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Peter Pierce
Peter Pierce (1950-2018) was an Honorary Professor at Monash University. He edited The Cambridge History of Australian Literature and had been chief judge of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction for the many years. Among his other books are From Go to Whoa: A Compendium of the Australian Turf; Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally's Fiction; and The Country of Lost Children.
Few Australian authors have been so prolific or so well-rewarded for their labours: twenty-six novels, as well as plays and a reluctant memoir; not to mention advances – in the 1960s – of hundreds of thousands of American dollars per book. How many of our writers have sold copies of their works in tens of millions, let alone been translated into twenty-seven languages at last count? None has b ... (read more)
Early in 1900, bubonic plague travelled by ship to Sydney, then erratically made its way up the coast. Ian Townsend’s accomplished first novel, Affection, traces the arrival of the plague in Townsville during the autumn of 1900. His story is factually based and is particularly concerned with three of the doctors who treated the outbreak: Linford Row, recently settled in the town as its municipal ... (read more)
Katherine Johnson’s first novel, Pescador’s Wake, is a well-paced account of the pursuit of a Uruguayan vessel that has been fishing illegally for Patagonian toothfish in Australian territorial waters south of Heard Island. What follows is a stern chase. The Pescador is followed across thousands of nautical miles by another fishing boat, the Australis (from Hobart), which for six months of the ... (read more)
In earlier works, Russian-born historian Elena Govor has written of changing Russian perceptions of Australia between 1770 and 1919 and – in My Dark Brother (2000) – of a Russian-Aboriginal family. In her latest book, Russian Anzacs in Australian History, the canvas is broader. She investigates the third largest national group (after the British and Irish) to enlist in the First AIF. Her indef ... (read more)
Roads are not places, but ways to and away from them, perhaps in fearful flight or in buoyant expectation. Travelling them can engender boredom (‘Are we there yet?’) and horror (‘Will we ever get there, alive?’). Roads are means of reaching those fabled and amorphous Australian locations – the city, the bush, the beach. Each of these has attracted anthologies (some from Penguin). Delia F ... (read more)
Julienne van Loon won the Vogel Literary Award for 2004 with Road Story. Now, with Beneath the Bloodwood Tree, van Loon has passed the hurdle or hoodoo of getting a second novel written and published, although not with ease, and apparently with no resolved sense of the kind of novel she was intending to write.
The novel’s setting is one of Australia’s new frontiers, the boom mining town of Po ... (read more)
One of the keenest childhood memories of David Meredith, narrator of George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964), is of the hall of his parents’ suburban home in Melbourne. It was full of prostheses, the artificial limbs of servicemen returned, maimed, from the Great War. The men are friends and former patients of Meredith’s parents. Her mother was a nurse, her father served in the First ... (read more)
Twenty years after the publication of their ‘inclusive Australian literary history’, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman have returned with a ‘sequel’, After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007. One leaden title succeeds another, although the tone of the second book is angrier. More of that later. As the authors note in their preface, ... (read more)
It is thirty-six years since the Australian National University Press published Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years; thirty-five since the unassuming Penguin paperback that became both a loved and critically acclaimed bestseller. Now Melbourne University Publishing has produced a deluxe, large-format, sombrely and evocatively illustrated edition. On the front cover is a Frank Hurley photograph of Au ... (read more)