‘... far better than any novel; an incomparable record of a greart family and of a series of great actions.’ The Bulletin When Patrick Durack left Western Ireland for Australia in 1853, he was to found a pioneering dynasty and build a cattle empire across the great stretches of Australia. With a profound sense of family history, his grand-daughter, Mary Durack, reconstructed the Durack saga - a story of intrepid men and ground-breaking adventure. This sweeping tale of Australia and Australians remains a classic nearly fifty years on.
Dame Mary Durack Miller was born into a pastoral legacy that made her name famous even before she became one of Australia's most popular literary doyennes of the 20th century. Best known for her history of the Durack family, Kings in Grass Castles, Dame Mary was married to aviation pioneer Horrie Miller and was a sibling to the artist Elizabeth Durack. Among the multifarious threads woven into her life, she became a friend and confident to many celebrated writers, actors, and artists. Drawing on a great accumulation of first-hand sources, principally her mother's diaries and correspondence, Patsy Millett's book is about a well-known family who saw their prospects as blighted. Written from the unique perspective of someone born into the wash-up of the Durack dynasty, Patsy says her account 'will be controversial, as the reality behind the generally accepted facts has never been told.' Millet's story is unflinching. Her sharp, insightful prose and acerbic wit create an intimate portrait of an extraordinary writer whose family life was filled with triumph and tragedy.
Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian writers of his generation. His novel To the Islands - written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission - won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after publishing seven remarkable novels and several collections of poetry, Stow's literary output slowed. This biography examines the productive period as well as his long periods of publishing silence. In Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner unravels the reasons behind Randolph Stow's quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world. Meticulously researched, insightful and at times deeply moving, Falkiner's biography pieces together an intriguing story from Stow's personal letters, diaries, and interviews with the people who knew him best. And many of her tales - from Stow's beginnings in idyllic rural Australia, to his critical turning point in Papua New Guinea, and his final years in Essex, England - provide us with keys to unlock the meaning of Stow's rich and introspective works. *** "The overriding virtue of this book is Falkiner's steady trust in the intelligence of her readers. She spells very little out, presenting us instead with this carefully curated wealth of textual evidence." -- Kerryn Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review *** Finally we have some sense of the wounds that shaped and animated Stow's poetry and fiction." -- Geordie Williamson, The Australian *** "Suzanne Falkiner's prodigious biography of Randolph Stow is a book long awaited by many; not just the literati of his native Australia but those countless readers who feasted on his novels and wondered what kind of person could write with such imaginative power. Not only do we come to appreciate what led this renowned Australian writer to create his celebrated fictional works, but we are also given rare glimpses into the inner world of this most private individual, whose personal demons included a dependence on alcohol, two suicide attempts, and struggles with homosexuality. Falkiner cut her teeth on six previous biographies, which stood her in good stead to tackle this challenge. Against significant odds, she has done a masterful job in painting a portrait of one of Australia's most revered writers, somewhat akin to what compatriot David Marr did for Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White. It will no doubt send readers scurrying back to Stow's novels, which, as Marr once said, is the best news a biographer can hear." --World Literature Today, January-February 2017 [Subject: Biography, Literary Criticism]
Tennant Creek and Australia’s Unresolved Past Winner of the 2022 Australian Political Book of the Year Award 'A drily elegant, bracing work from a pained and open heart' —Helen Garner 'Refreshing and original. A unique window on Australia's past and its barbed resonance today … Essential reading for anyone interested in the challenge of truth-telling.' —Mark McKenna 'A graceful, unostentatiously scholarly, wise (and highly readable) book on a subject of overwhelming and enduring significance for all Australians.' —Robert Manne The tale of a town, and a nation Returning after fifty years to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, Dean Ashenden finds Tennant Creek transformed, but its silence about the past still mostly intact. Provoked by a half-hidden account, Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of 'relations between two racial groups within a single field of life' has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence – from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy. In a moving finale, Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries, and to ask how the truths of Australia's story can best be told.
This book sets out the evidence to answer to this question and outlines its development and spread from one side of the continent to the other. It’s an amazing and quintessentially Australian story, one of the many stories from Australia’s ‘hidden history’. It will be of great interest to all the men and women who have used the technique, to those who are now attending bronco branding competitions, to any who have wondered at an old bronco panel or a faded photograph of broncoing in action, and to all who are fascinated by Australian history.
THE ADB'S STORY is a detailed history of the eminent publication THE AUSTRALIAN DICTIONARY OF BIOGRAPHY. Published as part of the ANU Lives series, the National Centre of Biography has produced this comprehensive profile of the ADB's origins, processes and people. Edited by Melanie Nolan and Christine Fernon, this is a fantastic book for scholars of Australian history and biography.
Psychoanalytic Ecology applies Freudian concepts, beginning with the uncanny, to environmental issues, such as wetlands and their loss, to alligators and crocodiles as inhabitants of wetlands, and to the urban underside. It also applies other Freudian concepts, such as sublimation, symptom, mourning and melancholia, to environmental issues and concerns. Mourning and melancholia can be experienced in relation to wetlands and to their loss. The city is a symptom of the will to fill or drain wetlands. This book engages in a talking cure of psychogeopathology (environmental psychopathology; mental land illness; environ-mental illness) manifested also in industries, such as mining and pastoralism, that practice greed and gluttony. Psychoanalytic Ecology promotes gratitude for generosity as a way of nurturing environ-mental health to prevent the manifestation of these psychogeopathological symptoms in the first place. Melanie Klein’s work on anal sadism is applied to mining and Karl Abraham’s work on oral sadism to pastoralism. Finally, Margaret Mahler’s and Jessica Benjamin’s work on psycho-symbiosis is drawn on to nurture bio- and psycho-symbiotic livelihoods in bioregional home habitats of the living earth in the symbiocene, the hoped-for age superseding the Anthropocene. Psychoanalytic Ecology demonstrates the power of psychoanalytic concepts and the pertinence of the work of several psychoanalytic thinkers for analysing a range of environmental issues and concerns. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental psychology, psychoanalysis and the environmental humanities.
This definitive work on the introduction of domestic animals to Australia begins with the first white settlement at Botany Bay. It explores the foundations of our wool and beef industries, examining the role of early leaders like Phillip, King, Macarthur and Bligh.The book considers the successful introduction of the horse, Australia's first live animal export, and goes on to explore the role of the acclimatisation societies, the development of the veterinary profession and the control and eradication of some of the major exotic and introduced diseases of sheep and cattle. The author, Dr Ian Parsonson, retired as Assistant Chief of the Australian Animal Health Laboratory at Geelong, Victoria, after a long career in veterinary practice and research. His areas of expertise include bacterial and viral diseases, pathology and microbiological laboratory safety. He is a committee member of the International Embryo Transfer Society and the Animal Gene Storage and Resource Centre of Australia.
