Cirrus@Austlit

'This book introduces us to a little known artist, playwright and poet who began her career as a commercial artist in Sydney and who settled into a creative life in Ipswich in the 1950s and 1960s. This beautifully produced volume has been compiled and edited by Joanne Holliman from the archive at the Fryer Library. It has been organised around the successive stages of Helen’s artistic development and is replete with photographs, colour plates and other illustrations that show how rich and various Helen’s creative life was.' (Introduction)

'According to Judith Wright, John Blight's best poems were about the sea. From the 1940s, when he lived around the Sunshine Coast, he wrote about the rhythms of life by the sea and about human relationships with the more than human world. In the 1960s, he published 180 sonnets in two volumes, A Beachcomber's Diary and My Beachcombing Days. The sonnet form, he said, cut him down to size. This paper considers Blight's work and its engagement with the littoral zone: the seascapes and ecology of the Sunshine Coast. It attempts to hear the sea's voices — muffled, indistinct — and to illuminate Blight's ideas about its alien nature.' (Abstract)

'Peter Roennfeldt’s study of the musician Henrietta Willmore might have been called The Fortunes of Henrietta Percival because, like Henry Handel Richardson’s trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, it is a migrant story. Henrietta Percival came to Brisbane in 1864 as the wife of Alfred Mallalieu and, as their family grew, Henrietta established herself as a teacher and the ‘most accomplished female pianist and organist to have resided in colonial Brisbane’ (2015: vi). While the physician Mahony initially prospers in Australia, but ultimately succumbs to madness, Henrietta (who reinvents herself as Madame Mallalieu) is more resilient. She overcomes personal sorrow following the death of her daughter, survives the disappearance of two husbands and leaves an important cultural legacy.' (Introduction)

'This essay describes the place of reading in the life of Irene Longman (1877-1962), the first woman elected to the Queensland parliament. It shows how Longman valued reading as a practice that enriched personal life, fostered civic virtue and defined a realm of citizenship for newly enfranchised women. Its profile of Longman's public career highlights the connection between reading and rhetoric, the arts of persuasion and liberal democracy. It also draws attention to the importance of associational life in promoting women's public participation.' (Author's introduction)