AustLit

'The death of a bird haunts the relationship between two siblings. A lonely narrator waits for a bus that never comes. A boy makes soup with his grandmother and wonders about the memories she has buried.

'For the sixteenth edition of Verge, we asked contributors to reflect on the theme of Home, a word that took on a new meaning after a year of solitude and separation. We chose this theme because we hoped to read about homes of all kinds: unhomely homes, abandoned homes, unlikely homes, forgotten homes, found homes. And we were awed by the beauty, depth and variety in the pieces we received. Our writers explored homes of past, present and future; they probed the bleakness of domesticity and mourned the loss of what was once held close. They wrote about familial ties and found communities, about the painfulness of childhood and the bonds of ancestry. Writing, indeed, to make a home in.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'At the height of the Victorian gold rush, between July 1852 and June 1853, hundreds of government-assisted migrants from Lancashire, England, made their way to Australia and disembarked in Victoria. They were part of a huge flood of such migrants who were poured into the new-born colony as the colonial administration scrabbled to cope with the gold rush.

'The scheme was an unprecedented achievement in government-organised migration. Yet most historians have tended to dismiss these assisted migrants as the unskilled poorest-of-the-poor, and not of the same calibre as the working-class and middle-class unassisted migrants also arriving at the colony in great numbers.

'Made in Lancashire is a collective biography that explores in detail who the Lancashire assisted migrants were, their origins, why they migrated, where they went on arrival in Victoria, and what they made of their lives. Far from being the dross of England, these migrants were intelligent, highly motivated risktakers, many of whom went on to experience success as gold diggers, selectors, tradespeople and entrepreneurs.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Autobiography or fiction? This question has shadowed the work of enigmatic Australian author Eve Langley since her death in 1974. Was her writing the truth, or false, or somewhere in between? What did it mean when she described her father as ‘evil’ and ‘perverted’ in her first published novel The Pea Pickers (1942) and a kindly figure in later, unpublished work? Did she really believe herself to be Oscar Wilde? Was she gender fluid? Eve and her sister (and co-conspirator) June held onto family secrets as if their very lives depended on it. Eve Langley has been in the news since the 1920s and reviewed on both sides of the globe. She was an author, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter and a long-term psychiatric inmate. But June, who traversed the Australian countryside dressed as a boy, a willing lifelong companion to her beloved sister, is a lonely anonymous figure. Drawing on contemporary evidence, Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers gives the key players in the author’s life a voice, and the result is a fascinating but ultimately poignant tale of love and loss.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In 2013 Cathy McGowan became the first female independent to sit on the crossbench, where she would represent the Victorian rural electorate of Indi for six years. Winning the seat of Indi, after the Coalition had held the seat for 82 years, was a watershed moment. Indi became ‘Exhibit A’ for future political campaigns – from Kerryn Phelps as the Member for Wentworth to Zali Steggall in Warringah.

'Doing Politics Differently tells both the story of the campaign to win Indi around the community’s kitchen tables and the subsequent realities of negotiating good policy with the major political parties.

'The book is a handbook – a ‘how-to-be-elected’ and a ‘how-to-survive’ Canberra. It is a manifesto for an alternative community-based politics told through the prism of the story we know as ‘Cathy McGowan Goes to Canberra’.

'In 2004 McGowan was made an Officer of the Order of Australia ‘for service to the community through raising awareness of and stimulating debate about issues affecting women in regional, rural and remote areas.’ McGowan was also a recipient of the Centenary Medal in 2001.' (Publication summary)

'Navigating obsessions, commemorating loved ones, cooking a meal, drinking with friends, picking at our bodies, reckoning with our choices, finding ways to connect, finding ways to exist in a world that doesn’t always accommodate us. Rituals give shape to our days and punctuate our years. It’s the large ones we remember the most, but it’s the small ones that carve out our lives for us.This year’s theme resonated with so many creative writers in all different, wonderful ways. In Verge 2020: Ritual, each contributor has picked through their lives, minds and imaginations to bring creative pieces spanning various genres and forms. Some will break your heart, while others will make you laugh. Most will do both.'

Source: publisher's blurb

'In 1946 Aboriginal people walked off pastoral stations in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, withdrawing their labour from the economically-important wool industry to demand improvements in wages and conditions. Their strike lasted three years. On Red Earth Walking is the first comprehensive account of this significant, unique, and understudied episode of Australian history.

