Cirrus@Austlit

'Picnic at Hanging Rock, the 1975 film directed by Peter Weir, has achieved iconic status in Australian cinema, while the story on which it is based has also yielded a television drama series, a ballet, plays, and a musical. Indeed, the fiftieth anniversary of the film is being marked by the Sydney Theatre Company’s revival of Tom Wright’s modern adaptation. The story enjoying this long and varied life was originally published as a mystery novel in 1967. Yet the author of that story, Joan Lindsay (1896-1984), is herself something of a mystery. Aged seventy-one at the time of her novel’s publication and scarcely known as a writer, she has received little recognition since.' (Introduction)

'Australian liberals and the Liberal Party were once thought laggards in attending to their own history in comparison with the Labor Party. Even so, Robert Menzies’ life and career had been well documented, with multiple biographies and memoirs, including Allan Martin’s masterful two-volume biography (1993-99) and Judith Brett’s influential analysis of Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ speech as a key to understanding the ‘public life’ (1992). More recently, liberal political history has become a cottage industry.' (Introduction)

'On a Tuesday morning in April 1954, Australians awoke to sensational headlines. The wife of Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov, who had recently sought asylum in Australia, was dragged aboard an aircraft in Sydney, as an impassioned, noisy crowd of a thousand tried to prevent her departure. Whether you were a dock worker or a stockbroker, your morning newspaper carried some version of what has become the Petrov Affair’s most iconic image: Evdokia Petrova, shoeless and eyes streaming, flanked by two bulky Soviet couriers, marching her across the tarmac. By all appearances, a terrified Russian woman was dragged, unwillingly, towards a dire fate in the Soviet Union.' (Introduction)

'Ian Barker was a relative rarity among barristers in that he never used two words when one would suffice. He died in 2021 and is now the subject of a biography by Stephen Walmsley, himself a barrister and then a judge – since retired – of the NSW District Court. This is an unusual exercise in Australia, where judicial biography is a sparse species and the lives of other lawyers are seldom chronicled.' (Introduction)

'Adrian is a professor at a top Australian university and his specialty is death. He lectures on it, writes books on it. Both his parents died when he was a child, one by suicide, but those are long-forgotten events that have nothing to do with his life’s work.' (Introduction)

'The diaries of Fred Williams (1927-82) invite the inevitable, unfair, but instructive comparison with those of Donald Friend; unlike the latter, they are not a masterpiece of witty and incisive prose, filled with insightful and indiscreet comments about contemporaries, the life of the artist, and the social and cultural world of the author’s time. They are plainly written observations on the day-to-day life of a hard-working painter, with an emphasis on the practical; it would be wrong to describe them as modest or self-effacing, for manifestly they were not written with any thought of publication. Friend, steeped in the culture of past centuries, was well aware of composing a literary work like the great diarists of earlier generations; Williams was jotting down, especially at the outset, largely professional notes in a standard page-to-a-day business diary.' (Introduction)

'John Tregenza’s 1963 study of Australian Little Magazines noted that neither Meanjin nor its near-contemporary Southerly could be characterised as ‘little’, unlike their predecessors and earlier selves. No longer solely dependent on subscription income from a small local band of devotees, both had attracted a wide following. Indeed on transferring his journal from Brisbane to the University of Melbourne in 1945, Meanjin’s Clem Christesen claimed that it had become ‘a well-established quarterly ... with a circulation of 4,000 copies per issue’.' (Introduction)

'Reading fiction is an intimate business. For ten, fifteen, twenty hours of glorious solitude, you engage with ideas, events, and, most especially, characters located in periods and places not your own. The connection with fictional characters can sometimes feel more real and enduring than relationships with real people. For a few years in my youth, I was so deeply attached to the young Hurtle Duffield in Patrick White’s The Vivisector that I wrote a short story in which Hurtle and I lived with Patrick White and Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury.' (Introduction)

'In this much-delayed final instalment of David Stratton’s trilogy on Australian cinema, the use of the word ‘ultimate’ in the book’s subtitle is no hyperbole. Stratton has been a film critic, television presenter, historian, and lecturer for sixty years, and during that time he has been assiduously recording information on the countless home-grown films he has seen. His knowledge of the local film industry is formidable and possibly peerless.' (Introduction)

'In Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’' (Introduction)

'It is worth noting that Jennifer Maiden, along with the present reviewer, seems to be one of the few Australian poets born in the 1940s who is still writing. Each of us has to be careful now (as Peter Goldsworthy wrote long ago) that we are not ‘Carving this same face / out of soap, each morning / slightly less perfectly’.' (Introduction) 

'For a creature born to life as a small songbird, days and nights can be treacherous. At any moment, a goshawk, a cat, or a goanna may be lurking, waiting to turn the songbird into supper. So these pretty little prey objects – scrubwrens and lorikeets and honeyeaters and the like – have developed an astute group behaviour. One bird spots the predator and issues an alarm call. Others hear it and zip out from behind branch and leaf to surround the threat, all of them twitting and hissing and flitting about, a mixed-species hullabaloo that together harasses the predator into pitiful retreat. This behaviour, known as a ‘mobbing flock’, is an evolutionary survival response. It is beautiful in its ingenuity, and the conviction it displays in the power of the collective. It is, to draw a metaphor from the literary ecosystem, an anthological act, a communal relay of meaning born of a shared inner urgency.' (Introduction)

'For much of the nineteenth century, John Gould (1804-81) was known internationally as ‘the bird man’. His fame derived from two main sources: first, as the author and publisher of a series of sumptuous, folio-sized books featuring beautiful, hand-coloured lithographs of birds from particular regions or spectacular bird families; secondly, by using his position as an ornithologist at the Zoological Society of London to amass an unequalled collection of stuffed birds to use as reference material. Such was his fame that collectors and natural scientists from Charles Darwin down sought his advice about species identities and relationships. In a local context, Gould is rightfully regarded as a giant of Australian ornithology. He described and named over 400 species of birds and mammals collected in Australia.' (Introduction)