Ink in Her Veins

Ink in Her Veins
Author: Sylvia Martin
Publisher: Apollo Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2016
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781742588254

Aileen Palmer - poet, translator, political activist, adventurer - was the daughter of two writers prominent in Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Vance and Nettie Palmer were well known as novelists, poets, critics and journalists, and Nettie suspected that their eldest would grow up with 'ink in her veins'. Aileen certainly inherited her parents' talents, publishing poetry, translating the work of Ho Chi Minh, and recording what she referred to as 'semi-fictional bits of egocentric writing'. She also absorbed their interest in leftist politics, joining the Communist Party at university. This, combined with her bravery, led to participation in the Spanish Civil War and the ambulance service in London during World War II. The return to Australia was not easy, and Aileen never successfully reintegrated into civilian life. In Ink in Her Veins Sylvia Martin paints an honest and moving portrait in which we see a talented woman slowly brought down by war, family expectations, and psychiatric illness and the sometimes cruel 'treatments' common in the 20th century. [Subject: Literary Criticism, Biography]

‘A world-proof life’

‘A world-proof life’
Author: Marivic Wyndham
Publisher: UTS ePRESS
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0980284023

Eleanor Dark (1901-1985) is one of Australia's most celebrated writers of the inter-war years. Born with the twentieth century - a Federation baby - she published ten novels, amongst them one of the best loved Australian stories of all time, The Timeless Land. Her life spanned successive global crises - two world wars, the economic depression of the 1930s, the Cold War - each issuing its own challenges to the artist and the people's writer she thought herself to be. By far the most privileged writer of her generation, her ultimate challenge was a personal one: to unlock the gates of her world-proof life to a society and a world in crisis. The first cross-cultural biography of this famous Australian writer, Marivic Wyndham's rich and controversial portrait of Eleanor Dark is based on extensive research of the author's public and private lives.

Investigating Arthur Upfield

Investigating Arthur Upfield
Author: Carol Hetherington
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2011-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443834955

Arthur Upfield created Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony) who features in twenty-nine novels written from the 1920s to the the 1960s, mostly set in the Australian Outback. He was the first Australian professional writer of crime detection novels. Upfield arrived in Australia from England on 4 November 1911, and this collection of twenty-two critical essays by academics and scholars has been published to celebrate the centenary of his arrival. The essays were all written after Upfield’s death in 1964 and provide a wide range of responses to his fiction. The contributors, from Australia, Europe and the United States, include journalist Pamela Ruskin who was Upfield’s agent for fifteen years, anthropologists, literary scholars, pioneers in the academic study of popular culture such as John G. Cawelti and Ray B. Browne, and novelists Tony Hillerman and Mudrooroo whose own works have been inspired by Upfield’s. The collection sheds light on the extent and nature of critical responses to Upfield over time, demonstrates the type of recognition he has received and highlights the way in which different preoccupations and critical trends have dealt with his work. The essays provide the basis for an assessment of Upfield’s place not only in the international annals of crime fiction but also in the literary and cultural history of Australia.

Nettie Palmer

Nettie Palmer
Author: Nettie Palmer
Publisher: University of Queensland Press(Australia)
Total Pages: 614
Release: 1988
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Cyclone Country

Cyclone Country
Author: Chrystopher J. Spicer
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476681562

The storm has become a universal trope in the literature of crisis, revelation and transformation. It can function as a trope of place, of apocalypse and epiphany, of cultural mythos and story, and of people and spirituality. This book explores the connections between people, place and environment through the image of cyclones within fiction and poetry from the Australian state of Queensland, the northern coast of which is characterized by these devastating storms. Analyzing a range of works including Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm, and Vance Palmer's Cyclone it explains the cyclone in the Queensland literary imagination as an example of a cultural response to weather in a unique regional place. It also situates the cyclones that appear in Queensland literature within the broader global context of literary cyclones.

Letters of Mary Gilmore

Letters of Mary Gilmore
Author: Dame Mary Cameron Gilmore
Publisher: Melbourne University
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1980
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Mary Gilmore's life spanned almost a century of Australian history. She lived for ninety-seven years and this selection of her letters covers a period of almost seventy years, encompassing the social, political and literary scene of the period when Australia was changing from colony to nation. The letters contain perceptive judgements of indigenous literary talent as it was emerging; they contain reflections on the pioneer past as she herself had experienced it and reflections on the contemporary political and social environment. Sometimes they express her anger at injustice and deprivation wherever it occurred-in the treatment of the Aborigines, the returned soldiers, women, children, old people, the sick. As she said, 'There was no hunted one with whom I did not run.' Above all, the letters reflect her immense patriotism and love for her country, her enormous hopes for its future; and they give, often unintentionally, fascinating glimpses of events in which she participated-for example, the New Australia venture in Paraguay - events which are now part of our established history.

Pioneer Players

Pioneer Players
Author: Peter Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521456449

This is a dual biography, the story of Louis Esson, the distinguished playwright who has been called 'the father of Australian drama', and his wife Hilda, who did her own pioneering in the theatre and in public health. The plays they wrote and performed reflected the drama of their lives: creative angst, intellectual conflict, untimely death, romantic entanglement, jealousy and despair. Yet Peter Fitzpatrick's book is more than a good read. As a critical appraisal of Louis Esson's plays and an exploration of the relationships the Essons had with well-known literary and theatrical figures in Australia and overseas, the book is an exploration of a developing Australian culture and identity. It is also about the dynamics of a marriage between two brilliant people, reflecting not only the patterns of gender relationships in their own time, but universal passions and strategies.

Wild Man of Letters

Wild Man of Letters
Author: Craig Munro
Publisher: Carlton, Vic. : Melbourne University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1984
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Includes involvement with Aborigines Progressive Association and with Xavier Herbert (publication of Capricornia) brief mention of Jindyworobak Poetry Movement and the Aust. Aborigines Conference celebrating the Sesquicentenary (1938) with a Day of Mourning and Protest.