'Using extensive and previously unsourced archival evidence, Anne Scrimgeour interrogates earlier historical accounts of the strike, delving beneath the strike’s mythology to uncover the rich complexity of its history. The use of Aboriginal oral history places Aboriginal actors at the centre of these events, foregrounding their agency and their experiences. Scrimgeour provides a lucid examination of the system of colonial control that existed in the Pilbara prior to the strike, and a fascinating and detailed account of how these mechanisms were gradually broken down by three years of striker activism. Amid Cold-war fears of communist subversion in the north, the prominence of communists among southern supporters and the involvement of a non-Aboriginal activist, Don McLeod, complicated settler responses to the strike. This history raises provocative ideas around racial tensions in a pastoral settler economy, and examines political concerns that influenced settler responses to the strike, to create a nuanced and engaging account of this pivotal event in Australian Indigenous and labour histories.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Graham Berry (1822-1904) was colonial Australia’s most gifted, creative and controversial politician. A riveting speaker, a newspaper proprietor and editor, and the founder of Australia’s first mass political party, he wielded these tools to launch an age of reform: spearheading the adoption of a ‘protectionist’ economic policy, the payment of parliamentarians, and the taxing of large landowners. He also sought the reform of the Constitution, precipitating a crisis that the London Times likened to a ‘revolution’. This book recovers Berry’s forgotten and fascinating life. It explores his drives and aspirations, the scandals and defeats that nearly derailed his career, and his remarkable rise from linen-draper and grocer to adored popular leader. It establishes his formative influence on later Australian politics. And it also uses Berry’s life to reflect on the possibilities and constraints of democratic politics, hoping thereby to enrich the contemporary political imagination.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A new and radically different biography of the Australian-born archaeologist and prehistorian, Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957). In his early life he was active in the Australian labour movement and wrote How Labour Governs (1923), the world’s first study of parliamentary socialism. At the end of the First World War he decided to pursue a life of scholarship to 'escape the fatal lure’ of politics and Australian labour’s ‘politicalism’, his term for its misguided emphasis on parliamentary representation.

'In Britain, with the publication of The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925) he began a career that would establish him as preeminent in his field and one of the most distinguished scholars of the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, his aim was to ‘democratise archaeology’, to involve people in its practice and to reveal to them What Happened in History (1942), the title of his most popular book. It sold 300,00 copies in its first 15 years. 

'Politics continued to lure him, and for forty years the security services of Britain and Australia continued to spy on him. He supported Russia’s ‘grand and hopeful experiment’ and opposed the rise of fascism. His Australian background reinforced his hatred of colonialism and imperialism. Politics was also implicated in his death. There is a direct line between Childe's early radicalism and his final - and fatal - political act in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. This is a book about the central place of socialist politics in his life, and his contribution to the theory of history that this politics entailed.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'It is hard for us to imagine the oppressed lives of single women in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet a few Australian women took a leap into the unknown and carved careers for themselves in Paris.

'They studied, painted, and haunted galleries and salons. They had a little fun too, at social gatherings or at cafes in Montparnasse.

'They were brave, and very determined young ladies. They exhibited in the Paris Salons and in private galleries on the Left Bank, and received prizes and awards out of all proportion to their numbers. They bought back home not only greatly enhanced skills but also Modernism, to a country that had barely heard of it.

'This book examines a selection of some of the best of them, including some who have been all-but forgotten. They were pioneers, role models, fine artists – and they have been neglected. Not any longer.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'From the ashes of the darkest event in human history, Australian Jews built a thriving community, one with proportionally more Holocaust survivors than anywhere else in the world bar Israel. Mark Leibler grew up in this community, and in time became a leader of it. This book shows how Leibler rose to a position of immense influence in Australian public life by skilfully entwining his roles as a Zionist leader and a tax lawyer to some of the country’s richest people.

'The book vividly paints a cast of Australian characters – among them Paul Keating, John Howard, Julia Gillard and Noel Pearson—who came to know Leibler and to call him a friend, along with people like Kevin Rudd and Bob Carr, who see Leibler as no friend at all. Finally, the book charts the surprise turn in Leibler’s life, when a social and political conservative became a committed advocate for radical reform on behalf of Australia’s Indigenous people. 

'This many-layered book is a portrait of Jewish life in Australia, of the interaction between private wealth and politics, and of a man whose energy, formidable work habits and forcefulness that often tips into pugnacity have made him a highly effective player in Australian affairs.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Ken Inglis was one of Australia’s most creative, wide-ranging and admired historians. During a scholarly career spanning nearly seven decades, his humane, questioning approach — summed up by the recurring query, ‘I wonder…’ — won him a large and appreciative audience. Whether he was writing about religion, the media, nationalism, the ‘civil religion’ of Anzac, a subject he made his own, or collaborating on monumental histories of Australia or the remarkable men aboard the Dunera, he brought wit, erudition and originality to the study of history. Alongside his history writing, he pioneered press criticism in Australia, contributed journalism to magazines and newspapers, and served as vice-chancellor of the fledgling University of Papua New Guinea. This collection of essays traces the life and work of this much-loved historian and observer of Australia life.' (Publication summary)

'Geoffrey Blainey is often described as Australia’s greatest living historian, a writer whose prolific output includes such iconic books about the country’s past as The Tyranny of Distance and Triumph of the Nomads.

