AustLit

'How does a young man who learns jazz and classical piano, scours Europe’s great art galleries for artistic enlightenment and falls in love with women from all over the world go on to become reviled as a bigot?

'The answer has less to do with him than it does with his critics. As cartoonist Bill Leak discovered, all it takes is to express an opinion that differs from today’s neo-authoritarian narrative.

'When Leak, late in life, provoked the wrath of politically correct mobs and institutions, he didn’t flinch, adhering to what he knew to be the truth and ridiculing his detractors with his brilliant caricatures and savage intellect.

'These battles were significant and symbolic, but should not define Leak’s life and work. Fred Pawle has spent three years researching and interviewing dozens of Leak’s friends and colleagues to create this intimate and honest biography.

'Now, for the first time, here is the whole beautiful but occasionally troubled story behind an extraordinarily gifted Australian artist, cartoonist, writer and raconteur.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'In 1915, Major Richard Francis Fitz-Gerald was the last Australian to leave an exposed position at Gallipoli. He was awarded the DSO for that and served on the Western Front through to the end of the Great War. Everywhere he went, often while in danger, he collected materials that marked his experience – photographs, orders, his battalion’s timetable for evacuation, and a souvenir map of Gallipoli that he annotated by hand. He wrote careful comments on everything he kept, transforming public documents into personal sites of memory and retrieval. He also kept a diary for the first year of his experience, covering Gallipoli, Egypt, and France. Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War personalises the difficult position of a front-line officer by closely examining the things he carried, collected, and preserved for the rest of his life.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'At 45, Bill Johnson, faced with chronic illness and the loss of everything important to him, decided to die, seemingly in stark contradiction to how he’d lived his life. Since his devastating accident at 13, he’d fought for decades against disability and prejudice to achieve a fulfilling and successful life. As his wife, Carolyne Lee witnessed his final conundrum, and was persuaded to support him as he died by euthanasia. This is the story of Bill’s death and his life, much of which the author discovered afterwards, in seeking to understand his fearless final decision.

‘Somehow I must tell of that day … It is, after all, the initiating event of his story. It caused everything that followed: the bad, first, which endured for a long time. But also the good. This event set up the defining paradox of his life. To fight endlessly for a satisfying quality of life, but once that quality was gone, to face death with more than bravery; to embrace it.’

Source : publisher's blurb

'Rose Mary Venn-Brown served in the First World War as an administrator with the British and the Australian Red Cross and the YWCA. She was the only woman to do so and, although she was not the only civilian Australian woman to serve in France, she was the last to leave in 1919. She did not proclaim herself a feminist or social reformer, but her work changed the lives of the men she served, and she played her part in the changing role of women in our world. This is her remarkable story – a story which gives a new insight into life on the battlefields during the Great War.'

Source : publisher's blurb

‘Silently and inconspicuously, shorthand writers have been instrumental in recording, documenting and preserving oral history. Thoughts and spoken words can simply fly away without any hope of retrieval – the written word remains.’

'So begins this account of a skill that greatly enhanced media and business communications in the 20th century, and continues to do so.

'Shorthand writers in Australia date to the early years of colonisation. Users brought with them the method of their time and infectious curiosity prompted inventions and improvements through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Shorthand’s popularity surged in the 1920s and beyond, coinciding with the new technology of the wireless, and what was once exclusively an occupation for men soon became one in which women excelled.

'Australia’s rich and fascinating history of shorthand has not been told previously. Carmel Taylor delves deeply and ranges widely in telling it with apt immediacy and lightness of touch.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Michael Wilding’s essays on Marcus Clarke’s life and works, from his schooldays at Highgate with Gerard Manley Hopkins to membership of the Melbourne Bohemian Yorick Club with Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall, and his associations with the Chief of Police Captain Frederick Standish, the Irish nationalist politician and political prisoner Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, and the President of the Melbourne Public Library Sir Redmond Barry.

