Cirrus@Austlit

'CAN full disclosure be fully rendered? The short answer is no. The longer, more engaging answer is that it is impossible to answer that question when the relationship with an author is embedded in one’s own experience. In fact, the measure of disclosure is indicated by the way gaps in a narrative are filled in with literary devices that hint at the emotional truth of the people in question. In this case, Francesca Rendle-Short and I share a connection in the fundamentalist Protestant history of Brisbane’s 1960s-1970s that cannot be boiled down to a single perspective.' (Author's introduction)

'JILL Hellyer's autobiography (1924-2012) provides plenty of “talking points” for a reviewer. Inter alia, it covers her crucial role in the fledgling Australian Society of Authors (ASA), her own writing, her dreadful marriage to an overbearing older man, her horrific struggles with one son's mental illness and another's physical handicap, the belated revelation of her daughter's sexual abuse, her years as a mental health activist, and her friendships. But only the most determined reader is likely to appreciate them. The book presents itself as a puzzle, as an obstacle course that perhaps mirrors Jill Hellyer's own life experiences. Consider the front cover, a posed photograph of the young Jill Hellyer, with the title Letters to Huldah over a subsidiary heading categorising the book as biography. Hmm, letters and biography, thinks the reader, who then finds it is not a biography of “Huldah.” On the back of the dustjacket along with any other editorial help, and without spelling it out, the vague blurb hints that the book is autobiography. The 120-word, prefatory “Author's note” (a reductive summary of the life of Huldah Sneddon, 1906-2006) yields the bare fact that Huldah was once Jill Hellyer's English teacher. ' (Author's introduction)

'SO questions the Locust Girl, Amedea, after her friend Beenabe’s rejoicing exclamation that she has learned to take love by providing sexual comfort to the Kingdom builders. Representing the converted likes of herself, Beenabe has to make compromises between her refuge in the Kingdoms and the cost that shelter demands, and between her cultivated loyalty to this new home and the numbing of her past memories. But love, as Amedea discovers through her friend’s sacrifice, can be taken without making it, and can be given without receiving it. Love is, indeed, a plague.' (Author's introduction)

'DREAMS of flight. A flight towards or a flight from? Dreams of hope or of despair? This rich but immediately accessible collection of short stories leaves it up to the reader to decide the answers. But the metaphor of flight is more intricate than the simple idea of birds allows, although there are many of them in these stories with different fates. Another underlying image is that of water in all its aspects. From sea, to lake, to stream, water can trap us or give us freedom, especially when it’s combined with air, such as the experiences of the young photographer in the story “Stalking the Light,” “She is here, now, in the impressions of the moment, with the solitary canoeist whose craft draws a long chevron on the rose-tinted surface of the water below; with the cohort of ibis silhouetted against the forget-me-not blue unveiled by dispersing cloud above; with the kingfishers and herons and magpies who frequent the early-morning river bank: here, now in the strengthening light.”' (Author's introduction)

'KAREN Lamb has produced an excellent piece of “life writing” in her biography of the Queensland author, Thea Astley. Astley, a successful Australian author by any standards, has contributed 16 published works and many articles to Australian literature, winning the Miles Franklin Award four times. Thea Astley was an All Hallows School girl from Brisbane, a graduate of The University of Queensland, and a Queensland school teacher for the first few years of her career, combining the roles of wife and mother, teacher, academic and prolific author, in what appeared to be a seamless fashion. Karen Lamb, in her carefully researched work, opens the door to the private life of Astley and allows the reader to follow her career and life journey, including the juggling of roles and commitments.' (Author's introduction)

'IT is twenty years this December since the renowned Australian poet Gwen Harwood died at the age of seventy-five. She was at the height of her fame and had confidently expected to live to an advanced age—or so she told various correspondents. To be diagnosed with terminal cancer at the beginning of 1995 was a blow. “I can’t remember the medical terminology but it was basically Good Night Sweetheart,” she wrote to a friend. “Oh well, shit eh? as they say in the Blessed City.” ' (Author's introduction)