Cirrus@Austlit

'Outcasts, Outlaws and Why Ned Kelly Yearned for China

'This story begins in Guangzhou China with the commencement of the Second Opium war. After the British bombardment of their home and city, two teenagers, a brother and younger sister, are sent by their parents to Tsin Chin Shan, the New Gold Mountain, in the colony of Victoria. As Chinese, the siblings and their compatriots are outsiders in the goldfields. They are on the margins of colonial society, as are the poor Irish settlers with whom they find they have interests in common. Their interaction with the notorious Kelly Gang becomes a dangerous political alliance …' (Publication summary)

'Alannah Coleman was admired as a free spirit and loved by many for her creative energy and physical beauty. She was part of a bohemian enclave in Australia and most significantly in postwar London where as a gallery director and curator she cultivated and captivated artists and literary figures such as Arthur Boyd, Charles Bush, Alister Kershaw, Sidney Nolan, Elizabeth Paterson, Albert Tucker and Phyllis Waterhouse. She tirelessly promoted Australian art and was a central figure in the sixties London art scene. In this biography, Simon Pierse reveals the fascinating and turbulent life of a neglected figure in British and Australian post-war art.' (Publication summary)

'Kingsley (Cat) Fisher is an Australian woman, born at the beginning of the 20th century, with a madness for literature. When she is injured in a terrible accident while reading, Cat finds that her powers as a reader are almost supernaturally enhanced. Over the next hundred years, her life is entwined with the lives and legends of the greatest writers of the time – James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, Patrick White and a host of others. Cat is their secret confidante, first reader and muse; the hidden constant in their very different literary quests. And for one of them she becomes much more, when a question is asked which only Cat can answer. Cat’s adventures take her around the world and back again in an epic tale of imagination, eccentricity and Promethean struggle.' (Publication summary)