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Carol Middleton
Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic and author, based in Melbourne. Her short story awards include second place in The Age competition 2010. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in the anthologies Melbourne Subjective, Ink3 and Vine Leaves Literary Journal. She is working on a memoir in essays.
‘Black Widow’ is the name given to the female Chechen rebels, who were widows of insurgents killed by the Russian army in Chechnya. They went on to serve under Shamil Basayev, leader of the Beslan school siege in September 2004. Sandy McCutcheon has set his latest political thriller two years later, in a story of revenge orchestrated by six female teachers at Beslan, who take on the guise of b ... (read more)
Elaine Lewis established and ran the Australian Bookshop in Paris from 1996 to 1998. It acted as an outlet in France for Australian books, a nexus for travelling Australian writers and a cultural hub in the Parisian arts scene. This is the story of the bookshop in its heyday, before Lewis returned to Australia and the bookshop retired to an online existence.
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In 1957, Michael Benthall, a director at the Old Vic, took a chance on a young woman straight out of drama school, casting her as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet starring John Neville and Coral Browne. I was lucky enough to be in the audience with my mother when Judi Dench, a velvet-voiced cherub in virginal white, made her début. An infinite variety of stage and film performances have gone by ... (read more)
For many Australians, the Burke and Wills odyssey is a sketchy episode in our history. For Kevin Rabalais, a recent immigrant to this country from New Orleans, the fragments of the story were obviously an intriguing premise for a novel. His first novel, The Landscape of Desire, retraces this expedition and the later one led by Howitt that set out to find the missing explorers. The strange thing is ... (read more)
‘I want to be buried on top of Connor’s Hill, the mountain at the head of the Tambo Valley in East Gippsland.’ These were the words that came into Barry Heard’s mind as he faced death in the jungle in Vietnam in August 1967, an episode recounted in his first memoir, Well Done, Those Men (2005). Later in that book, Heard recalled another near-death experience, when his mind turned again to ... (read more)
Nineteen Seventysomething is the second of the Long Story Shorts collections published by Affirm Press. It is a series of linked stories by author, journalist and music critic Barry Divola, set in the fictional Australian town of Braithwaite, in the 1970s, and told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, Charlie.
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Alien Roots is a remarkable memoir of pre-war Germany, written in Melbourne by Anne Jacobs (born Annemarie Meyer). Jacobs wrote it in the 1960s, at a time when the Holocaust was rarely mentioned in Australia. Charles Jacobs collated his wife’s memoir for the family, and her children arranged for its publication in late 2006, twenty-four years after her death. The Melbourne-based Makor Jewish Com ... (read more)
Ben Hills’s biography of Princess Masako has a second subtitle: The Tragic True Story of Japan’s Crown Princess. It is a taste of the work to come, of both the hyperbole and the author’s tendency to explain everything to the reader. But then, the book is promoted not as a serious biography but as a ‘romance gone wrong’. Written by a Fairfax investigative reporter, it reads like an extend ... (read more)
The title of Miriam Margolyes’s memoir, This Much Is True, strikes a declamatory note, well suited to the octogenarian actor whose greatest asset is her voice, with its diverse accents, timbres, and moods. It also proclaims that we are not going to have the wool pulled over our eyes, or to be frustrated by authorial modesty, tact, or political correctness.
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