Cirrus@Austlit

The relationship between Australia and England was changed through cricket. '...Bradman's cricketing duel with England...helped spare Australians undue angst when the time came...for the two countries to go their separate ways in the world.' (p.18)

From the vantage point of a married woman living in British Columbia, Sara Dowse recalls her childhood encounters with Ava Gardner and the strong impression Gardner made on her life.

Examining the literary career of Marcus Clarke, Tony Moore concludes that 'Clarke was Australia's first celebrity writer, adopting the pose of the inner-city slacker, an alternative to the prissy middle class and the grin-and-bear-it bushie. More the sceptical satirist than the true believer, he offered the promise of a different way of being a cultured rebel.'

An essay on the American sculptor Richard Serra

In this essay, Janine Burke discusses pieces in the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud's art collection.

Helen Garner describes time spent in the Melbourne, Victoria, rehearsal rooms of the Australian Ballet.

Memoir of a sailing voyage north to the Arctic in the wake of the Viking longships.

Robyn Davidson travels back to the country that, in 1977, inspired in her 'the most profuound sense of belonging I will ever know' and resulted in her book Tracks.

Baldwin writes: 'Home is not just a physical place. It's also an inner landscape, made up of all that you hold most dear.' In this sense, she revisits her English heritage and recognises her attachment to England as 'home'.

Louis Nowra discusses the relationships between the first settlers and the Eora people in Sydney, New South Wales and the effect on each of each other's noises and language sounds. A parallel comment on Nowra's relationship with an elderly neighbour, and her accusations against him of noise making and the effect this has on his sensitivity to sounds around him in modern day Sydney, runs alongside part of the essay.

Martin Thomas writes about his biographcal subject the Australian anthropologist R. H. Mathews.