AustLit

'In an indignant letter, written on 12 December 1918, to S. Nevile Foster, editor of Land and Water, the novelist and former ship’s captain, Joseph Conrad, questions the suitability of the illustration of his story ‘Rescue’, which they were about to publish. He begins by describing himself ‘as an artist in another medium’, and remarking that he had ‘always been treated by his illustrators with a certain amount of consideration … with that loyalty which is due from a conscientious artist to the conceptions of another’. He questions whether the illustrator of ‘Rescue’ has ‘ever seen a yacht’s gig’ (a type of boat)? Or a man standing in one? Or any boat that looked like the one in the illustration? Had he ‘looked with an artist’s eye ever in his life at the leech of a sail, either full or aback, the most definite and expressive line in the world? The whole thing’, Conrad adds, ‘is false enough to set one’s teeth on edge; and of unpardonable ugliness … There are ways of rendering the luminous quality of a tropical night & there was no reason to cram ugliness into the very sky.’' (Introduction(

'How can we tell the story of places where families with limited means came and went and made a living of sorts, places that act as meeting points between the old and the new, the long established and the newly arrived, where each generation is given the opportunity to understand itself as different from a previous generation and, hence, able to break away? How can we describe the emotions that characterise these places, emotions that contain just enough volition to push a person out into the world in search of something better? How can we convey the manner in which these places remain behind, providing shelter when the noise of all that they had made possible becomes too confusing, or the feeling of strangeness experienced when we return to these familiar places and discover that everything we thought we understood about their nature was simply a product of our wants and needs? How can we turn this unsettling realisation into a story, not just for ourselves, but also for the people who brought us to these places, people that we loved and spurned and whose lives are bound to ours in ways too complex for us to understand?' (Introduction)

'This, Clive James’s final book, is a collection of his writings on Larkin and his work. James takes his title from the final words of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1959). The ninety four pages, which include copies of one manuscript letter and two typed letters from Larkin to James, don’t offer very much book for your money, but you do get Clive James, who’s always good value. His explanation of why Jack Nicholson is the only Hollywood actor appropriate to play Larkin onscreen justifies the price of admission.' (Introduction)

'‘The sky was red, black ash fell like snow, and smoke choked the whole east coast – even New Zealand felt the effects of our fires. All while the government keeps selling our water and land,’ Bee Cruse said of last summer’s inferno. Cruse’s Monaro-Yuin Nation is one of the worst hit communities. Yuin man Warren Foster from Wallaga Lake said, ‘We need our country to be healthy so we can be healthy. We need the animals. If that is all lost, our spirits die when they die. This might be a wake-up call for them now to listen to us Indigenous people on how we do our cultural burning.’'  (Introduction)

'I often think of the vision of the Old People in constructing our culture on such egalitarian and environmentally loving principles – but that then leads to being overwhelmed by the devastation of soul they must have experienced when the Invaders so wilfully destroyed that social design.' (Introduction)