Franklin’s opinion. ‘The thing that puzzles me,’ she wrote to Mary Fullerton on New Y ... (read more)
The twenty or so elegant Georgian buildings designed by Francis Greenway that stand in Sydney today are a civilising presence. Yet these represent less than a quarter of his output. The destruction has been wanton and impoverishing.
Greenway was born in November 1777, near Bristol. His father was a stonemason and builder, as had been generations of Greenways. Nothing is known of his early years, ... (read more)
It is not often that a truly ground-breaking work appears, publishers’ hype notwithstanding. Paul Eggert has produced two such works in the one year, which must be a record. Both relate to Henry Lawson (1867–1922), arguably the most famous Australian writer of all time.
... (read more)