'In the past month or so, the Australian feminist movement has suffered multiple setbacks.
'The proposed federal budget would leave single mothers, women over 50 and women already financially marginalised living with even fewer resources. In Geoffrey Rush’s successful defamation case against The Daily Telegraph, the judge concluded the main defence witness, actress Eryn Jean Norvill, was at times “prone to exaggeration and embellishment”.'(Introduction)
'A friend of mine noted just before the Australian premiere screening of the new romantic comedy Top End Weddingthat no film with the word “wedding” in the title has ever flopped at the box office. That’s good news for this amiable, uneven, basically sweet and ultimately culturally rich movie from director Wayne Blair.' (Introduction)
'Whose stories get to be told? An Unconventional Wife, Mary Hoban’s elegant biography of Julia Sorrell Arnold, who was born in Tasmania in 1826 and died in England 61 years later, challenges traditional notions of biography, examining a woman other writers might have ignored.' (Introduction)
'It has been commonplace to equate poverty with moral weakness, although it is a mistake to do so. For Jenny in Cornwall in 1783, the death of her father is a tragedy from which the family may never recover. History books are littered with families gone to ruin at the death of the chief breadwinner.' (Introduction)
'Andrea Goldsmith is a distinguished and prolific Australian writer. To review her new novel, Invented Lives, I returned to a review I did of her 2009 novel Reunion, to remind myself of what I’d said. In doing so, I noticed structural similarities between the two, and also to her award-winning 2015 novel The Memory Trap.'(Introduction)
'Mark Brandi’s 2017 novel Wimmera was one of the most impressive debut Australian crime novels of recent years. A tautly constructed exploration of the corrosive effects of masculinity, it won the British Crime Writers Association’s Debut Dagger, was named the best debut at the Australian Indie Book Awards, and was shortlisted for several other accolades.' (Introduction)
'Ben Elton’s last two novels saw him harking back to the past, playing it straight in Holocaust drama Two Brothers and serving up thrills in mind-bending adventure Time and Time Again. In earlier novels he took his readers the other way, into all-too-real, environmentally unfriendly dystopian futures.'(Introduction)
