AustLit

'The photographs are tiny, still in their original envelope, never mounted in an album. They show the moment of departure for a traveller on the seas, as recorded by friends and family. Crossing hemispheres and great oceans was not so common in the early twentieth century, and depicted here is a rite of passage, a severing as sure as that of the flimsy paper streamers linking the travellers to shore, which would break as the ship left the quay. The photos track the farewell, the camera following the ship as it steams through the harbour, only ceasing when it vanishes from view.' (Introduction)

'White historian Cassandra Pybus has drawn on her direct links to Truganini, the symbol of indigenous extinction, to make a personal contribution to our conversation about colonial times, writes Lucy Sussex'

'If Australia can be represented in three books, there can be little better a genre than crime fiction. European Australia originated as a penal colony, and crime and its representation have been an obsession ever since. It began with convict ballads, then true crime in newspapers, to the gradually developing form of the crime novel over the nineteenth century. Australia was a significant generic innovator here, with Fergus Hume’s 1886 The Mystery of a Hansom Cab being the first crime international blockbuster. Crime-writing in Australia has form, content, swaggering style—and some of the results are outstanding literature by any criteria.' (Introduction)

'Residents of a hill-top guesthouse observe the first battle of the Martian invasion and the war machines, which easily dispatch the soldiers sent to battle them. But the tripods are unprepared for the dangers of The Australian bush.'

Source: Foreword.

'From Armageddon to Ragnarok and the Rapture, humans persist in imagining the end of the world. The religious term is eschatology, and the literary terms are many. Some are jocular (Disaster Porn), or precisely denote a sub-genre (Post-Apocalypse, Solarpunk). Climate change or Anthropocene fiction is the latest variant on the theme, and if we believe our scientists — and woe betide us if we do not — these may be the final words. The end of the world as we know it approacheth, and nobody is feeling fine. Even the denialists feel the heat of the sand around their heads.'  (Introduction)

'‘I won’t live to see it, but you will!’

'If spoken now, these words might be addressed by a baby boomer to a millenial. In fact they were said to me some thirty years ago. The speaker was the Australian novelist and critic George Turner. He was a small, wiry, olive-skinned man, his eyes merry behind square bifocals. Despite the warning, his tone was light and ironic. There was nothing nasty about the remark, rather a commitment to telling the truth. For some novelists, the stance could seem unbearably pretentious, or self-aggrandising. For Turner it was neither. He was a kind man in person, and gentlemanly in his manners, although he could also be ferocious, particularly when attacked.' (Introduction)