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Gillian Dooley
These two quite different historical novels, both by first-time novelists, reveal once again the many difficulties of that genre, no matter how much information the author has gathered. The publisher of Temple of the Grail has provided ample publicity material. Along with the usual media release, there is a two-page puff piece couched in the first person about how Adriana Koulias came to write and ... (read more)
Adolf Gustav Plate (1874–1913) was a German artist, photographer and writer who spent much of his youth on merchant vessels in the South Pacific, eventually settling (or trying to settle) in Australia. Cassi Plate, his granddaughter, researched his life for a higher degree at the University of Sydney; her thesis has now been revised for publication (the first of six such volumes to be published ... (read more)
The only surviving image of George Bass is surrounded by as much mystery as his death. It is a photograph of a painting that has now disappeared, thought to have been painted in about 1800. A handsome young man looks straight out at the viewer, with a faintly supercilious smirk. His hair is tied back and perhaps powdered – old-fashioned, I would have thought, for a young man in 1800, when Bass w ... (read more)
Early Sydney has beguiled many writers, and the latest to succumb is Kristin Williamson. She has combined an interest in the Rocks area with a self-confessed ‘obsession with our feisty female forebears’, and has produced an historical novel involving several real people.
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Treasures exhibitions have reached epidemic proportions in Australia since the runaway success of the National Library’s ‘Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries’, which ran from December 2001 to February 2002. Now the National Library has decided to repeat its act, but this time to concentrate on home-grown exhibits. Australia’s ‘great’ libraries, it must be noted, are in this ca ... (read more)
Gerald Walsh’s book is an unabashed celebration of seven young Australians, golden boys who died during the first decades of the twentieth century. Five sporting heroes, one medical researcher and one soldier make up Walsh’s miniature hall of fame, early death being the common thread. The oldest of them was not quite twenty-seven when he died.
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In her contribution to Britishness Abroad, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, Anne Dickson-Waiko writes that ‘the experiences of the colonised Other in relation to empire and colonisation needs [sic] urgent investigation, so that the colonised other can … move on to the post-colonial’. She shows a touching belief in the usefulness of research in the humanities ... (read more)
Margaret Reynolds was a junior minister in the Hawke government. She began her career in special education, developing a passion for advocacy of the marginalised. Providing effective early childhood education for Aboriginal children in race-bound Townsville in the 1960s took not only idealism but ingenuity and guts. Juggling the needs of a young family with work and political activism, she joined ... (read more)
Gillian Dooley reviews 'Life and Death in the Age of Sail: The passage to Australia' by Robin Haines
The Age of Sail might be presumed to cover several centuries, beginning, say, as far back as the great age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and continuing until wind-powered sea travel was gradually replaced, in the late nineteenth century, by steamships.
The euphonious title of Robin Haines’s book is therefore a little misleading. She deals only with British as ... (read more)