Cirrus@Austlit

'Marion Halligan, who died on February 19 at the age of 83, was one of Australia’s finest authors. She has more than 20 books to her credit, including novels, short story collections and non-fiction. Her novels are compulsively readable and full of ideas.' 

'Born at the end of the Age of Enlightenment and growing up as Romanticism took hold of European culture, Matthew Flinders was the embodiment of these seemingly irreconcilable movements. His achievements as a navigator and leader are impressive, but he was much more than an action hero, idolised by generations of admirers.

'In Matthew Flinders: The Man behind the Map Gillian Dooley looks to the primary sources to discover Flinders as a friend; a son, a brother, a father and a husband; as a writer, a researcher, a reader, and a musician - and above all as a romantic scientist.' (Publication summary)

'Brian Medlin (1927-2004) - philosopher, activist, socialist, bushman, environmentalist, poet and author of short stories - wrote much more than he published during his lifetime.

'This collection includes five of his essays, dealing with how to stay sane and constructive in the face of environmental crisis, with the nature of philosophy and the contemporary university, and with the very meaning of life and death. They are as relevant and urgent now as when he wrote them 30 years ago.

'The essays are complemented by a selection of his poetry and by four of the short stories he wrote under the pseudonym Timothy Tregonning, only two of which have been previously published. Set in the early 20th century, the stories draw us into the mixed fortunes of a working class family in South Australia's mid north. Medlin's unique voice, humane, witty and vigorous, leaps off every page.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Professor Joost Daalder taught in the English Department at Flinders University from 1976 until his retirement in 2001, mostly in the area of English Renaissance literature. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Otago (New Zealand) from 1966 to 1976. He has an impressive list of publications, including several scholarly editions of Renaissance literary texts and many journal articles, book chapters, and reviews.  
'Joost was born in the Netherlands in 1939, and studied at Amsterdam University and Edinburgh University before moving to New Zealand with his wife Truus in 1966. Joost and Truus have an interest in collecting fine arts, and in 2017 donated the Daalder Contemporary Jewellery Collection to the Art Gallery of South Australia. They also often lend art objects to other institutions for exhibitions. Truus is known for her books on the visual arts, notably her Ethnic Jewellery and Adornment (2009).
'I first knew Joost as a lecturer when I was studying Honours in English in the mid-1990s – he was an inspiring teacher of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Since then we have become friends and colleagues and it seems fitting to mark his 80th birthday with an in-depth conversation about his professional career. The interview was conducted via email in September and October 2019.' (Publication abstract)

'Sean Williams is a South Australian author who has published more than 50 books and well over 100 short stories for adults, young adults and children. Most of his work is science fiction or fantasy, and he has created several series, including Twinmaker (3 volumes) and The Books of the Change (10 volumes). He often co-authors with writers such as Garth Nix and Shane Dix. Sean is a multiple recipient of both the Ditmar and Aurealis Awards for science fiction and has appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list.
'I got to know Sean when he joined the staff of the English and Creative Writing department at Flinders University in 2019. I was intrigued to hear about Impossible Music (2019), a novel about a young musician who suddenly loses his hearing, and I read it with great enjoyment as soon as I could get my hands on it. When I heard him say in a public conversation that he read Jane Austen for inspiration when writing a realist novel (a new genre for him) I approached him and suggested we talk. I hurriedly read a very small fraction of his other output – the first novels in the Twinmaker and Change series, and Magic Dirt, a book of short stories – in preparation, and we met in his office in December 2019.' (Publication abstract)

'Steven Carroll is the author of twelve novels, including two series; one based around his family background in Glenroy in suburban Melbourne, and the other inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

'I have admired Steven’s work ever since I reviewed The Time We Have Taken, his 2007 Miles Franklin Award winning novel, for the very first issue of Transnational Literature. This was the third of the ‘Glenroy’ novels – there are now six in that series, the latest being The Year of the Beast (2019), based on the experiences of his grandmother in Melbourne in 1917.

'Recently, when catching up on some long-overdue reading, I picked up A World of Other People (2013), the second of the Eliot novels, to discover that, although it is never made explicit in the book, the heroine is a reinvented version of another of my favourite writers, Iris Murdoch. I immediately decided it was time to travel to Melbourne (on the Overland train, which Steven’s father used to drive) to interview him.

