DON WATSON The Bush: Travels in the heart of Australia. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
The Bush offers a narrative that includes Indigenous people, colonialists, settlers and migrants in a wide-ranging and sophisticated appreciation of our bush heritage. Colonial and post-colonial Australians have always had an ambiguous relationship with the bush. For...
ANDREW McMILLEN Talking Smack: Honest conversations about drugs. Reviewed by Toby Creswell
Fourteen interviews with Australian musicians give rare insights into the mystique of drugs and the creative process. One Christmas a long time ago, I received a yellow card with a big capital ‘H’ on the front and inside, instead of ‘Season’s...
LORELEI VASHTI Dress, Memory. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
An extraordinary collection of dresses inspires an extraordinary recollection of a young woman’s life. Memory is an individual thing. For some people, it’s a place or a fragrance that triggers a memory, for others it’s a word or an object. For Lorelei Vashti, her...
JILL JOLLIFFE Run for Your Life: A memoir. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The author of Balibó turns her focus on herself with this gripping examination of how a traumatic childhood shapes an entire life. How long does it take to see your own story? For Jill Jolliffe, it was only after a lifetime of reporting the experiences of people in...
ALOM SHAHA The Young Atheist’s Handbook: Lessons for living the good life without God. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
Rather than a handbook, this is a generous and thoughtful memoir of a life in pursuit of intellectual freedom. Belief and non-belief do not sit well with something like a 12-step plan and this book is in fact not a handbook but a memoir; a warm,...
HILLY JANES The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas. Reviewed by Peter Corris
This book commemorates the 100th anniversary of Thomas’s birth and offers new insights into his life. We ‘did’ Dylan Thomas in the fourth year of the Honours course in English at Melbourne University and I bought his Collected Poems second-hand at the...
JUSTIN HEAZLEWOOD Funemployed: The life of an artist in Australia. Reviewed by Walter Mason
Warning: reading this book can get you down if you are a creative in Australia trying to establish or maintain a career. Justin Heazlewood’s brilliant Funemployed is not all happiness and light. But in spite of its, ahem, realistic portrayal of the scene for...
TARA MOSS The Fictional Woman. Reviewed by Robyne Young
Bestselling crime novelist Tara Moss examines the fictions society weaves about women’s roles, and how they have played out in her own life. I haven’t read Tara Moss’s fiction, but I have come to know about her and her writing through her advocacy, particularly as...
MEREDITH BURGMANN (Ed) Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO files. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Absurdity and anger reside in this anthology of personal responses to ASIO’s clumsy and calumnious file-keeping. Meredith Burgmann’s Introduction to this fascinating book foreshadows some of the themes that emerge repeatedly as the contributors discuss their own or...
EDMUND WHITE Inside a Pearl: My years in Paris. Reviewed by Walter Mason
Telling stories he shouldn’t: the gossipy, titillating and always fascinating world of Edmund White’s Paris. There is something deliciously circular about Edmund White’s fiction and memoirs. I have been reading them constantly since I was a teenager in the late 1980s,...
BIFF WARD In My Mother’s Hands: A disturbing memoir of family life. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
A family haunted by a tragic death and terrorised by a disease they couldn’t name. Families are as defined by their secrets as they are by their blood ties. The secrets Biff (Elizabeth) Ward’s family kept united them, tormented them and ultimately divided them. Biff...
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