Cirrus@Austlit

'Many people struggle to maintain a healthy work-life balance. But what happens when you add a third component, such as writing, to the scales? For many readers, the public face of the writer that they encounter is in newspaper or radio interviews, at book signings in bookshops, or on panels at writers’ festivals. But what happens when the journalist walks away, when the radio transmission is silenced, when the bookshop is closed and all the people go home, when the festival is over? Island asked sociologist Ruth Quibell and philosopher Damon Young to explore the private face of the writers’ life, and the work-life-writing balance it entails' (Publication abstract)

'Recently Christopher Koch, one of Australia’s great novelists, died aged eighty-one. Author of eight novels, he won the Miles Franklin Award twice, for The Doubleman (1985) and Highways to a War (1995). His last novel, Lost Voices, was published in 2012. Tasmania, the place of his birth – and of his death – was an enduring presence in his novels, just as his novels will be an enduring presence in the literature of Tasmania and, indeed, of Australia. Here, Penny Cohen appraises this Tasmanian presence in Koch’s work.' (Publication abstract)

'Upstairs in the Battye Library in Perth in 2007, I sat in a darkened room squinting at a microfilm of the sloping copperplate in Captain James Mangles' letter books, which consisted of letters written to him on matters of botany between 1835 and 1845. Mangles was an amateur botanist who had retired from the British navy and lived near Regent's Park, London. One of his correspondents was Georgiana Molloy, who emigrated from Carlisle, England, to Augusta in south-west Western Australia, arriving in 1830. In 1836, Molloy, who knew Mangles' cousin Ellen Stirling, wife of the governor of Perth, received a letter and box of English seeds from Mangles, with the request that she return it to him filled with Australian seeds. Molloy protested, 'I fear you have bestowed your liberality on one whose chief pleasure is her Garden but who does not enter the lists as a florist, much less a Botanist', however she agreed to collect specimens when she had time. I had read extracts of Molloy's letters in a biography written by Alexandra Hasluck, Portrait with Background (1955), but this was the first time I had seen them in their entirety.' (Publication abstract)