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Miegunyah Press Miegunyah Press i(A39627 works by) (Organisation) assertion
Born: Established: 1967 Melbourne, Victoria, ;
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1 y separately published work icon Tumarkin Patrick Allington , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2022 22127697 2022 single work biography

'A personal reflection and an ambitious, overarching reading of Maria Tumarkin as a writer, and her place in the contemporary Australian literary zeitgeist.

'Why is Maria Tumarkin a significant writer today?

'What are the worlds-personal, social, and intellectual-that have helped to form her perspective? Where does she fit within the circles of key Australian writers and thinkers? What are the boundaries that her work pushes against? And what future does she see for us in Australia and beyond?

'In Tumarkin, which inaugurates the Contemporary Australian Writers series, noted critic and author Patrick Allington registers his intellectual and emotional reaction to Maria Tumarkin's witty, often blunt, always complex interpretations of Australia and the world.

'In the era of the rushed think piece, Allington explores the depth of Tumarkin's persistent, historically informed concern with questions of personal and social belonging, disruption and dislocation. He asks how we might most usefully respond to a body of writing that is urgent, important and unsettling but contains no simple manifesto.' (Publication summary)

2 3 y separately published work icon European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850 : A Study in the History of Art and Ideas European Vision and the South Pacific Bernard Smith , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2021 Z1451697 1960 single work prose
1 1 y separately published work icon William Cooper : An Aboriginal Life Story Bain Attwood , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2021 22128889 2021 single work biography

'An important tribute to the work and life of an extraordinary Aboriginal activist

'William Cooper's passionate struggle against the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the denial of their rights, and his heroic fight for them to become citizens in their own country, has been widely commemorated and celebrated. By carefully reconstructing the historical losses his people suffered and endured, William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story reveals how the first seventy years of Cooper's life inspired the remarkable political work he undertook in the 1930s Focusing on Cooper's most important campaigns - his famous petition to King George VI for an Aboriginal representative in the Australian parliament, his call for a day of mourning after 150 years of colonisation, the walk-off of the Yorta Yorta people from Cummeragunja reserve in 1939 and his opposition to the establishment of an Aboriginal regiment in the Second World War - this carefully researched study sheds important new light on the long struggle that Indigenous people have fought…' (Publication summary)

1 y separately published work icon Contemporary Australian Writers Series 2021 Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2021 22127734 2021 series - publisher biography
1 1 y separately published work icon Fairweather and China Claire Roberts , Melbourne : Miegunyah Press , 2021 21541330 2021 single work biography

An exquisitely illustrated appraisal of Australia's 'greatest artist' that explores his fascination with China and its centrality to his body of work

'Ian Fairweather is one of the most significant twentieth-century artists to have worked in Australia. After a life of wandering, including time spent in China, Bali and the Philippines, Fairweather settled on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, where he built his own house. In 1962 a leading art critic named him 'our greatest painter'.

'Fairweather is exceptional among modern artists for his experience of Chinese life and culture. He lived and worked in China for extended periods, learnt Chinese and published a book-length translation of the popular Chinese novel The Drunken Buddha (1965). From an early age Fairweather sought alternatives to art based on verisimilitude and single-point perspective. This led to a lifelong engagement with the principles of Chinese art and thought that profoundly shaped his own creative process.

'Drawing on letters, interviews and other archival materials to shed new light on Fairweather's artistic practice, Claire Roberts brings her own extensive knowledge of Chinese language and art to this absorbing re-examination of a revered artist. Fairweather and China shows how central the China experience is to his emergence as a key transcultural figure, connecting British, European, Chinese and Australian art histories in new and visionary ways.' (Publication summary)

1 2 y separately published work icon Life as Art : The Biographical Writing of Hazel Rowley Hazel Rowley , Della Rowley (editor), Lynn Buchanan (editor), Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2021 21541158 2021 selected work biography

'‘My books are all, in their different ways, voyages of discovery. I write books to learn, to stretch my horizons. These voyages of mine are full of risk and passion.’ Hazel Rowley

'Hazel Rowley was an award-winning biographer who was committed to telling the stories of people’s lives. This collection of short pieces—journal articles, essays, talks, diary entries – provides a wonderful insight into her craft. In these pages she talks honestly about the joys, the challenges, the highs and the lows of writing biography. Much of the material is previously unpublished and reveals Rowley’s lively ideas on a range of topics.

