Cirrus@Austlit

'A monumental and gripping story, Red Heaven is a glamorous tale of a child with two fascinating and domineering guardians, inspired by the author's own childhood.

'Red Heaven is the story of a child's journey to adulthood, his loss of those he loves and his fixing of them in memory. It begins in the late 1960s in Switzerland, as the unnamed narrator's ideas about life are being shaped by two compelling rival influences, the architects of his youth.

'These are his so-called aunts-imperious, strong-willed, ambitious-both determined to make the boy into their own heir, a believer in their values. In self-contained episodes, each set in an alpine grand hotel, we see one aunt and then the other seek to educate their protege by imparting their experiences.

'Serghiana, the 'red princess', is the daughter of a Soviet general, a producer of films and worshipper of art, a true believer. Ady, a former actress and singer, is a dilettante and cynic, Viennese, married to a great conductor- in her eyes, life is nothing but an affair of surfaces; truth and beauty are mere illusions.

'The aunts and all those in their orbit are exiles, without a home, at the mercy of outside political events. They strive to see what lies beyond the chance events and intersections of their lives. Their allegiances shift. Their stories deepen- gradually the child comes to understand the shadows in their past.

'Memory and nostalgia-the aunts' gifts to him, gifts of obligation-are the purest expression of love allowed them. These stories stay with the boy, guiding his beliefs and his path in life, until he can grow up and absorb the influences of the world around him, and become himself.

'Red Heaven is about the people who make us what we- how they come into our lives, instruct or affect us, then depart the stage. This fiction, with its affinity for the elusive beauties and sadnesses of the world, is Nicolas Rothwell's finest achievement.'  (Publication summary)

'A turbulent decade has gone by since the coming of the Northern Territory 'Emergency Response' (NTER), a policy revolution in the grand style, unveiled in Canberra on 21 June 2007 with high dramatic accents by the prime minister of the day, John Howard, and his keen-eyed aide-de-camp, Indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough. It became known at once as the 'Intervention' - a project to transform the remote communities of the North. It was designed to be at once rescue mission and remedy for a raft of troubles: the cure for alcoholism, child neglect and passive welfare dependency, a scheme for restoring bush Indigenous men and women to their better selves. High ambitions; heroicseeming dreams. In retrospect, it is plain enough that the Intervention failed; it failed absolutely, and it failed on its own terms, although, like most failures in Aboriginal policy, it lingers on, diluted, rebadged and refashioned, its key measures still obdurately in place. The reasons for this failure are multiple, and only some of them are well characterised in the debates still ticking over amidst the bureaucratic and academic circles that make remote Indigenous Australia and its well-being the focus of their professional lives. It is clear that the NTER brought chaos, upset and vastly increased levels of administrative surveillance and control in its wake, but much about the project's long-term impact, during the course of its various incarnations under three successive Commonwealth governments, remains mysterious to its architects. The NTER has gradually taken on the aspect of a colonial endeavour, achieving the precise opposite of its stated aims, for the very reason that colonial endeavours often go astray: they aim to co-opt, and persuade, but the overseers of these efforts at social engineering cannot sense the way they seem to those they aim to change.'  (Publication abstract)

'Quicksilver begins on a quiet day in contemplation of a lizard deep in the heart of the outback but quickly moves to the Russia of Tolstoy and Gorky, and on to other lands and times, bringing into play universal questions about the essential nature of the human condition.'

'Rothwell’s chief subject is always the inland: the mystic Kurangara cult that flourished in the Kimberley; the story of the Western Desert artists, their works and their eventual fate; the tracks across the wilderness of Colonel Warburton and George Grey; the bush dreams and intuitions of D. H. Lawrence and the landscape word-portraits by the great biographer of nature Eric Rolls.'

'In Quicksilver Rothwell masterfully takes us in search of the sacred through place and time, in an enchanting reverie of calm wondering.' (Source: Text Publishing website)

Western fascination with the north Kimberley coastline has endured since seafarers encountered it in the 17th century, writes Nicholas Rothwell.