'Henry George Lamond is no longer a household name, but he was once popular and widely known in Australia and overseas. An extremely prolific writer, he published fifteen books of fiction and non-fiction, and more than 900 essays and magazine articles in his lifetime. His essays and articles include writing in a wide range of subjects and genres, from romantic fiction to practical agricultural advice. He was perhaps best known for his animal-based books, including Horns and Hooves (1931), An Aviary on the Plains (1934a), Dingo (1945), Brindle Royalist (1946) and Big Red (1953a). These titles were popular in the United States, England and Australia. Some were translated into other languages, including German and French, and they even formed part of school curricula. His tales are set in the Australian landscape and are ‘littered with bush colloquialisms’ (Bonnin 2000).' (Publication abstract)
'Cultural narratives also function as lifelines in the work of another Queensland Indigenous woman writer, Vivienne Cleven. Cleven's novel, Bitin’ Back (2001), begins when Mavis Dooley's son, Nevil, announces that he is no longer Nevil, but the writer Jean Rhys. Although Nevil eventually reveals that he has simply been acting as a woman in order to understand the protagonist of the novel he is writing, his choice of Rhys in particular is significant. Nevil selected Jean Rhys as a signifier of his female role because, he explains:
She's my favourite author; she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea [1966]. She was ahead of her time; she wrote about society's underdogs; about rejection and the madness of isolation. I know it sounds all crazy to you, Ma, but this is about who I am . . . [A] lot of people would never understand me and they wouldn't want to. (2001: 184)' (Publication abstract)
'By the time poet David Malouf wrote Johnno (1976), his first work of prose fiction, he was in his late thirties and living in the Renaissance city of Florence. Both European Florence and antipodean Brisbane mirror and enfold the novel's eponymous hero, Johnno, and his narrator-creator, Dante. The Florentine poet, and by extension his medieval trappings, resonate throughout a tale about growing up in a frontier town far removed from the cosmopolitan centres of the Northern Hemisphere. This Italian connection can be explored further by considering Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1997) alongside Johnno. The depiction of Venice in Calvino's novel can operate as a point of contrast and comparison to the river city of Brisbane, conjured by Malouf's Dante. (Publication abstract)
