AustLit

'‘The style of a narrative is a kind of dialect,” observed American writer and painter Guy Davenport in a 1976 essay. “The laws it obeys are of its own nature.” These words appeared five years after publication of the novel that occupies the extreme orbit of Thomas Keneally’s imaginative universe. A Dutiful Daughter is at once the most introvert and urgently expressive of his works: a northern hemisphere allegory set on a swamp-ridden dairy farm somewhere on the coastal fringe of the “least significant of continents”, a tale of incest and bestial transformation that plays out somewhere between kitchen-sink real­ism and philosophical novel.'  (Introduction)

'When I was talking to a friend about how difficult it is to describe the otherworldliness of the Antarctic Peninsula, she responded with a reminiscence. As a schoolgirl living in the northern Sydney suburb of Collaroy in the 1950s, she visited Frank Hurley at his house on the plateau from which he had sweeping views of Long Reef and the Narrabeen Lakes.' (Introduction) 

'Juniper May’s world is rocked when she receives a letter from her classmates in Grade 6C telling her she’s a freak and that they wish she’d never been born. The robot-obsessed loner stops going to school and asks Google how to write a hit musical. Robot Song — performed by Juniper (Ashlea Pyke) and her arty but impractical parents — is the result.' (Introduction) 

'In the early 1990s Elizabeth Stead published a story called Knitting Bridget Emily about a ­widower who was knitting body parts to replace those of his late wife. He had her heart in a biscuit tin that he planned to insert into the finished knitted body.' (Introduction)

'It seemed unusual to Dorothy Hewett that a man of substance might knock back the offer of sex with her underage daughters. After all, at the federally subsidised bohemian Woollahra pad she shared with her fellow writer and husband Merv Lilley in the 1970s, there had been lots of takers.'  (Introduction)