AustLit

'One new friend is Charmian Clift’s Mermaid Singing, a memoir of trauma and self-discovery and a reminder of what could have been.'

'Mark McKenna’s short, elegant book Return to Uluru gazes inwards to the continental interior, metaphor for a nation’s yearning.'

'From award-winning journalist Paul Daley comes a gripping multi-generational saga about Australian frontier violence and cultural theft that will capture the national imagination.

'Morally bankrupt popular historian Patrick Renmark leaves London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he takes a commission to write the biography of his pioneering anthropologist grandfather.

'With no enthusiasm and even less integrity, Patrick travels to the former mission town in Australia's far north where his grandfather famously brokered 'peace' between the Indigenous people of the area and the white constabulary.

'Of course nothing is as it seems, or as Patrick wants it to be. Unable to lay his own son to rest, Patrick unwillingly becomes part of local lawyer Jericho Bakerman's quest to return the settlement's ancestral remains to Country.' (Publication summary)

'When contemplating the historical efficacy of this nation’s secular shrine, the Australian War Memorial, it is best to stand out front in the middle of Anzac Parade, look up towards Mount Ainslie and imagine what was originally intended.' (Introduction)

'I frequently reread the Australian novels of my youth – and few more so than George Johnston’s autobiographical “Meredith Trilogy” of My Brother Jack, Clean Straw for Nothing and A Cartload of Clay.' (Introduction)

'The actor, playwright and screenwriter’s first novel solidifies her take on Henry Lawson’s classic: first a play, now a book, soon a film'

(Source : Abstract)

'Kurnell is a no-fuss, unpretentious place given that it’s supposed to be the cradle of the nation. Stretching along a promontory that looks like a witch’s finger pointing west from the southern shore of Botany Bay, opposite Sydney Airport, Kurnell is a hotchpotch sprawl of fibro modesty and glass-and-steel ambition, where trailered speedboats rest on the verges and Aussie flags snap on front-yard poles. Nestled in Kamay Botany Bay National Park, Kurnell overlooks a mass of water lacking the frenetic beauty of luminous sails and green and gold ferries, and of some of the international signature structures of modernity, that characterise that other vast nearby inlet that the colonists instead chose as the harbour for their penal settlement.' (Introduction)

'Fifty years after Clean Straw for Nothing won the prodigal Australian writer George Johnston a second Miles Franklin award, the novel has aged as a rich critique of social change, cultural complacency and the rise of smug nationalism in Menzies-era Australia.' (Introduction)

'Birch’s new novel is an allegory of good, evil and the legacy of Australia’s colonial past – with strong black women at its core.'

'In recent years, a figure has begun to emerge from the dark recesses of Australia's colonial history - one of the most progressive and courageous people from Queensland's violent pastoral and logging frontier. Danish-born Carl Feilberg was a journalist and fiction writer of elegance, an environmentalist and Indigenous rights campaigner who confronted Queensland's politicians and their vested pastoral and logging interests with ugly truths about their killing of the country and its custodians. Feilberg is colonial Queensland's most notable early non-Indigenous human rights activist, and perhaps this continent's first campaigning environmentalist; yet he has remained an obscure figure until recently because most of his advocacy appeared anonymously, without by-line, in a range of Queensland newspapers.' (Publication abstract)

'The myth of benign, peaceful settlement persists today – even as historians reveal a far more sinister picture.'

'During his short life Danish-born Carl Feilberg risked more than any other Australian journalist or author to expose the brutality against Indigenous people on the ultra-violent Queensland colonial frontier of the late 19th century.' (Introduction)

'Nobody seemed quite capable of distinguishing John Noble from Jimmy Clements when the pair turned up for the royal opening of the new Commonwealth Parliament building in Canberra. It was Monday, 9 May 1927. And as far as European Australia was concerned, the original inhabitants of the Limestone Plains, upon which Canberra was imposed, were extinct – vanished.' (Introduction)

'In the early 1950s, as acute cold war paranoia about possible communist infiltration began dominating Australian politics, the next generation of Indigenous activists took their equality fight to Europe.' (Introduction)

'Bruce Chatwin’s book opened my mind to Indigenous spiritual belief. I’ve since learned to glimpse beyond his take on ‘songlines’.' 

Paul Daley recounts the life of Alf Stafford.