Cirrus@Austlit

'A must-read biography of an enigmatic personality who helped shape early Melbourne

'Madame Brussels, the most legendary brothel keeper in nineteenth-century Melbourne, is still remembered and celebrated today. But until now, little has been known about Caroline Hodgson, the woman behind the alter ego.

'Born in Prussia to a working-class family, Caroline arrived in Melbourne in 1871. Left alone when her police-officer husband was sent to work in remote Victoria, she turned her hand to running brothels. Before long, she had proved herself brilliantly entrepreneurial: her principal establishment was a stone's throw from Parliament House, lavishly furnished and catered to Melbourne's ruling classes.

'Caroline rode Melbourne's boom in the 1880s, weathered the storm of the depression years in the 1890s and suffered in the moral panic of the 1900s. Her death in 1908 signified the end of one kind of Melbourne and the beginning of another: in terms of prostitution, the city went from tolerance to complete prohibition in her lifetime.

'Drawing on extensive research, author and historian Barbara Minchinton deftly pieces together Madame Brussels' story and guides readers on a journey through a fascinating, colourful period in Melbourne's history. This is a major biography of an Australian icon.' (Publication summary)

'One of Australia's finest essayists, the first to cut through 'the great Australian silence' to convey the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture to settler Australians

'The most literate and persuasive of all contributions on Australia's Indigenous people' -Marcia Langton

'W.E.H. Stanner's words changed Australia. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures he exposed a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale', regarding the fate of First Nations people, for which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. And in his essay 'Durmugam' he provided an unforgettable portrait of a warrior's attempt to hold back cultural change.

'The pieces collected here span Stanner's career as well as the history of Australian race relations. They reveal the extraordinary scholarship, humanity and vision of one of Australia's finest essayists. Stanner's writings remain relevant in a time of reckoning with white Australia's injustices against Aboriginal people and the path to reconciliation.

'With an introduction by Robert Manne' (Publication summary)

'The fascinating biography of a brilliant man who captured the nation’s imagination and boldly showed Australians who we were and how we could change

'In the 1960s, Donald Horne offered Australians a compelling reinterpretation of the Menzies years as a period of social and political inertia and mediocrity. His book The Lucky Country was profoundly influential and, without doubt, one of the most significant shots ever fired in Australia’s endless culture war.

'Ryan Cropp’s landmark biography positions Horne as an antipodean Orwell, a lively, independent and distinct literary voice ‘searching for the temper of the people, accepting it, and moving on from there’. Through the eyes – and unforgettable words – of this preternaturally observant and articulate man, we see a recognisable modern Australia take shape.' (Publication summary)

'In June 1926, a posse of police officers and white civilians murdered at least twenty Oombulgurri people at Forrest River in the Kimberley. After the massacre, a conspiracy of silence descended. Witnesses vanished. Charges against two of the officers were dropped for insufficient evidence.

'One of the massacre's perpetrators was Bernard O'Leary, a former soldier whose land holding was known as 'the underworld'. At the 1927 Royal Commission into the killings, O'Leary was portrayed by his lawyer as a simple honest backwoodsman who was framed. In this powerful account, Kate Auty argues that O'Leary was in fact 'vicious, brazen and a bullshitter', with 'a propensity for brutality'. Although never charged, he played a leading role in the murders, and his duplicitous testimony thwarted the commission's work. In electric prose, Auty depicts O'Leary as a merciless killer, while the apparatus that concealed his crimes is portrayed with great realism and clarity. Driven by both forensic and moral judgement, the book exposes the injustices embedded in Australian settlement history, and the culture of denial that has prevented truth-telling in this country.' (Publication summary)

'Harold Holt was a pivotal prime minister in Australian history. Ambitious, modern and telegenic, he helped bring his party and nation into the late twentieth century, following the Menzies years. Nowhere was Holt’s legacy more significant than in the 1967 referendum, and in helping to end the White Australia policy. At the same time, as the Vietnam War raged, Holt dramatically increased Australian troops, telling President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 that Australia was ‘all the way with LBJ’.

'In this evocative, intimate and deeply researched biography, Ross Walker captures the worlds in which Holt moved and the people who were close to him. He reveals a popular, gentle, yet at times self-destructive man, whose tendency to always go one step further would have fatal consequences. This is a strikingly original portrait of Australia’s seventeenth prime minister.'  (Publication summary)

'Sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne were judged morally corrupt by the respectable world around them. But theirs was a thriving trade, with links to the police and political leaders of the day, and the leading brothels were usually managed by women.

