Cirrus@Austlit

The first dual biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.

'Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Eora leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.

'Fullargar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire.

'To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.' (Publication summary)

'After my mother died, I brought home a tub of photos and documents she had collected. It was a Pandora's box. When I finally opened it, I discovered a photo of my father. I peered into his face, feeling the tide of many questions rushing into me. Why did you change so much? I wanted to ask. Why did you bring shame on our family and make me betray you three times? Memories of you as a violent man pushed aside my earliest memories of loving and admiring you. I trusted you. You were proud, playful and strong. You sang, danced and made your children laugh. Why did you stop being that man? How did you, a Polish enemy alien, have such an enduring hold on my German mother's affections and not on mine? Why did Mutti divorce you? Who were you really? Could I have been wrong about you all this time? I no longer wanted to live with the long legacy of shame. Surely there was more to the man who caused such turbulence in our family than I had come to believe. Could I, as an adult, get to understand him better - and maybe forgive him? Is it possible for a child to redeem a parent, and in turn be redeemed? I felt ready to probe the past for the missing pieces that could help me know my father better, to explore the wartime and migrant experiences that destroyed him and our family. It was time to reckon with that monolithic legacy of shame constructed by the official view of my father as 'mad and dangerous', to chip away at it, and uncover a deeper, more nuanced truth, to see and grasp the shape of it, to hold onto it. Memories persisted, demanding interrogation. I no longer wanted the authorities to have the last word on my father. And I needed to heal.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The moving and evocative story of Napier Waller’s masterpiece – the Hall of Memory – the spiritual heart of the Australian War Memorial.

'The one-armed Melbourne artist Napier Waller OBE CMG created the great Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Waller died in 1972 without knowing that 20 years later his greatest work would be the place for a tomb that would be central to Australia’s remembrance of war dead. The Glass Cricket Ball is a story of Waller’s life, the creation of a great artwork and the bringing home and re-burial of the remains of an Unknown Australian Soldier from a French World War I battleground cemetery. 

'Napier Waller was a casualty at the battle of Bullecourt. A watercolour artist on the Western Front should be out of his comfort zone when his wounds include the loss of his right painting arm. But Napier Waller’s answer was to become Australia’s greatest monumental artist – with his left hand.

'Waller and the war historian Charles Bean had a fine time deciding which words described the quintessential qualities of Australian fighting men and women in World War I. The words would be included at the foot of each of the fifteen windows of the Hall of Memory and would define fighting, social and personal qualities. The window defined as “ancestry” would include a sporting image and Waller chose to include a stained-glass cricket ball and stumps – a tradition of the Anzacs of World War I. (Publication summary)

'A different kind of nature writing, for a different kind of landscape.

'I went and sat alone where Jimmy has been lying. It is way down in the bush. The light is soft, the air and the earth are cool, and the smell is of leaves and the river. I cannot presume to know what he is doing when he lies here, but it seems that he is taking himself back to an ecology not wrought by the terror of the fires, not fuelled by our violence on the earth. He is letting another earth heal him. 

'Philosopher Danielle Celermajer’s story of Jimmy the pig caught the world’s attention during the Black Summer of 2019­­-20.' (Publication summary)

'Wryly humorous and scarifyingly honest, Coolamon Girl is a beautifully crafted memoir of a daughter terrified of her mother. Scarred by her mother's conservatism and palpable dislike of her body and her sexuality, Di escapes her fraught home life and the stultifying narrowness of her 1950s and 60s small country town. Feeling lost in the big outside world, she travels the bumpy journey into adulthood full of adolescent doubts and fears - how she looks, how others see her, how to navigate sex and love. And finally, she discovers what she values as a woman. Told with clarity and poignancy, painful scenes are rendered unflinchingly, yet the whole is suffused with humour and compassion. Di's coming-of-age is a triumph of recovery from betrayal and Coolamon Girl captures the glory of reaching for a bigger life and the power of the universal within the particular, as relevant today as when she lived it. ' (Publication summary)

'All around Australia, former WRANs and navy men regard the woman they know as Mrs Mac with a level of reverence usually reserved for saints. Yet today no-one has any idea of who she was and how she rescued Australia's communication systems in World War II.

'As you climbed the rickety stairs of an old woolshed at Sydney harbour in 1944, you would hear the thrum of clicks and buzzes. Rows of men and women in uniforms and headsets would be tapping away vigorously at small machines, under the careful watch of their young female trainers. Presiding over the cacophony was a tiny woman, known to everyone as 'Mrs Mac', one of Australia's wartime legends.

'A smart girl from a poor mining town who loved to play with her father's tools, Violet McKenzie became an electrical engineer, a pioneer of radio and a successful businesswoman. As the clouds of war gathered in the 1930s, she defied convention and trained young women in Morse code, foreseeing that their services would soon be sorely needed. Always a champion of women, she was instrumental in getting Australian women into the armed forces.

'Mrs Mac was adored by the thousands of young women and men she trained, and came to be respected by the defence forces and the public too for her vision and contribution to the war effort. David Dufty brings her story to life in this heartwarming and captivating biography.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.