AustLit

'Melina Marchetta’s latest novel opens in a downpour lasting “forty days and forty nights”, establishing a sense of providence that runs through The Place on Dalhousie. While a rural town floods with sorrow, blow-ins Rosie Gennaro and Jimmy Hailler have a fling, bonding over their own sadness: Rosie “loves broken people who damage her in return”.' (Introduction)

'Mary Bryant was a Cornishwoman transported with the First Fleet for highway robbery. After three years in Sydney, she masterminded the first escape from the nascent colony. Her story was the subject of an ABC television drama in the 1960s and a telemovie in 2005, and she has appeared as a minor character in several books. Arguably none capture the extensive detail found in Meg Keneally’s latest, Fled, in which Bryant has been fictionalised as Jenny Trelawney.' (Introduction)

'“Language is important,” Sarah Maddison tells us at the start of The Colonial Fantasy, a necessary and purposefully confronting book. She sets out the vocabulary on which she believes any discussion of black–white relations in this country must be based if we are to find a way forward. First and foremost: Australia is a “settler state” created by “settler colonialism”. We are deluded by the “colonial fantasy” that once we eliminate the differences between us in an act of “colonial completion”, First Nations people and settlers can enjoy life as equals within a shared polity.'  (Introduction)