Issue Details: First known date: 2004... 2004 [Review] My Island Home : A Torres Strait Memoir
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'John Singe has contributed to the scholarly literature on the islands~ peoples and cultures of Torres Strait in his previous books: Torres Strait: People and History (1979 and 1988); Culture in Change: Torres Strait History" in Photographs (1988); and Among Islands (1993). These books canvassed the history, multicultural diversity and dynamics of a unique area of Australia, once a frontier outpost but no," fully integrated into the economy, politics and concerns of mainland Australia. The Torres Strait region is scattered with many islands, 14 of,which are inhabited. They are home to approximately 6000 Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and migrants.' (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon Queensland Review vol. 11 no. 2 December 2004 Z1175338 2004 periodical issue

    'Thea Astley - the great Queensland novelist, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78 - famously expounded the notion that Queensland is quite unlike anywhere else. Even when familiar cultural elements are present, she argued, they are combined so incongruously here as to produce an utterly distinctive environment:

    It's all in the antitheses. The contrasts. The contradictions. Queensland means living in townships called Dingo and Banana and Gunpowder. Means country pubs with nvelve-foot ceilings and sagging floors, pub which, ,while bending gently and sadly sideways, still keep up the starched white table-cloths, the heavy duty silver, the typed menu. Means folk singers like Thel and Rick whom I once followed through to Clermont on that lecture-tour while they cleaned up culturally ahead of me; but it also meant listening to the now extinct State Queensland String Quartet playing the Nigger Quartet in my fourth-class room among the sticks of chalk, the tattered textbooks~ means pushing our way through some rainforest drive laced with wait-a-while to hear the Lark Ascending, or more suitably, the Symphonie Fantastique crashing through the last of the banana thickets.

    Many of Astley's novels and short stories explore the ways in which Queensland enters and shapes her characters' bodies and minds. Astley's biting humour, her vivid evocations of excess in the tropics, and her elusive search for spiritual . authenticity in a stolen land are - at least in part - products of the quirky, infuriating, but also deeply creative environment in which she grew up.' (Editorial) 

    2004
    pg. 111-112
Last amended 1 Aug 2019 13:30:08
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