'While today a popular bar and a city lane are famously named after Madame Brussels, the identities of the other ‘flash madams’, the ‘dressed girls’ who worked for them and the hundreds of women who solicited on the streets of the Little Lon district of Melbourne are not remembered.

'Who were they? What did their daily lives look like? What became of them? Drawing on the findings of recent archaeological excavations, rare archival material and family records, historian Barbara Minchinton brings the fascinating world of Little Lon to life.''

Source : publisher's blurb

'Inga Clendinnen was one of Australia’s greatest writers and thinkers. This selection covers the full scope of her writing, from Tiger’s Eye to Aztecs, from Boyer Lectures to essays on all manner of topics. The rich array is introduced by acclaimed historian James Boyce, who traces Clendinnen’s life and evolving thought. 

'Boyce writes that Clendinnen’s ‘ability to write serious history for a general readership was unrivalled in this country … Her writings are an enduring testament to the truth that while we might “live within the narrow moving band of time we call the present … the secret engine of our present is our past, with its plastic memories, its malleable moralities, its wreathing dreams of desirable futures”.’ ' (Publication summary)

'George Seddon, one of Australia’s most revered environmental scholars, was renowned for championing ‘a sense of place’. He was a connoisseur of landscapes – from the rugged Snowy River Mountains to the humble domestic backyard – who explored the contested relationship between metropolitan suburbs, agricultural hinterlands and wilderness areas, and the dynamics of everything from resource extraction to tending our own gardens. He sought to radically rethink our relationship with nature.

'Seddon’s work anticipated the new fields of urban planning, landscape architecture, environmental conservation, but he was also an irrepressible polymath. A professor in four distinct disciplines – English, geology, the history and philosophy of science, and environmental sciences – he also carved out a career in community, regional and government consultation, wrote practical guides to gardening, heritage walks and house restoration, and the first Australian suburban history.

'Collected here are highlights of Seddon’s groundbreaking writing, selected and edited by Andrea Gaynor, a leading scholar of environmental history, and with a lively introduction from renowned historian Tom Griffiths.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A public intellectual known for his deeply humane approach to social, economic and urban issues, Hugh Stretton was an Australian original.

'His Political Sciences was described by The Times Literary Supplement as 'a work of near genius'. His groundbreaking Ideas for Australian Cities became the manifesto for a generation awakening to the distinctive features of our cities and suburbs.

'In this selection, leading historian Graeme Davison includes highlights from these and other published and unpublished works, showcasing Stretton's bravura intellectual style, grounded analysis, literary flair and the remarkable range of his thinking on history, politics, urban planning, and progressive social and economic development. Davison also provides a substantial and valuable introduction, setting the work in context.

'Stretton saw the dangers of the neoliberal orthodoxy that took hold in the Anglophone world from the early 1980s. With subtlety, imagination and rigour, his work offers an alternative vision of a good and fair society.' (Publication summary)

'During the nineteenth century many European settlers, government officials and missionaries documented their obervations of the Indigenous people's of Victoria they were displacing. This selection of over 700 extracts from a wide variety of these sources provide glimpses into a rich and complex world. This reader is a convenient entry point into this disparate literature and will be of use to anyone with an interest in Victorian ethnography and history and of particular value to teachers, students and Aboriginal communities.' (Source: TROVE)

'One of Australia’s leading thinkers for close to fifty years, Donald Horne was probably the best Australian non-fiction writer of his generation.

'This definitive collection of Horne’s writing, thoughtfully selected by his son, Nick, tells the story of his life and intellectual development. From a position of doubting whether change was possible, he eventually became a proponent of the sensible reform necessary for Australia to prosper in a changing world.

'Horne made the case for a more open, modern, intelligent Australia, most famously in his seminal book The Lucky Country. Selections from this work sit alongside pithy reflections on Australian history and culture, as well as vivid autobiographical writing.

'With an introduction by Nick Horne and a biographical essay by Glyn Davis , this important book honours and illuminates the man who helped the nation understand itself.' (Publication summary)

'An award-winning biography of one of the greats.

'Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in 2014.

'Writing in three languages – French, Chinese and English – he played an important political role in revealing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution. His writing on China and on varied literary and cultural topics appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and the Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People’s Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.

'This substantial biography – recently published by Gallimard in France to wide acclaim and winning an award from the Académie Francaise – draws on extensive correspondence with Ryckmans, as well as his unpublished writings. It has been translated by an internationally renowned French translator Julie Rose (based in Sydney).' (Publication summary)