AustLit

'A reunion of old friends in which past quarrels and betrayals bubble to the surface is the premise of Palm Beach, the second film directed by Rachel Ward after the provocative and immensely impressive Beautiful Kate 10years ago. Both films deal with unresolved events that took place years earlier and which still cause bitterness and resentments. In both, Bryan Brown plays the patriarch, a strong, powerful presence. Otherwise, the two films could hardly be more different. Whereas Kate explored an incestuous relationship that split a family apart, the dynamics of Palm Beach are far less abrasive and the film plays out, for the most part, as a comedy.' (Introduction)

'The Battle of Long Tan, which took place on August 18, 1966, in a rubber plantation close to the Australian base camp of Nui Dat, is vividly brought to the screen by the very eclectic director Kriv Stenders, whose CV includes family fare (Red Dog), a bloody crime thriller (Kill Me Three Times) and even semi-experimental works (Boxing Day). Working with screenwriter Stuart Beattie, Stenders has produced a tribute to the young men, many of them conscripts, who fought in that bloody conflict against far superior Vietcong forces.' (Introduction)

'In the #MeToo movement’s early, giant-felling months, when every day seemed to yield a new scandal, with women across the globe uniting in anguish and fury, David Leser was shaken by his own obliviousness. “I thought I was awake to this rampaging male aggression,” he wrote at the time, “but the truth is I had absolutely no idea what women faced.” In the final days of an erratic 15-month relationship, Stephanie Wood could no longer ignore what some deep, limbic part of her brain had long suspected: her boyfriend was a conman, a pathological fantasist.' (Introduction)

'Stephen Orr is one of the key fictional chroniclers of South Australian life. While earlier novels such as Miles Franklin short-listed The Hands and One Boy Missing are set in the state’s bare country towns, This Excellent Machine is a homage to growing up in Adelaide’s lower middle class suburbs in the 1980s; a story of fibro, Datsuns, flaky men and enduring women set in Lanark Ave, Gleneagles, a fictional analogue of the suburb of Hillcrest.' (Introduction)

'Australians are good at poetry, the way that we’re good at comedy. Does this mean that we’re good at the mug’s game of pursuing an art in which there is no money, only the fame that waits on a cultivated obscurity? Does it mean that we’re good at shaping words into more or less memorable patterns of sound in the way we’re good at comically highlighting our own ridiculousness?' (Introduction)