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'From the time of the early Enlightenment, the British upper classes sent their sons on the Grand Tour, a sort of moving finishing school through the great centres of classical and Renaissance Europe. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.” Young men from other northern principalities also hit the trail, which led south, often through France, to the rolling landscapes and art treasures of Italy: the epitome of civilisation.' (Introduction)
'Peter Polites’s impressive debut novel Down the Hume charts similar terrain to Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded. It further mines the struggles of ethnic and sexual identity in modern Australia, only this time the protagonist is on a far more precarious path, headed for self-destruction.' (Introduction)
'The title of Sue Woolfe’s new collection of stories sounds like a petulant query from a confused teenager, uttered with a raised eyebrow. But in the book it remains a rhetorical question, mulled over but never asked.' (Introduction)
