Cirrus@Austlit

'Introducing the McDonagh sisters … a trio of extraordinary and ground-breaking filmmakers. Between 1926 and 1933, the mostly self-taught McDonagh sisters made four trail-blazing independent feature films in Sydney and Melbourne. Paulette, one of only five women film directors in the world, was behind the lens, writing and directing. Phyllis produced, art directed and conducted publicity. And Isabel, under her stage name Marie Lorraine, was in front of the camera, acting in main roles. Together, they transformed Australian cinema’s preoccupations with the outback and the bush – and what the sisters mocked as ‘haystack movies’ – into a thrilling, urban modernity.

'In Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters, Mandy Sayer tracks the sisters’ remarkable story, from their childhood as daughters of a respected Sydney surgeon, learning the art of filmmaking and their first feature film, Those Who Love (1926), an instant hit, to their controversial final film, Two Minutes Silence (1933).

'Although the trio didn’t set out deliberately to blaze a trail of feminism, their collective confidence and independence was striking at a time when there were few career options available to women.' (Publication summary)

'Today, roughly 100,000 Gypsies call Australia home, yet until now their experiences have been hidden from our history, and from our present. 

'Here, award-winning memoirist and novelist Mandy Sayer weaves together a wide-ranging and exuberant history of Gypsies in Australia. She begins with the roots of Romani culture, and traces the first Gypsy people to arrive in Australia, including James Squire, the colony's first brewer. She meets Gypsy families who live all over Australia, who share the stories of their ancestors and their own lives. 

'With her own nomadic early life and experiences as a street performer, Sayer brings unique insight into the lives of the people she meets, and a strong sense of their extraordinary history. She also demolishes some longstanding but baseless myths along the way. Her original and compelling book reveals a rich part of our history that few of us even know is there. ' (Introduction)

'Even though we'd grown up in vastly different cultures and countries, we'd both known poverty, domestic violence and the expectation that neither one of us would ever amount to anything. That was probably what united us more than anything: our shared defiance of that prediction.

'She tap-danced on street corners for people's small change. He was an out-of-work university teacher, poet and Vietnam vet. She was white and from Australia. He was black and from the Deep South. They met on Mardi Gras, New Orleans in 1985. She was twenty-two. He was nearly forty.

'They fell in love. They married. What happened next will thrill, move, perplex and enrage you. It will break your heart.

'The Poet's Wife tells the story of the ten years that Mandy Sayer and Yusef Komunyakaa spent together, first as lovers, then as husband and wife. During that time he became a famous poet, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the highest honour for poetry in the United States, and a university professor.

'At the same time, Mandy became a writer, winning the Vogel Prize for young Australian writers for her first novel, Mood Indigo. She is now an acclaimed author and journalist and has written two award-winning memoirs, Velocity and Dreamtime Alice. The Poet's Wife traces her life from the end of Dreamtime Alice, and again confirms Sayer's place as one of our most lyrical and most courageous writers - memoirist like no other.' (Publisher's blurb)