In Search of Hobart
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2009
Z1629766
2009
single work
prose
'Peter Timms leads us on a journey through his adopted city of Hobart, Australia's smallest, most southerly, least prosperous, but arguably most beautiful state capital. He reveals a city in transition, shaking off its dark and troubled past to claim its special place in the contemporary world: 'going boutique, nice and slow', as one overseas visitor notes.
'From Hobart's convict legacy, its spectacular natural setting, heritage architecture and climate, to crime-rates, economic hardship and the recent disfigurements of the developers, Timms brings a wealth of fresh insights, exploring the city with a mixture of affection, admiration, frustration and sadness, interviewing a wide range of residents along the way. Those who have experienced Hobart as tourists will be surprised and intrigued by the lively, complex society this book reveals. Those who live here will surely discover their city anew.' (From the publisher's website.)
Sydney : NewSouth Publishing , 2009
Brisbane
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2010
Z1714586
2010
single work
prose
(taught in 2 units)
'In this book, the [second] in a series on Australian cities in which leading Australian authors write about their home city, novelist and journalist Matthew Condon rediscovers the city of his childhood, Brisbane. Having returned there after many years, Condon takes the reader on a unique and personal journey through contemporary Brisbane, unearthing its history — sometimes literally — and painting a portrait of the contemporary transformation of the city.' (From the publisher's website.)
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2010
Sydney
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2010
Z1729705
2010
single work
prose
(taught in 3 units)
'Sydney has always been the sexiest and most gaudy of our cities. In this book, the third in a series in which leading Australian authors write about their hometowns, novelist Delia Falconer conjures up its sandstone, humidity, and jacarandas. But she goes beyond these to find a far more complex city: beautiful, violent, half-wild, and at times deeply spiritual. It is a slightly unreal place, haunted by a past that it has never quite grasped, or come to terms with. Here, in her first non-fiction book, she proves herself an adept memoirist. She twines the stories of the people that have made Sydney the twenty-first century city it is today. Mad clergymen, amateur astronomers, Indigenous weather experts, crims and victims, photographers and artists: their stories are surprising, funny, and moving.' (From the publisher's website.)
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2010
Melbourne
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2011
Z1789024
2011
single work
prose
travel
Sophie Cunningham writes a year in the city's life, a year that takes us from the heatwave that culminated on Black Saturday when temperatures soared to 47 degrees to the destructive deluge of a hailstorm. She walks through Melbourne's oldest suburb to its largest market, she goes to the footy and to the comedy festival, she talks publishing and learns how to use a letterpress. Along the way she journeys deep into her own recollections of the city she grew up in, and tells stories from its history: the theft of Picasso's Weeping Woman, the Hoddle Street massacre, William Barak's trek from Healesville, the Westgate Bridge Disaster, the high drama of the 1970 and 2009 AFL grand finals and the Market Murders of the sixties. She strolls by Melbourne's rivers and creeks while considering the history of the wetlands and river that sit at Melbourne's heart. She clambers through the drains that lie beneath. For it is water - the corralling of it, the excess of it, the squandering of it, the lack of it - that defines Melbourne's history, its present and its future (publisher website).
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2011
Adelaide
Kensington
:
University of New South Wales Press
,
2011
Z1802290
2011
single work
prose
'A painting, a frog cake, a landmark, a statue, a haunting newspaper
photograph, a bucket of peaches, pink shorts in parliament, concert
tickets, tourist maps ...
Kerryn Goldsworthy's Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of iconic objects. Adelaide
navigates her southern home, discovering its identifying curios and
passing them to the reader to touch, inspect and marvel at. These
objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark and contradictory
history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive
politics and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the
homey friendliness. They all paint a lively portrait of her home city -
as remembered, lived in, thought about, missed, loved, hated, laughed
at, travelled to and from, seen from afar and close up by assorted
writers, citizens and visitors - but mainly as it exists in her memory
and imagination.' (Publisher's blurb)
Kensington
:
University of New South Wales Press
,
2011
Canberra
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2012
Z1896300
2012
single work
prose
'An implicit sense of public service and "otherness" has now come to permeate Canberra's identity to a point that there is a great smugness, arrogance even, that the rest of Australia can hate us - but they'll never know how good it is to live here.
Alice Springs
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2012
Z1877265
2012
single work
prose
'Alice Springs, Alice, The Alice, Mparntwe is the most talked about but least familiar place in Australia. It is a town of extremes and contradictions: searingly hot and bitterly cold, thousands of miles from anywhere, the heart of black Australia and the headquarters of the controversial NT Intervention. It's seen as a place where blokes are blokes, yet the town has a high lesbian population. It is the gateway to the red centre, but relatively few Australians have been there. Its striking landscape and modern facilities attract those looking for a desert change, yet it is a town where frontier conflicts still hold sway. Eleanor Hogan's Alice Springs reveals the texture of everyday life in this town through the passage of the local seasons.' (NewSouth Books website)
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2012
In Search of Hobart
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2009
Z1629766
2009
single work
prose
'Peter Timms leads us on a journey through his adopted city of Hobart, Australia's smallest, most southerly, least prosperous, but arguably most beautiful state capital. He reveals a city in transition, shaking off its dark and troubled past to claim its special place in the contemporary world: 'going boutique, nice and slow', as one overseas visitor notes.
'From Hobart's convict legacy, its spectacular natural setting, heritage architecture and climate, to crime-rates, economic hardship and the recent disfigurements of the developers, Timms brings a wealth of fresh insights, exploring the city with a mixture of affection, admiration, frustration and sadness, interviewing a wide range of residents along the way. Those who have experienced Hobart as tourists will be surprised and intrigued by the lively, complex society this book reveals. Those who live here will surely discover their city anew.' (From the publisher's website.)
Hobart Sydney : NewSouth Publishing , 2012
Perth
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2013
6111901
2013
single work
prose
'David Whish-Wilson’s Perth is a place of surprising beauty, of sand-swept peace and brilliant light, yet a place where the deeper historical currents are never too far beneath the surface. Like the Swan River that flows in two directions at once at certain times, with the fresh water flowing seawards above the salty water flowing in beneath it, Perth strikes perfect harmony with the city’s contradictions and eccentricities.
'We look beyond shiny glass facades and boosterish talk of mining booms to the richness of the natural world and the trailblazers, the rebels, the occasional ghost and the ordinary people that bring Australia’s remotest city to life.' (Publication summary)
Sydney : NewSouth Publishing , 2013
Darwin
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2014
7423893
2014
single work
prose
'Darwin is a survivor, you have to give it that. Razed to the ground four times in its short history, it has picked itself up out of the debris to not only rebuild but grow. Darwin has known catastrophes and resurrections; it has endured misconceived projects and birthed visionaries. To know Darwin, to know its soul, you have to listen to it, soak in it, taste it.
'To write about her home town, Tess Lea waded knee-deep in memories of the city, including those of her family and her own. The story begins in 1974, when Cyclone Tracy shattered Darwin, and Lea was a little girl. Then it takes us back to the wild times of early settlement, explores the backstory of the White Australia policy, paints a vivid picture of the bombing of Darwin during World War II – the first Australian city to experience direct attack from a foreign power – and guides us to Australia’s militarised future, led by Darwin, sitting as it does under the largest aerial defence training space in the world. Lyrical and visceral, Tess Lea’s ode to her hometown is suffused with the textures, colours, scents and the many gritty realities that beset this tough, fragile, magical, foolhardy and unique place.' (Publication summary)
Sydney : NewSouth Publishing , 2014
