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Paul Hetherington breathes life and feeling into the vivid images, moments, and scenes which he captures in his latest collection.
Aileen Palmer - poet, translator, political activist, adventurer - was the daughter of two writers prominent in Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Vance and Nettie Palmer were well known as novelists, poets, critics and journalists, and Nettie suspected that their eldest would grow up with 'ink in her veins'. Aileen certainly inherited her parents' talents, publishing poetry, translating the work of Ho Chi Minh, and recording what she referred to as 'semi fictional bits of egocentric writing'. She also absorbed their interest in leftist politics, joining the Communist Party at university. This, combined with her bravery, led to participation in the Spanish Civil War and the ambulance service in London during World War II. The return to Australia was not easy, and Aileen never successfully reintegrated into civilian life. In Ink in Her Veins Sylvia Martin paints an honest and moving portrait in which we see a talented woman slowly brought down by war, family expectations, and psychiatric illness and the sometimes cruel 'treatments' common in the twentieth century.
Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia and in Europe, with names, dates and locations erased so that individual women came to be as anonymised as 'gins' and 'lubras'. Liz Conor identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination, even after conflicting records emerged. The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Conor shows how the industrialisation of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep.
Even in the Dark (2013), Lucas's earlier work, won the 2014 Mary Gilmore Award for Poetry (Association for the Study of Australian Literature).
"Memoryscopes is a companion volume to Changescapes"--Page [4] of cover.
"Changescapes is a companion volume to Memoryscopes"--Back cover.
This substantial volume, Poems 1957-2013, contains all of the poetry written by Geoffrey Lehmann considered by the poet to be worthy of inclusion. He has taken the prerogative of the mature artist looking back to revise poems, sometimes substantially, and to restore lines and passages he had removed from earlier versions. Displaying the breadth and depth of his poetry, Lehmann explores human nature in settings as diverse as ancient Rome and rural New South Wales, from searing satire to the domestic life of a family. This is Geoffrey Lehmann's second volume of collected poems: in this book the span is dazzling; the poetry a major literary vessel from a highly awarded writer.
Why is allergic disease increasing so rapidly, especially in young infants? What are the environmental factors contributing to this? What is going wrong with the immune system and can we prevent it? When is it safe to give children peanut products? What are the current treatment options for allergies? What is epigenetics? Where is the research headed? These are some of the many questions challenging not only parents and allergy sufferers, but whole societies now facing the global rise in immune diseases. Dr Susan Prescott, an internationally renowned specialist in childhood allergy and immunology, takes us on a journey into the world and science behind the allergy epidemic. Drawing on the latest research, The Allergy Epidemic provides clear, no-nonsense descriptions in the very personable style Susan's patients have come to expect.
When Mary Bennett died in 1961, Australia lost one of its leading Aboriginal rights activists. Mary's crusade is still, sadly, a current one, and this book serves to historicize the ongoing struggle for Aboriginal rights through the lens of Mary's campaign. By tracing Mary's advocacy - from the 1920s, when the possibility of Aboriginal human rights was first mooted, to the 1960s, when an attempt was made to have the Aboriginal question raised before the United Nations - Just Relations charts a large portion of human rights history. However, the book also tracks a discourse of needs, moral codes, and sentiments, as well as the urgent goal of keeping people alive. In this sense, then, Mary Bennett's story demonstrates the close connection between the rise of humanitarianism as a political project and the rise of human rights. ***Just Relations was shortlisted for the 2016 NSW Premier's Australian History Prize. *** Librarians: ebook available on ProQuest and EBSCO [Subject: Biography, Aboriginal Studies, Human Rights, Australian Studies, History]
Feet to the Stars is Susan Midalia's third collection of short stories, offering keenly observed details about everyday life expressed with pathos, tenderness, and bracing wit. Subtly rendered and emotionally engaging, these stories speak of the transformative capacities of the heart and mind, and of the ways we affect each other, sometimes unwittingly and often profoundly. They offer us the pleasure of listening to different voices, and the satisfaction of reading carefully crafted and evocative prose. *** Midalia's skill at presenting big ideas through everyday experience demonstrates how powerful good writing can be. -- The West Australian *** Librarians: ebook available on ProQuest and EBSCO [Subject: Short Story Fiction
In 1882 dismembered human remains were discovered at a lonely campsite called 'The Sinkings' near Albany, Western Australia. The surgeon conducting the autopsy claimed they were those of a woman. Why, then, was the victim identified as Little Jock, a sandalwood-cutter and former convict? And why was the murder so brutal, so gruesome? More than a hundred years later, Willa Samson embarks on a search to find out. A recluse after having lost her daughter, Willa is drawn back into the world as she negotiates archives, communicates with family historians, and journeys to Scotland, Northern Ireland and England looking for clues to her questions. The Sinkings is a story within a story, the portrayal of a figure from the margins of history embedded within a contemporary narrative of a mother's guilt and grief. Beautifully crafted, the novel deals with the dilemma confronting parents of an intersexed child and the coming to terms with gender.