'Essays on His Natural Life, Clarke’s classic novel of the convict system; on Chidiock Tichborne the historical romp about the Catholic conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I on the English throne with Mary, Queen of Scots, and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham’s espionage operation to expose it; on Old Tales of a Young Country about the early years of European settlement and the brutalities of the convict system; on his journalism ranging from exposés of the lives of Melbourne’s down and outs and homeless, to reminiscences of the Theatre Royal’s Café de Paris, and the spoof account of the Melbourne Cup written by aid of a camera obscura; on his literary essays, reviews and obituaries of Bret Harte, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens and Adam Lindsay Gordon; and on his short stories, ranging from realistic accounts of his up-country days on sheep stations and mining towns in the Wimmera, and speculations on the alternative futures of what life might have been, to sensational tales of Gothic horror, crime mystery, fantasies of opium dreams and mesmeric trances, and sophisticated literary experiment in his account of taking hashish, ‘Cannabis Obscura’ and the premature post-modernism of ‘The Author Haunted by His Own Creations’.'

‘This is scholarly and very entertaining.’
– Sydney Morning Herald

Source : publisher's blurb

'In 1940, soon after graduating, Dr Stanley Goulston joined the Australian Army. As the sole doctor to 1500 soldiers, he was sent to the Middle East where the Allied forces were fighting the Germans and Italians. His battalion was part of the iconic Rats of Tobruk during the famous siege. At Tobruk he was awarded a Military Cross.

'In 1947 he was appointed honorary physician to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. He became one of Australia’s first gastroenterologists and advanced this speciality at his hospital and beyond. In senior roles with the Royal Australasian College of Physicians he headed a long-lasting redesign of physician training.

'Stanley Goulston was universally admired for his humility, empathy and commitment to teaching and research. For most of his life, he wrote poetry. At 79 he completed a Master of Philosophy degree at Sydney University and then taught narrative and poetry to doctors and medical students with the aim of fostering a more humane and compassionate version of modern scientific medicine.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Peter Allen Ryan (1923–2015) was a talented, brave and complex man; in some quarters an Australian institution. As a 19-year-old soldier in World War Two he won the Military Medal and was Mentioned in Dispatches. Fear Drive My Feet, the book he wrote when he returned home from New Guinea, is recognised as perhaps Australia’s finest war memoir. In another life—and he had several—Ryan was Director of Melbourne University Press for 26 years. As a writer—his first and greatest interest—Ryan’s extraordinary output included nine books and some two million words, most of them produced by hand. His essays and columns were often controversial (as intended) but written with style, grace and wicked wit. It was said of Peter Ryan that he was incapable of writing an ugly sentence.' (Publication summary)

' In April 1938 a small bookshop opened for business in Canberra, at a time when Australia’s federal capital was still a country town and Burley Griffin’s vision for its future had been defeated by years of war, depression and  political indifference.

'In an era which was a golden age for books and booksellers, the bookshop, under its owner and manager Verity Hewitt, became a meeting place for booklovers as well as an art gallery and a library. Scientists, artists, diplomats, servicemen and women, public servants, writers, adventurers and immigrants all visited the shop during the war years.

'The bookshop was an important part of the city’s social and cultural history. It witnessed Canberra’s slow change, under the pressures of war, from a rural backwater to a reluctant and still unformed capital city.' (Publication summary)

'Over two years, writer Nick Gadd and his wife Lynne circled the city of Melbourne on foot, starting at Williamstown and ending in Port Melbourne. Along the way they uncovered lost buildings, secret places and mysterious signs that told of forgotten stories and curious characters from the past. Soon after they completed the circle, Lynne passed away from cancer. Melbourne Circle is the story of their journey, a memoir, and a stunning meditation on personal loss.' (Publication summary)

'This is the previously untold saga of one of theatre’s most controversial creators, Ernest C. Rolls, and his loyal wife, the revue star, Jennie Benson. They brought their talents to the Australian theatrical world in the 1920s. Their chaotic careers survived a daunting succession of personal and professional crises – everything from bankruptcy to murder. Rolls even served a term in prison. This extraordinary story, authored by well-known theatre critic and historian, Frank Van Straten, unfolds amidst an array of evocative, rarely seen, images. The racy text and vast selection of archival images bring to life the remarkable world of a forgotten theatrical great.' (Publication summary)

'Violence is the plague of our civilization. Its many tentacles – domestic violence, criminal violence, sexual abuse, terrorism, state violence, revolution, war and genocide tentacles – threaten us.

