'Bad parents often make good literature: the egotistical and controlling Sam Pollit in Christina Stead’s tour-de-force The Man Who Loved Children; the abusive father and alcoholic mother in Edward St Aubyn’s masterful trilogy Some Hope; and, in William Faulkner’s gothic novel, As I Lay Dying, the cowardly and manipulative Anse Bundren who, among his many misdeeds, forces his pregnant teenage daughter to forgo her savings for an abortion so he can buy a set of new false teeth and attract a second wife.' (Introduction)
'John Kinsella is best known for poetry that is often characterised as anti-pastoral: the ecological underpinnings, the rootedness in the wheat belt of Western Australia, the postmodern aesthetic awareness. Rather than the celebration of humanised nature, Kinsella’s poems deal with the exploitation of the land and its consequences as well as the often anti-romantic lives of those on the land. It’s a poetry of silos and heat, trail bikes, drought and death.' (Introduction)
'It’s not difficult to understand why the story of German zoologist Ernst Schafer might be attractive to a novelist. A doctoral student in ornithology, Schafer made a name for himself in the 1930s, travelling with American expeditions to Tibet and China.' (Introduction)
