Cirrus@Austlit

'My dad, Ray, jabbed steroids into Beyonce's butt when she lost her voice the day of her stadium show. My dad jumped into Sydney Harbour to save my brand-new red Power Ranger toy. My dad made his own jam, muesli and sourdough bread. My dad protected me from cockroaches, but he never, ever killed them. My dad once covered for so many of my demerit points that he lost his own licence and had to ride a bicycle to work for a year. My dad tended a worm farm in the compost bins in our back garden.

'Blackly funny and frequently devastating, this memoir traverses family, death, hope, love, survival, compassion and the deep relationship we can develop with music throughout our lives when nothing else is enough. It's a Shame About Ray asks how we shape new identities from old tragedies - and whether the answers might be hiding in the bestselling record of 2001.

'Several lifetimes in the making, Jonathan Seidler has created a lyrical and original interrogation of men and memories, a tracklist of songs of innocence and experience that beautifully unpick a life lived to the full - and sometimes spilling over the lip.

'My dad ate the whole apple: core, pips and all.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

New Zealand-born producer Roger Mirams followed his earlier children's television programs The Terrific Adventures of the Terrible Ten and The Magic Boomerang with this ship-based adventure series, which, as Don Storey points out in his Classic Australian Television, was one of 'three Australian half-hour adventure series [that] were set on boats' during the first twenty years of Australian television.

Adventures of the Seaspray followed the adventurers of a widowed journalist who is raising his three children on a schooner in the South Pacific (aided by a Fijian crew member, Willyum).

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'The 26 half-hour stories have all the adventure material that children love - haunted islands, rescues, shipwrecked sailors, hidden treasure, smugglers and primitive tribes all filmed in exotic Pacific locations.'

Storey concurs with this analysis, and adds

Seaspray was notable for several achievements, apart from a high standard of production. It was filmed on location in an international setting; it was the first Australian television show to be filmed in colour since the 1955 series The Adventures of Long John Silver (made before Australia had television); it was the first co-production with an overseas company; and it had a Fijian native in a lead role, the first Australian series to give such prominence to a non-white person.