'The new discipline of traumatology amply describes the consequences of violence. But there is as yet no corresponding discipline of violentology to explain why violence occurs in the first place. Inexorably, Paul Valent was drawn professionally to take the leap from healing the minds of victims to trying to understand the minds of perpetrators.

'Valent unpicks the minds of perpetrators in each field of violence. He develops a lens for illuminating violence, whether individual or international, primitive or spiritual. We come to understand how aggressions that helped our species to survive now threaten it with extinction.

'Valent explains his thesis by recounting many stories. One story interwoven throughout is his own. A child who survived the Holocaust, he examines the minds of his perpetrators in his quest to prevent future violence.

'Violence, for Valent, is not an isolated feature of the human condition. Surprisingly close to violence are struggles for love. Readers also learn about that aspect of humanity.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'Costas Taktsis, arguably the most important post-war Greek writer, called himself a Sacred Monster, and his life-long friend Carl Plate – an important painter, Gallerist and influencer of modern art in Sydney – the Colossus of Woronora.

'‘You get a very aromatic sense of this great cross-pollination of cultures, and what a hip cast of characters! (Powys and Oblomov!!) And the letters supply specificity like nothing else – details, voice, intimacy.

'It’s great. How the drab Edwardian monochrome of the post-war years, gets a sweep of colour on islands of creativity, dazzled landscapes … terrific links (London, Paris, Ireland, Athens, Hydra, Sydney), and entanglements and – because we know the end  – one senses the drama of forces  – beyond anyone’s control – under the sunny availability of youth. A fantastic work of cultural history.’
– George Alexander'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'Castlemaine owes its existence to the alluvial gold rushes which began in 1851. To cope with the crisis, Governor La Trobe established four Gold Commissioners’ Camps – at Castlemaine, Bendigo, Ballarat and Beechworth. While many centres of mining dwindled to names on the map, these administrative centres developed into permanent towns. Castlemaine was at first a ramshackle village known as the Canvas Town clustered around the Camp. After the first land sales in 1853 the town began to take shape. The first hotels were licensed in 1853, schools came out of tents and into buildings, the churches built substantial places of worship, administrative functions such as the Post Office and the Court House were moved from the Camp to the town. Local initiative built the Hospital, the Gas Works, the Mechanics Institute and the Benevolent Asylum.  Several foundries flourished, servicing the mining industry and the construction of the railway line. Castlemaine was declared a municipality in 1855. The first decade is rich in characters and egos. They were astonishingly young, assertive and determined to shape a better way of life. ‘The Accidental Town’ recreates an era when Castlemaine was poised precariously between a mining camp and a settled town.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'Who could imagine that finding a suitable pair of football boots would prove almost impossible for women and girls in the 1970s?

'The focus of the women’s liberation movement was fought in the streets, in universities, in workplaces and in the home. We add the football field to these sites of protest and empowerment for individual women. We follow the Australian and New Zealand national players – schoolgirls, factory workers, university graduates and professionals – as they navigate the male-dominated world of football. This book never shies away from the uncomfortable aspects of their journeys, uncovering stories of vulnerability and strength, sexual harassment as well as sexual awakening, personal vilification as well as celebration, giving voice to a silencing in sport.