'We met in late January 2019 in bustling Lygon Street, Carlton, where it was too noisy to record our conversation. We found a quiet, shady table nearby on the Melbourne University campus and talked for an hour, till the heat drove us back to Lygon Street to continue chatting over a cup of tea.'(Introduction)

'The European maritime explorers who first visited the bays and beaches of Australia brought with them diverse assumptions about the inhabitants of the country, most of them based on sketchy or non-existent knowledge, contemporary theories like the idea of the noble savage, and an automatic belief in the superiority of European civilisation. Mutual misunderstanding was almost universal, whether it resulted in violence or apparently friendly transactions.

'Written for a general audience, The First Wave brings together a variety of contributions from thought-provoking writers, including both original research and creative work. Our contributors explore the dynamics of these early encounters, from Indigenous cosmological perspectives and European history of ideas, from representations in art and literature to the role of animals, food and fire in mediating first contact encounters, and Indigenous agency in exploration and shipwrecks.

'The First Wave includes poetry by Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, fiction by Miles Franklin award-winning Noongar author Kim Scott and Danielle Clode, and an account of the arrival of Christian missionaries in the Torres Strait Islands by Torres Strait political leader George Mye.' (Publication summary)

'A small bay is a cove, and so is a man, according to old-fashioned slang. The Coves takes advantage of this coincidence: it’s a story about a gang of men that rules ‘Sydney Cove’ in the mid-nineteenth century. But this is not the familiar Sydney Cove in New South Wales. There is another one across the Pacific in San Francisco, where arrivals from Australia, ‘pioneers in … viciousness and depravity’, were said to commit ‘atrocious crimes’, according to the novel’s epigraph from Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast (1933).'  (Introduction)

'And so I patch it together … I take the liberty of seeking not only an explanation but a connection between what at first might appear to be disparate ingredients.’ The narrator of Gregory Day’s new novel, A Sand Archive, takes many liberties. Enigmatic in various ways, apparently solitary, nameless, and ungendered, this character is nevertheless full of fascinated admiration and affection for an older man who is virtually a stranger, and candid about the feelings and impulses that compel the creation of an intimate account of his life and career. The patchwork is composed of clues found in an obscure publication titled The Great Ocean Road: Dune stabilisation and other engineering difficulties by FB Herschell, along with an archive in ‘the small prime ministerial library at the university on the edge of the water’ in Geelong.' (Introduction)

''Mrs M’ is the second wife of Lachlan Macquarie, governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. Luke Slattery explains in his Author’s Note the impulse behind his novel – Elizabeth Macquarie’s voice coming to him, romantically, in a dream. It was not quite unprompted. He had been visiting her home territory in the Hebrides, having already written a short book about the Macquaries’ last years in New South Wales (The First Dismissal [2014]). But this book is different; and it is Slattery’s first novel.'  (Introduction)

'Matthew Flinders’s major work, A Voyage to Terra Australis: Undertaken for the Purpose of Completing the Discovery of that Vast Country, and Prosecuted in the Years 1801, 1802, and 1803, in His Majesty’s Ship the Investigator, appeared in 1814, eleven years after the voyage it describes finished, and just days before he died. Although it has now become a canonical work in Australian history and a copy of the first edition is a highly-prized and expensive investment, at the time it was published it did not sell well. 1 The moment had passed—during the intervening decade Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor and made a battleground of the whole of Europe, and the distant activities of a surveying expedition must have seemed irrelevant to many who had been confronted with these more urgent and proximate events. As Ingleton points out, in respect of Flinders’s prospects of promotion or financial support while writing the Voyage, “the war had been long and relentless, and promotion came when vacancies occurred.… Possibly the lords commissioners of the Admiralty were beginning to consider that Flinders had been rewarded sufficiently for the explorations and surveys he had made so long ago.' (Introduction)

'Simile haunts The Pacific Room. So many sentences begin ‘It’s as if ...’ that the phrase seems like an incantation. Michael Fitzgerald writes that he agrees with Robert Louis Stevenson that ‘every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning.’ For the reviewer coming from outside the circle, this book does not so much erect screens as exist within a lush, enticing forest of signs which seems indifferent to one’s presence. As Teuila, the Samoan fa‘afafine, confidently climbs to the summit of Mount Vaea in the dark, we are told, ‘For an outsider there is no hint of what lies ahead, so inscrutable is the dense foliage.’ One is aware that given time and multiple readings, the forest might become as familiar as it is to Teuila. On a first reading, the best option is to let the strangeness of the book seep into one’s consciousness and resist the temptation to seek clarification at every twist in the path.' (Introduction)