'Before her untimely death in 2011, Rowley wrote four acclaimed biographies: about Christina Stead, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. This new collection gives a rich store of reflections on biography and draws the reader into Rowley’s passionate pursuit of stories and her search for new biographical subjects.

'Della and Lynn, along with Hazel’s friend Irene Tomaszewski, established the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship in her memory.' (Publication summary)

1 6 y separately published work icon The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt Ken Gelder , Rachael Weaver , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2020 18610283 2020 multi chapter work criticism

'From the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770 to classic children's tale Dot and the Kangaroo, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver examine hunting narratives in novels, visual art and memoirs to discover how the kangaroo became a favourite quarry, a relished food source, an object of scientific fascination, and a source of violent conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people.

'The kangaroo hunt worked as a rite of passage and an expression of settler domination over native species and land. But it also enabled settlers to begin to comprehend the complexity of bush ecology, raising early concerns about species extinction and the need for conservation and the preservation of habitat.' (Publication summary)

1 15 y separately published work icon A Web of Friendship : Selected Letters (1928-1973) Christina Stead , R. G. Geering (editor), Victoria : Miegunyah Press , 2017 Z201224 1992 selected work correspondence

'A Web of Friendship is a collection of Christina Stead's intimate correspondence with influential literary figures such as Stanley Burnshaw, Ettore Rella, Nettie Palmer, Clem Christesen, Elizabeth Harrower and A.D. Hope.

'These letters span the life of one of Australia's most illustrious writers, offering a rare insight into the relationships that influenced and sustained her work. They reveal Stead's reflections on the art of literature, the development of her political thought, and the significance of a handful of friendships that would endure throughout her life and career.

'The letters cover Stead's arrival in England in 1928, as well as her time abroad in Europe and the United States. They also detail her marriage to William Blake, their life in England where they settled in 1953, as well as her brief return to Australia and her final years in England following Blake's death.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon My Vice-Regal Life: Diaries 1978 to 1982 Anna (Lady) Cowen , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2017 11862580 2017 single work diary

'Sunday, 8 January 1978 

'I have decided to keep a diary during Zelman's term of office as Governor-General. I am pleased, because I forget so much and the re-reading of a sentence brings whole occasions, scenes, and otherwise forgotten things, vividly back to mind... '

'And so begins an extraordinary record of the life of a Governor-General's wife. Lady Anna Cowen's edited diaries capture the day-to-day life-the wardrobe fittings, the running of an enormous household-as well as the pomp and circumstance of vice-regal duties during the term Sir Zelman Cowen, the 'healing Governor-General', served after the dismissal by Sir John Kerr of the Whitlam government. ' (Introduction)

1 39 y separately published work icon The Salzburg Tales Christina Stead , Sydney : Miegunyah Press , 2016 Z462682 1934 selected work short story

'A group of visitors to the Salzburg Festival, brought together by chance, decides to mark time by telling tales. Their sketches, anecdotes, fantasies, legends, tragedies, jokes and parodies combine to make The Salzburg Tales. ' (Publication summary : 2015 edition)

1 y separately published work icon Margaret Preston : Recipes for Food and Art Lesley Harding , Melbourne : Miegunyah Press , 2016 10893239 2016 single work biography

'Celebrated for her vibrant, distinctive pictures of indigenous flowers, Margaret Preston was an equally colourful and outspoken personality. She was passionate about the need for a modern national culture that reflected local conditions and vernacular qualities. For Preston, the building blocks of such a culture was not to be found in the pastoral landscape tradition of Australian art, but instead in the home.

'Maintaining that art was an integral part of everyday life and that is should be within the reach of everyone, she published widely on the methods and techniques of a host of artistic pursuits, from pottery, printmaking and basket weaving to the gentle art of flower arranging. She devoted much of her career to the genre of still life her aesthetic laboratory table;using humble domestic objects and often painting in the kitchen while keeping 'one eye on the stew'.

