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An analysis of some of Australia's most famous writers, with excerpts from their novels, to demonstrate and trace the origins of the Australia novel. Included in this volume: Geoffrey Hamlyn, Henry Kingsley; For the Term of His Natural Life, Marcus Clarke; Robbery Under Arms, T.A. Browne; A Marriage Ceremony, Ada Cambridge; On Our Selection, Steele Rudd; Such Is Life, Tom Collins; We Of The Never-Never, Mrs Aeneas Gunn; The Escape Of Sir William Heans, William Hay; Working Bullocks, Katharine Susannah Prichard; Up the Country, 'Brent of Bin Bin'; The Mountfords, Martin Boyd; The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, Henry Handel Richardson; A House Is Built, M. Barnard Eldershaw; The Passage, Vance Palmer; Man-shy, Frank Dalby Davison; Sun Across the Sky, Eleanor Dark; Mountain Flat, Leonard Mann; The Pea Pickers, Eve Langley. -
Roberta Cowell was the first known British trans woman to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Born Robert Marshall Cowell in 1918, she was a British racing driver and Second World War fighter pilot who was captured by the Germans and imprisoned for five months in Stalag Luft I until the prison was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. After separating from her wife of seven years in 1948, suffering from depression and flashbacks to the war, consultation sessions with a second Freudian psychiatrist revealed that her unconscious mind was predominantly female. Between 1950 and 1951, Roberta underwent a inguinal orchiectomy and vaginoplasty and in May 1951, was able to have a new birth certificate issued showing her change of name and change of recorded sex. At this time, transsexuality had become closely associated in the public mind with male homosexuality and effeminacy amongst men, both highly taboo subjects. Cowell's story broke ground, disrupting this narrative. Although she remained active in flying and British motor racing up until the 1970s, she found it very difficult to gain employment. Roberta died in October 2011 - only six people attended her funeral and in accordance with her instructions, her death was not publicly reported until two years later. Illustrated with black and white photographs. -
Billy: Pamela Stephenson
$7.00Once in a lifetime, there strides upon the stage someone who can truly be called a legend. Such a person is the inimitable, timeless genius who is Billy Connolly. His effortlessly wicked whimsy has entranced, enthralled – and split the sides of – thousands upon thousands of adoring audiences. And when he isn't doing that…he's turning in award-winning performances on film and television. He's the man who needs no introduction, and yet he is the ultimate enigma. From a troubled and desperately poor childhood in the docklands of Glasgow he is now the intimate of household names the world over. How did this happen, who is the real Billy Connolly? Only one person can answer that question: his wife, Pamela Stephenson. Pamela’s writing combines the very personal with a frank objectivity that makes for a compelling, moving and hugely entertaining biography. This is the real Billy Connolly. -
This is the book the late Clive James (1939 - 2019) always wanted to write: an almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what. It is his always-unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the twentieth-century. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, Tacitus to Thatcher, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now. Not to be read at one sitting! -
Walter Matthau: Allan Hunter
$25.00Walter Matthau (1920 - 2000) was once described as 'about as likely a candidate for stardom as the neighbourhood delicatessen man' Walter Matthau worked long and hard to achieve public recognition. AT the age of 45 he found the perfect role in The Odd Couple and became the oldest overnight success in the business. He quickly established himself as a top box-office attraction, won an Oscar for the conniving shyster lawyer in The Fortune Cookie and continued to delight audiences with a string of movie hits: The Sunshine Boys, Kotch, Charley Varrick, The Front Page, The Bad News Bears, Pete 'n' Tillie and House Calls. Hunter chronicles Matthau's tough childhood in New York, his early jobs as boxing instructor, basketball coach and filing clerk; his lifelong (and expensive) addiction to gambling; his distinguished Air Force service record; the years as a villain in films like King Creole; his doctor's prediction on his heart: 'My Doctor gave me six months to live; when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more'; the disastrous making of Hello, Dolly with Barbra Streisand and happier partnerships with Jack Lemmon, Neil Simon, George Burns and Glenda Jackson. -
Elizabeth Woodville, The White Queen; Margaret Beaufort, The Red Queen; and Jacquetta, Lady Rivers, The Rivers Woman are the subjects of the first three novels in Philippa Gregory's Cousins' War series and of the three biographical essays in this book. Philippa Gregory, together with historians David Baldwin and Michael Jones, both leading experts in their field, helped Philippa to research the novels, tell the extraordinary 'true' stories of the life of these women who until now have been largely forgotten by history, their background and times, highlighting questions which are raised in the fiction and illuminating the novels. With a foreword by Philippa Gregory - in which Philippa writes revealingly about the differences between history and fiction and examines the gaps in the historical record - and beautifully illustrated with rare portraits. -
The first - at time of publication, 1977 - Marxist analysis of the history and situation of the Australian Aborigines and presents the balanced and co-operative nature of traditional Aboriginal society, the brutal and tragic story of white colonisation and the growth of indigenous resistance to discrimination and exploitation. Also demonstrated is the minimalising of the Aboriginal in the Australian nation and the role of the capitalist establishment, the media and the racial ideology that destroyed the crucial land rights campaign. The author concludes with an assessment of the future for the indigenous people and an appeal for unity in the struggle for their rights. -
Published in 1978, this is the book that tells Australians who they really are via the controversial perception by the author of Australian apathy, greed and intolerance while scrambling for a fast buck and endless possessions - not to mention being lazy and overweight as well. And delusional. King - a descendant of Philip Gidley King, Governor of N.S.W. 1800 - 1806 - explodes the myths of the hard-working outback heroes to replace them with I'm all right Jack...I'm getting rich quick...I'm getting my share of...on the grounds that the spirit of materialism has waltzed through Australian history for too long. Illustrated by John Spooner. -
Here is the story of seven years of patrolling by one of the Australian Inland Mission padres and his wife. Their only home was the vehicle in which they travelled and their parish was the northern third of Queensland - the then-forgotten 'top-end' of Australia. Written with humour, warmth and a very human fellow-feeling together with a love for her country and the end result is a story with plenty of information and interest regarding the Australian Inland Mission and its work.
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