DAVID HUNT True Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia, Volume 2. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
In True Girt Hunt successfully blends his tongue-in-cheekiness and sometimes dark humour with detailed research. Following on from the death of Governor Macquarie, the cliffhanger ending of his 2013 bestseller Girt, Hunt’s new volume opens with the colonisation of...
GEORGINA ARNOTT The Unknown Judith Wright. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
Arnott reveals the literary growth of an important Australian artist, bringing to life a complex, contradictory human being. Georgina Arnott was surprised to realise that existing biographies, autobiographical works and critical studies of Judith Wright merely skimmed...
BRENDA NIALL Mannix. Reviewed by Yvonne Perkins
This biography is a valuable and engrossing contribution to Irish-Australian history. ‘Archbishop Mannix used to live there,’ my Presbyterian grandmother said as we passed the stately mansion Raheen on Studley Park Road. It was the mid-1970s and the Catholic...
JOHN LE CARRÉ The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my life. Reviewed by Peter Corris
The distinctive flavour of le Carré’s writing is unmistakeable from the first page of The Pigeon Tunnel. This review is of the audio version of the book. That format has given me an extra insight into the abilities of David Cornwell, aka John le Carré. In his...
JOSHUA HAMMER The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And their race to save the world’s most precious manuscripts. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
This book reveals not only Africa’s significant literary heritage but also the courage of the librarians who endangered themselves to preserve it. This is the story of Abdel Kader Haidara, one of the librarians of Timbuktu, and how he smuggled 350 000 ancient...
ROBBI NEAL After Before Time. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
Robbi Neal has captured a truthful, no-holds-barred and deeply sensitive range of Indigenous Australian experience. For seven years from 2008, Robbi Neal and her family lived and worked in a Cape York Aboriginal arts community. There, Neal heard the narratives of six...
CHARLOTTE WOOD The Writer’s Room: Conversations about writing. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The winner of this year’s Stella Prize brings together 12 conversations from The Writer’s Room journal. Ten seconds’ googling will find a plethora of writing advice from amateurs and professionals alike. List after list of writing ‘rules’ to follow for success and...
BRENDAN MURRAY The Drowned Man. Reviewed by Peter Stanley
The Drowned Man investigates a murder in the Australian Navy, mixing fact and imagination with varied results. Books are sometimes like buses. You wait 20 years for a book dealing with the murder committed aboard HMAS Australia in March 1942, and then three come along...
GREG DE MOORE AND ANN WESTMORE Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
This is an outstanding biography of Australian lithium pioneer John Cade, whose life merits major recognition. Let’s start with a statistic. The year 1948 marked a peak for deaths in Melbourne asylums, 183 at the Royal Park Mental Hospital alone, and John Cade kept a...
ASHLEIGH WILSON Brett Whiteley: Art, life and the other thing. Reviewed by Annette Hughes
This new biography of Brett Whiteley is completely compelling. Brett and I were close. Geographically. He lived just around the corner in Raper Street, Surry Hills. I would often see that compact, woolly-haired, tightly-wound man barrelling down Crown Street. We never...
MARIA KATSONIS & LEE KOFMAN (Eds) Rebellious Daughters: True stories from Australia’s finest female writers. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
The authors in Rebellious Daughters write about family honestly and without clichés. It’s been a while since, in My Mother, Myself, Wellesley College graduate Nancy Friday invited Baby Boomer women to reflect on their first impressions of life and how these...
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