AustLit

'It is not so common these days to come across what Bill Ashcroft might call a "white settler" account of growing up in the Australian bush. In Taciturn Man and Other Tales of Australia Geoffrey Gibson, a pre Baby-Boomer, of the same generation and rural provenance as Les Murray, writes of growing up in the 1940s in rural New South Wales, and also, the earlier rural life of his father Alexander (1905-1965). Alexander Gibson, the "taciturn" man of this tribute by memoir published by the Ann Arbor-based Modern History Press, was born in Somerset, and one of a number of English who migrated to Australia sometime after WWI. (D. H. Lawrence had also considered migrating but only stopped for six weeks to gather material for and write, or help write, two novels.)' (Publication abstract)