Cirrus@Austlit

'Thirty years ago, wanting to probe deeper into the question of what it meant to make home in Tasmania, I enrolled to do my honours year at the University of Tasmania. During a discussion with the secretary of the History Department about my partially formed dissertation ideas, she urged me to read a thesis by a recent graduate whose work had greatly impressed her: one Richard Flanagan. When I read the thesis and the book that came out of it, the result can best be described as a soul shift. It was not so much the information I gained but that Flanagan’s approach to Tasmania’s past released an imaginative flow in my own research, allowing it to slowly metamorphose over fifteen years into my first book, Van Diemen’s Land. I share this anecdote, not just to highlight what was lost when universities sacked most of their administrative staff, but to show how seriously Richard Flanagan has always taken history.' (Introduction)          

'Richard Flanagan's new work, Toxic, is a startling exposé on Tasmania's salmon farming industry. From genetically altered 'frankenfish' to the use of dangerous chemicals to turn 'dead-grey flesh a marketable red', the industrial machinations uncovered in Flanagan's new work are stomach-churning. As James Boyce writes in his review, 'After the publication of Toxic, I doubt Tasmania will ever be the same again.'' (Production summary)

'The article looks at the issues surrounding the depiction of Indigenous Australians in the book "Dark Emu" by Bruce Pascoe. Topics discussed include the failure of Pascoe to ask the Indigenous people about the practices and lifestyles of older Aborigines according to a scholarly critique, call of Pascoe for change in farming practices and lifestyle choices in the book, and failure of Pascoe to provide carefully crafted, respectful and informed stories.' (Abstract)

'Inga Clendinnen was one of Australia’s greatest writers and thinkers. This selection covers the full scope of her writing, from Tiger’s Eye to Aztecs, from Boyer Lectures to essays on all manner of topics. The rich array is introduced by acclaimed historian James Boyce, who traces Clendinnen’s life and evolving thought. 

'Boyce writes that Clendinnen’s ‘ability to write serious history for a general readership was unrivalled in this country … Her writings are an enduring testament to the truth that while we might “live within the narrow moving band of time we call the present … the secret engine of our present is our past, with its plastic memories, its malleable moralities, its wreathing dreams of desirable futures”.’ ' (Publication summary)

'In a rush of remembrance that seemed longer than my own life, I recognised that was who we are, that there was a term for it, for our family-Aboriginal. At that point I began the long process of trying to understand what had happened that we had almost forgotten ourselves. Fugitive History: The Art of Julie Gough celebrates Gough's art practice, which has been central to her search for, and creation of, an identity for over twenty years. As an Aboriginal woman whose family from Tasmania had moved to Victoria and left behind connections to place and history, this search became as much about negotiating absence, distance, and lack, as discovery. This title includes essays by Brigita Ozolins, artist and senior lecturer at the Tasmanian College of the Arts; James Boyce, author of Born Bad and Van Diemen's Land, which won the Tasmanian Book Prize; and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Professorial Fellow and Chair of Global Art History in the Department of Art, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham. ' (Publication summary)

'The publication of Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers in 2003 gave Australia what the country desperately needed for the new millennium: a founding story in which the human beings who encountered each other in 1788 could finally become part of the national imagination.' (Introduction)

Extraced from Van Dieman's Land : A History, Black Inc., Melbourne 2008