'Richly illustrated with Preston’s art, photographs and her recipes" for food, art and interior décor" this book sheds new light on the private life of much-loved public figure.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon Shooting the Picture : Press Photography in Australia Fay Anderson , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2016 10144200 2016 single work criticism

'Shooting The Picture is the story of Australian press photography from 1888 to today—the power of the medium, seismic changes in the newspaper industry, and photographers who were often more colourful than their subjects. This groundbreaking book explores our political leaders and campaigns, crime, war and censorship, international events, disasters and trauma, sport, celebrity, gender, race and migration. It maps the technological evolution in the industry from the dark room to digital, from picturegram machines to iPhones, and from the death knock to the ascendancy of social media. It raises the question whether these changes will spell the end of traditional press photography as we know it. ...'

1 2 y separately published work icon Fortunate Voyager : The Worlds of Ninian Stephen Philip Ayres , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2013 7411333 2013 single work biography

'One life, many roles: soldier, brilliant barrister, High Court judge, Governor-General, Australian diplomat, mediator in Northern Ireland, member of the first war crimes tribunal since Nuremburg and Tokyo, head of UN and Commonwealth missions to crisis zones from Cambodia to Burma to Bangladesh, Sir Ninian Stephen is the recipient of five knighthoods and the most honoured Australian in history—and yet precisely because so much of his work was international it has rarely received the notice it deserves in his home country.

'In this, the first whole-of-life biography of the subject, Philip Ayres traces Stephen's early life in Scotland, England and around continental Europe, from Edinburgh and the Highlands to the spa towns of France and Germany, from the ski runs above Montreux to the Nuremberg Rally of 1938, including the details of his education at outstanding British and Swiss schools and his highly unorthodox 'family' life as an only child with an absent father, the details of which, like so much here, have never previously been revealed.

'All this constitutes the unknown Ninian Stephen, and yet so much else in this book is new: the wartime Stephen, the barrister Stephen, and all the other aspects of his life traced in precise yet dramatic detail in a book whose momentum is generated through unique access to the full resources of the subject's personal papers.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon Hilda Rix Nicholas and Elsie Rix's Moroccan Idyll : Art and Orientalism Jeanette Hoorn , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2012 Z1908914 2012 single work biography
1 3 y separately published work icon Sunday's Garden : Growing Heide Lesley Harding , Kendrah Morgan , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2012 Z1860192 2012 single work prose

'When Sunday and John Reed purchased Heide, now the site of Heide Museum of Modern Art, it was a neglected former dairy farm. At the end of their lives, it was unique among Melbourne's parklands, densely forested with exotic and native flora, with a stunningly beautiful cottage-style kitchen garden the jewel in its crown—in all, an extraordinary aesthetic accomplishment, the result of fifty years of vision, dedication and sheer hard work. The Reeds moulded Heide into a personal Eden, connecting art with nature and creating a nourishing environment for the artists they championed—Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Charles Blackman and Mirka Mora among them.

'Sunday's Garden explores the growing of Heide, and in doing so fully restores the Heide garden into the literature surrounding this inspiring site, its creators and the makers of its myths.' (From the publisher's website.)

1 2 y separately published work icon Aiming for the Skies : Fay Marles Fay Marles , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2012 Z1853672 2012 single work autobiography

'In Aiming for the Skies, a woman of compassion and conviction reflects on a life rich in achievements.

'Fay Marles has lived a life of firsts. As Victoria's first Commissioner for Equal Opportunity, she played an instrumental role in the landmark case that resulted in Ansett employing its first female pilot. Over the next decade, she battled discrimination on many fronts, overseeing the commission's rapid development and expansion. She went on to found Australia's first private equal opportunity consultancy, and made history again when she became the first woman Chancellor of the University of Melbourne in February 2001.

'But in these fascinating memoirs, Marles offers much more than an account of her many personal and professional achievements. She candidly explores the influences that helped to shape her outlook and interests, from her family background and schooling to her experiences as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne in the 1940s, where she was one of Manning Clark's first students. Her recollections of working as a young social worker in Brisbane in the 1950s, and later as a lecturer in social work at the University of Melbourne in the 1970s, offer a fascinating snapshot of the development of social work as a profession in Australia. She also describes the challenges of balancing her family life and career, and of pursuing postgraduate study as a mature-age student. Along the way, she charts her growing interest in women's issues and Indigenous affairs.