'However, Blainey has also been a controversial figure. His 1984 comments about Asian immigration triggered a major political controversy. In turn, the reaction of his critics raised fundamental questions about freedom of speech and set the scene for the ‘history wars’ fought out in Australia over the past three decades.

'Many academic historians were amongst Blainey’s critics. After 1984, Blainey became stereotyped as a ‘conservative historian’ and thus outside the bounds of academic history, yet much of Blainey’s historical writing, both in method and outlook, has been far from conservative.

'Geoffrey Blainey: Writer, Historian, Controversialist challenges simplistic descriptions of Blainey’s work. It sheds an important light not just on Blainey’s career, but also on the past and present practice of history in Australia.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity – as well as the vagaries of international markets – to become some of Australia’s most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure.

'Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness’ covered in ‘dismal scrub’ became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora, and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Dennis Altman's long obsession with the United States began when he went there as a graduate student during Lyndon Johnson's Presidency. His early writing stemmed from the counter-culture that developed in the States in the mid-1960s. Altman was involved in early Gay Liberation, and his 1971 study Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation is regarded as a classic work in its field. Since then, Altman's writings have touched in various ways upon the shifting terrain of sexual politics, including the AIDs epidemic, which he witnessed from the onset while living in New York.

'Altman's memoir, Unrequited Love, is as wide-ranging and remarkable as his career, moving between Australia, the United States, Europe and parts of Asia, and influenced by encounters with intellectuals and writers including James Baldwin, Gough Whitlam, Dorothy Porter, Christos Tsiolkas, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag.

'Written through the lens of recent activism and the global rise of authoritarianism, this is a story of a half century of activism, intellectualism, conflict and friendship.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Publishing is an industry steeped in rules and conventions, controlled by laws and contractual agreements, and heavily invested in practices of careful production and reproduction. But it is also currently undergoing drastic change. Digital technologies have reshaped the practices of writing, editing, typesetting, printing, distributing and buying books. And as political movements like #metoo ripple through the creative industries, the social implications of legacy processes of cultural production and valuation are being re-evaluated.

'This collection of essays draws together contributions from established and emerging scholars and industry practitioners to explore contemporary Australian publishing’s relationship to the past. How does knowledge transfer occur within and between presses? How do gender and race shape participation in the industry? And how can scholars, librarians, and publishers work together to improve and future-proof the industry?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Poet and journalist Zora Cross burst onto the Australian literary scene in 1917 with her book Songs of Love and Life. Here was a young woman who looked like a Sunday school teacher, celebrating sexual passion in a provocative series of sonnets. She was hailed as a genius, and many expected her to endure as a household name alongside Shakespeare and Rossetti. While Cross’s fame didn’t last, she kept writing through financial hardship, personal tragedies and two world wars, producing a remarkable body of work. Her verse, prose and correspondence with the likes of Ethel Turner, George Robertson (of Angus & Robertson) and Mary Gilmore place Zora Cross among the key personalities of Australia’s literary world in the early twentieth century.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Comic actors have made a particularly strong contribution to cultural life in Australia over the past sixty years. They have brought a range of memorable characters to the stage, television and film; they have transformed our image of ourselves, helped to overturn the crippling cultural cringe, and brought Australian humour and satire to the world. The Australian theatre, television and film industries are dynamic in ways that could never have been imagined fifty years ago. These industries have expanded and demonstrated extraordinary vitality, with actors, as the public face of the performing arts, carrying the immediate responsibility for the success of each show. It is the actors, and often the characters they play, that we remember when we recall a favourite television program, film or play, long after we have seen it. In spite of this they are frequently left out of history.' (Publication summary)

'The strangely familiar. The alien within the home. The repressed impulse. Bloodsucking counts in castles. Dismembered limbs. Wax models of famous figures. Trying to find a lost car in a parking lot. Being given seat E21 at the cinema when you live at 21 Rose Grove and your 21st birthday was last week. Doppelgängers, ghosts, déjà vu.

'This is the fourteenth issue of Monash University’s creative writing journal, Verge.

'Established and emerging writers have come together to fill this collection with poems, flash fiction, creative non-fiction and short stories that converge on the theme of the uncanny.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'What was it like to be involved in the heady days of ‘second wave’ feminism in Australia, when the role of women at home and at work changed decisively? Iola Mathews was one of the founders of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, a journalist at The Age, and later a leading ACTU advocate for women workers during the ‘Accord’ with the Hawke-Keating Government. She was one of the first generation of women trying to ‘have it all’ with a career and children.

In this honest and revealing memoir, she takes us inside the day-to-day groundwork required to bring about reforms in areas like affirmative action, equal pay, superannuation, childcare, parental leave and work-family issues. This is an important record of a pivotal time for women in Australia’s history. Iola brings wisdom and experience to it, reflecting on where we are today, with suggestions for further reform. It’s a vital source for policy makers and all those interested in women, work and families.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.