Cirrus@Austlit

'Henry Kendall was once regarded as Australia's finest poet, compared favourably with Wordsworth. His poetry was romantic, sentimental in its celebration of the Australian bush he loved. But he was more Henry Lawson than John Keats: a self-pitying wife deserter, cadger and drunkard. And it ran in the family.

'From 1859, Kendall published prolifically in newspapers and periodicals. But he struggled to support a wife and children through poems and articles, his first poetry book was a financial failure (though critically acclaimed) and his brother and sister contributed to his financial troubles.

'Often in debt and on the precipice of bankruptcy, Kendall suffered from poverty, ill health and drunkenness. In 1870, he was charged with forging a cheque, and found not guilty on grounds of insanity; two years later, he spent time in an insane asylum. But from 1876, he began to rebuild his life and career, and in 1880 his collection Songs from the Mountain was an outstanding success.

'In this intriguing work of literary investigation, celebrated author and historian Adrian Mitchell delves deep into Kendall's storied life and uncovers a dark past that casts new shadows on his legacy. He discovers that this habitually self-effacing poet had good reason to keep himself and his family out of the limelight. This is the true story of Henry Kendall, his parents and his grandparents - and he had every reason to dread it being made public.' (Publication summary)

'It should have been a paradise, but paradise is what you lose, it is what you might have had.

'An elderly woman who has lived for many years on a tropical island off the Queensland coast with her beachcomber husband waits for help from the mainland. For three harrowing days, alone. He has died, his body lies in their cabin just up from the beach, and while she awaits help she reviews her reclusive life there, of nearly 25 years with him. She is a woman with a glint in her mind's eye.

'The Beachcomber's Wife draws upon the published writings of E.J. Banfield, who lived an isolated life with his wife Bertha on Dunk Island through the first decades of the twentieth century. He made very little reference to her in his work (Confessions of a Beachcomber and others). This account imagines what it might have been like from her point of view. It follows Banfield's practice, of fact cemented with fiction.'

'There were likely to be deserts enough for Goliath to feel quite at home, he said. But that gave rise to a puzzle as to why we would want to go exploring there. Never mind. My task was to record what we saw.

'By his training as a profilist - a silhouette painter - Ethan Dibble has learned to take a sidelong view of life. When he arrives in early colonial South Australia he has no idea of what to expect; but with his knack for observation and detachment, and a wry sense of humour, he finds that the variety of activity and events provides colour in plenty. There is no black and white here. First Adelaide, then the Victorian goldfields, then Sydney and Melbourne attract his wandering attentiveness.

'In The Profilist, Adrian Mitchell paints a compelling picture of the early years of the Australian colonies, in the imagined voice of the artist Samuel Thomas Gill - or someone very like him.'

'Plein Airs and Graces examines the extraordinary life of George Collingridge de Tourcey, a landscape painter of the late nineteenth century, just ahead of the Australian impressionists. When he emigrated from France to Australia he grew passionate about the possibilities of his new country, and worked tirelessly to contribute to it - not least for his Discovery of Australia (1895), in which on the evidence of ancient maps he argued controversially for Portuguese and Hispanic pre-discovery of Australia. [Source: Trove]

'William Dampier, the 'devil's mariner' as he has been called, a far voyager and traveller extraordinaire, lived in an era when, more truly than in other periods of history, the past was being put behind the present, and everything was new - a new world discovered by the first stirrings of the new science, under a new political and economic formation.

Dampier's Monkey examines the late-17th century ways of comprehending an expanding world by re-evaluating the travel narratives of the buccaneer William Dampier. Included in this book is Dampier's journal of his voyage in the South Seas from 1681 to 1691, complete with his annotations and illustrations, published here for the first time. ' (Wakefield Press website)