AustLit

'Miles Franklin’s 1942 homage to Henry Lawson was the twentieth annual commemorative speech to this revered Australian author. Each year after his death admirers, family members and friends of Lawson would get together in Melbourne and Sydney to give speeches and celebrate his legacy. But the question of where to commentate him needed to be resolved. In 1927 the renowned local artist George W. Lambert submitted a model for a bronze statue of the author to the Henry Lawson Memorial Committee. Money was raised and the statue was commissioned: it shows a lithe Lawson in baggy trousers and rolled-up sleeves, possibly reciting to an audience, with a swagman sitting on one side and a sheep dog on the other.' (Introduction)

'The late Kerry Packer once quipped, ‘You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine.’ Packer was referring to the 1987 deal in which the Perth-based Bond bought Packer’s Nine network for $1 billion. The wily Sydneysider clawed back an equity stake in the top-rating station upon Bond’s bankruptcy and slide into ignominy, when Bond was found guilty of committing, through other companies, Australia’s biggest corporate fraud.' (Introduction)

'I was sitting on the toilet. Plucked from the underpants around my knees, cradled in the palm of my hand, was a blood clot almost the size of my thumb. It was a luminescent red, verging on glittery, the colour of a nail polish bottle I might have picked out at the chemist. What I could never have imagined was that, for a moment, I would think very hard about swallowing that clot.'  (Introduction)

'For one Anzac, it was just another day at the office. Describing the Australian counterattack at Lone Pine on Gallipoli in the second volume of his colossal Official History of the First World War, C.E.W. Bean ushers onto narrative centre-stage a certain Captain A.H. Scott, ‘who in private life was a clerk in Dalgety and Company’s Sydney office’...' (Introduction)

'When I arrived in Mildura and people heard I was into sign-writing, they immediately told me:

‘You’ve got to talk to Moose. He’s painted signs all over town for 40 years.’

‘He’s old school—refuses to work in digital.’

‘Lives in the old dairy in Merbein.’

‘Rides a Harley.’

‘You can find him playing his trumpet in the mall.’

'I had become interested in old signs—often known as ‘ghost signs’—a few years earlier. I loved the way they lingered in laneways or on the side of shops, sometimes more than a century old, whispering stories in faded paint. Coming across an old sign felt like finding a forgotten letter in a drawer, or a travel ticket tucked into a book.'  (Introduction)

'My right knee points in the wrong direction. Instead of articulating forwards and backwards like it should, it moves on an angle—inwards, towards the other knee. If I’m clumsy while running, my knees knock together. I can only assume something went wrong at the manufacturing plant.' (Introduction)

'International recognition was accorded to Lucy Treloar for her first novel, Salt Creek (2015), when it was short-listed for the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. (Hannah Kent was the second Australian author to be short-listed, in the next year, for her novel The Good People). Thus Treloar was placed in the nominal company of the great writer who invented the historical novel and whose literary influence—at least in the nineteenth century—surpassed all others.' (Introduction)