AustLit

'Alex Miller is a novelist who has always welcomed a conversation with history. During a period in our national literary life when there have been occasional flashes of tension between history and fiction, Miller’s work has luminously transcended these categories in a way only achieved by the greatest literature.' (Introduction)

'I want to take you on a journey from the planet to the parish, from the global to the local, from the Earth in space to the earth beneath our feet, from the lonely glowing speck of dust at the edge of the galaxy to the soil that we kneel upon and sift through our fingers and to which we ultimately return, dust to dust. These are contrasting perspectives of our home - one vertiginous, the other intimate; one from the outside in deep space and the other from the inside in deep time - on very different scales but still connected. And we have to see them as connected if we are to live respectfully and sustainably as part of nature.'' (Publication abstract)

'Writing good history is a high-wire act of balance and grace. Historians scour their own societies for vestiges of past worlds, for cracks and fissures in the pavement of the present, and for the shimmers and hauntings of history in everyday action.

'In The Art of Time Travel, eminent historian and award-winning author Tom Griffiths explores the craft of discipline and imagination that is history. Through portraits of fifteen historians at work, including Inga Clendinnen, Judith Wright, Geoffrey Blainey and Henry Reynolds, he observes how a body of work is constructed out of a life-long dialogue between past evidence and present experience.

'Riveting, beautiful and elegantly written, this landmark book conjures fresh insights into the history of Australia and revitalises our sense of the historian’s craft – what Tom Griffiths calls “the art of time travel”.' (Publication summary)