'Written by historian Dr Marion Stell, in collaboration with football identity Heather Reid AM, this enlivened account is told with honesty, pain and humour.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'John Absolon was a well-known nineteenth-century London water-colour artist. John de Mansfield Absolon, one of his artist sons, married a daughter of Robert Mace Habgood and travelled to Western Australia in 1869 to undertake tasks that included management of Habgood’s two large import stores in Perth and Fremantle, Habgood’s three ships that traded lead ore, pearl shells and sandalwood between Western Australia and London, and the Geraldine Lead Mines north of Geraldton—perhaps the first mining operations in colony.

'John de Mansfield Absolon also brought to Western Australia a knowledge of developments in mid-century French art twenty years in advance of Melbourne’s Heidelberg School, which embraced French Impressionism in the mid-1880s. Absolon’s impressionistic paintings of various sites in Western Australia and numerous ship-board scenes are quite remarkable for their time.

'This handsome book is richly illustrated with all aspects of this intriguing story—the art of both Absolons, father and son, in their perspectives of Victorian London and colonial Western Australia, together with rare glimpses into the early colonial history and the business records of the enterprising Habgood, Absolons & Co.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'In 1835 the name ‘Merriburnong’ was given to a sheep run imposed upon the traditional land of the Marin balug, or salt-water-river people. Before a punt was installed near the junction of the Saltwater River with the Yarra at Footscray, a circuitous track from Melbourne to Williams Town and Geelong crossed the river at ‘Solomon’s Ford’. But where exactly was it, and who was Solomon?

'Rick Keam has sought answers by walking the riverbank and re-examining contemporary documents and historic photos. His fresh account of the Solomon era is placed in a wider context, from Charles Grimes’ 1803 exploration, through the degradation of the river as an urban-industrial drain, to its renaming and rehabilitation as today’s Maribyrnong.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'David Campbell is remembered as one of Australia’s finest lyric poets. A man of strong, highly individual personality and wide achievement, born into a landed family, he was a grazier in the Monaro for most of his life and a decorated airman during the Second World War. He published eleven books of poems and two of short stories, and very many of his poems and short stories appeared in The Bulletin under Douglas Stewart’s literary editorship. He had friends in many fields and his influence on fellow writers was considerable.

'Campbell’s poetry was inspired by his love of the land, in all its forms, and by his belief in the unity of all things in nature. Though not conventionally religious, he was a true pantheist. In his words:

'“The cosmos dances” ….'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'International journalist John Lawrence takes the reader at kaleidoscopic speed through high drama and rib-tickling humour as he relives nearly twelve years of adventures in sub-Saharan Africa.

'His racy memoir swings from west coast to east coast, with a detour to Mauritius, as he vividly describes the everyday lives of both humble and famous Africans and the amazing array of animals that share this vast continent.

'Lawrence pays homage to the literary genius of Nigerian authors and is spellbound by the Kenyan landscape, described by the popular novelist Wilbur Smith as a microcosm of Africa.

'He survives an armed hold-up in Nairobi and a close shave with a hippopotamus that charges his small boat on a Kenyan lake. And he fears for his life, and that of his wife, when his elderly driver, who claims to be a prince, threatens to abandon them on a jungle road.

'For old Africa hands, for those who have already been there and all who intend to visit, this book is a must read.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'This book is about a daughter asking and answering the question—Was my father extreme and dangerous? Why Ian Macdonald was seen as a security threat by so many, and how he was dealt with, is relevant to today’s surveillance of citizens.

'In 2007 Kate Hutchison read in her father’s ASIO file that he was ‘extreme’ and ‘dangerous’. These words did not describe the father she knew, an idealist, a life-long communist, a doctor in WW2 who never carried a revolver—but he was so dangerous that the Attorney General drafted a special regulation of the National Security Act 1939–1940 just for him.

'This book is the result of Kate’s 13-year research to understand why her father was a problem for federal, military and para-military groups. Kate looks at the information that was covertly collected, how it was interpreted and how the army and government dealt with a citizen it deemed a serious threat. It is also an account of growing up in a middle-class, communist family in Australia.'