'Throughout her remarkable life, Fay Marles has aimed for the skies. Through her commitment to justice and her firm belief in the value of education, she has helped and inspired many others to do the same.' (From the publisher's website.)

1 8 y separately published work icon The Memoirs of a Young Bastard : The Diaries of Tim Burstall, November 1953 to December 1954 Tim Burstall , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2012 Z1841787 2012 single work diary

'Tim Burstall, the celebrated director of Stork, Alvin Purple and numerous other definitive "ocker" comedies, is credited with shaking the moribund Australian film industry out of its torpor. But long before that, in the early 1950s, he began keeping a diary to record the world of the group of "arties" and "intellectuals" he was living among in Eltham, then a rural area outside Melbourne, where cheap land was available for mudbrick houses and studios, and where suburban rigidities could be mercilessly flouted.

'Burstall was in his mid-twenties, with two young sons and an open marriage with his wife, Betty. Eager to become a writer, to go against the grain, he kept a record almost daily—of the parties and the talk in pubs and studios, about art and politics and sex, of Communist Party branch meetings and film societies, of political rallies and the first Herald Outdoor Art Show. Somehow, while holding down a public relations job in the Antarctic Division and juggling his love affairs and obsession with the beautiful, brainy Fay, he wrote 500 words almost every day. Betty, according to the diaries, kept the show on the road, feeding friends after the pub, milking goats and working in her pottery making bowls and mugs, which Tim sometimes decorated at weekends.

'These Memoirs of a Young Bastard, as Burstall dubbed himself and them, are among the most evocative Australian diaries of modern times. Burstall can write. He has an eye for the telling detail, an unerring ear for cant and pomposity and, most endearingly, an ability to mock himself—always from the perspective of a bloke of his generation.' (From the publisher's website.)

1 2 y separately published work icon Permanent Revolution : Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 Richard Haese , Melbourne : Miegunyah Press , 2011 Z1848363 2011 single work biography

'In 1961 the 22-year-old Mike Brown joined the New Zealand artist, Ross Crothall, in an old terrace house in inner Sydney's Annandale. Over the following two years the artists filled the house with a remarkable body of work. Launched with an equally extraordinary exhibition, the movement they called Imitation Realism introduced collage, assemblage and installation to Australian art for the first time. Laying the groundwork for a distinctive Australian postmodernism, Imitation Realism was also the first Australian art movement to respond in a profound way to Aboriginal art, and to the tribal art of New Guinea and the Pacific region.

'By the mid-1960s Brown was already the most controversial figure in Australian art. In 1963 a key work was thrown out of a major travelling exhibition for being overtly sexual; a year later he publicly attacked Sydney artists and critics for having failed the test of integrity. Finally, in 1966-67, Brown became the only Australian artist to have been successfully prosecuted for obscenity.

'Brown spent the last 28 years of his life in Melbourne, where his reputation for radicalism and nonconformity was cemented with his multiplicity of styles, exploration of themes of sexuality, and transgressive commitment to the ideal of street art and graffiti. Against a background of the counter-culture and the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, Brown's art and remarkable life of personal and creative struggle is without parallel in Australian art.

'Permanent Revolution is the first full-scale account of Mike Brown's life and work. It is also a ground-breaking portrait of one of the most vital, disputatious and creative periods of Australian art.' (From the publisher's website.)

1 y separately published work icon Armageddon : Two Men on an Anzac Trail Paul Daley , Michael Bowers , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2011 Z1820697 2011 single work autobiography travel
4 49 y separately published work icon Letty Fox, Her Luck Christina Stead , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2011 Z462885 1946 single work novel "One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarrelled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods upon me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad." "So begins Letty Fox's own story, a comic extravaganza about the crazy circus of her early life; about her moping mother, absent father, and two impossible sisters; about work and play, sex and men, and the seemingly unending search for a lasting relationship." (Publisher's blurb)
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