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Issue Details: First known date: 2004... 2004 [Review] Wildflowing: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Kathleen McArthur was born in 1915, the same year as her cousin Mary Durack and her lifelong friend Judith Wright. The three women are also linked by the way that their work gave expression to their deeply felt connection to place. Kathleen and Judith became friends in the early 1950s as their shared passion for "wildflowrering" grew into a shared commitment to conservation. Margaret Somerville s book is about the \way Kathleen McArthur inhabited places - her childhood home at Coorparoo, and later Caloundra, Currimundi, Cooloola and the Pumicestone Passage. Her connection to these places brought her self into being, and her representations of them raised public awareness of their beauty and significance.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Queensland Review vol. 11 no. 2 December 2004 Z1175338 2004 periodical issue

    'Thea Astley - the great Queensland novelist, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78 - famously expounded the notion that Queensland is quite unlike anywhere else. Even when familiar cultural elements are present, she argued, they are combined so incongruously here as to produce an utterly distinctive environment:

    It's all in the antitheses. The contrasts. The contradictions. Queensland means living in townships called Dingo and Banana and Gunpowder. Means country pubs with nvelve-foot ceilings and sagging floors, pub which, ,while bending gently and sadly sideways, still keep up the starched white table-cloths, the heavy duty silver, the typed menu. Means folk singers like Thel and Rick whom I once followed through to Clermont on that lecture-tour while they cleaned up culturally ahead of me; but it also meant listening to the now extinct State Queensland String Quartet playing the Nigger Quartet in my fourth-class room among the sticks of chalk, the tattered textbooks~ means pushing our way through some rainforest drive laced with wait-a-while to hear the Lark Ascending, or more suitably, the Symphonie Fantastique crashing through the last of the banana thickets.

    Many of Astley's novels and short stories explore the ways in which Queensland enters and shapes her characters' bodies and minds. Astley's biting humour, her vivid evocations of excess in the tropics, and her elusive search for spiritual . authenticity in a stolen land are - at least in part - products of the quirky, infuriating, but also deeply creative environment in which she grew up.' (Editorial) 

    2004
    pg. 109-110
Last amended 1 Aug 2019 13:26:42
109-110 [Review] Wildflowing: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthursmall AustLit logo Queensland Review
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