Martin Harrison (1949-2014) prepared and delivered this final manuscript at the end of a prolific creative life. With the vulnerability of a lover, the poet peels back one cover of truth after another; reckless for the evidence of the senses, he sifts light, sound, and smell. Poems like the skin of a world: breathing, walking, touching. Martin Harrison's culminating poetic achievement is a crossing over - stylistically, thematically, emotionally. Mapping the tragic chiasmus of love and death, it finally asserts the transcendent power of poetry to bear witness, to join us in a greater communion. Cosmopolitan and local, these triumphs of a 'late style' remind us what poetry is when its mastery allows the irony of existence to walk naked and to exult. *** Librarians: ebook available on ProQuest and EBSCO [Subject: Poetry]
Sosina Wogayehu learnt to do flips and splits at the age of six, sitting on the floor of her parents' lounge room in Addis Ababa, watching a German variety show on the only television channel in the land. She sold cigarettes on the streets at the age of eight, and played table soccer with her friends who made money from washing cars, barefoot in the dust. She dreamed of being a circus performer. Twenty-five years later, Sosina has conjured herself a new life in a far-off country: Australia. She has rescued one brother and lost another. She has travelled the world as a professional contortionist. She can bounce-juggle eight balls on a block of marble. Sosina is able to juggle worlds and stories, too, and by luck - which is something Sosina is not short of - she has a friend, David Carlin, who is a writer. Following his acclaimed memoir Our Father Who Wasn't There, David brings us his 'not-me' book, travelling to Addis Ababa where he discovers ways of living so different to his own and confronts his Western fantasies and fears. Through Sosina's story he shows us that, with risk and enough momentum, life - whom we befriend, where we end up, how we come to see ourselves - is never predictable.
For almost two and a half decades, Sir Paul Hasluck was one of Australia's most prominent politicians. Born in Fremantle in 1905 and educated at Perth Modern School and the University of Western Australia, Hasluck worked for The West Australian newspaper and lectured at the University of Western Australia before moving into politics in 1949. After two decades in politics, including a variety of ministerial responsibilities, Hasluck was appointed as the 17th Governor General of Australia in 1969. This biography includes Sir Paul Hasluck's experience working for the Department of External Affairs during World War II. Also, it covers his career as a writer, poet, historian, and politician, providing a complete and enthralling portrait of one of Australia's great men.
Ann Moyal tells of her life's work in Australian science history, and the many important people she met along the way.
A secret plan is being cooked up to bring water from the monsoonal north of Australia to the south. But Government minister Michael Mooney needs to find out what opposition he might face around the river valley. He sends Kate Kennedy, his young, career-minded Chief of Staff, and political fixer Jack Cole on a 'fact-finding' trip. Ex-greenie Dylan Ward is their guide. Respected by both the mining industry and Aboriginal elder Vincent Yimi, Dylan is unaware that he has been compromised until their journey takes some unexpected turns. But as they travel through the wild river country, Kate begins to see Dylan and the world around her in a new light. As The River Runs is a powerful ode to one of Australia's most stunning regions, from an author who writes with red dust in his veins.
Vagabondage is a book of poems tracking a year in the life of a single woman who sells her house when she turns 50 to live in a camper van. Vagabondage is poignant and funny, circling around the idea of home, and belonging (or not), and picking up the storage of traces of connection and memory. Vagabondage will place the reader in that in-between time of youth and old age, straddling the fine line between loneliness and solitude, regret and joy.
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