Stephen Murray-Smith

John Manifold died in Brisbane on 19 April 1985. At his funeral a few days later the Eureka Flag covered his coffin, some of his own ballads were sung, and three fiddlers played. His death removes us from one of the great idiosyncratic talents of Australian letters. Colonial aristocrat, English middle-class intellectual, Australian nationalist and international socialist, his poetry at its best lo ... (read more)

Most of these books are Oztalgia reprints of the more respectable and desirable kind, but three are original works, two of them by senior men of letters of the kind that any country is fortunate to have a corps d’elite of: I mean of course Howard and Pearl. Cyril Pearl, in Five Men Vanished, relates in 128 pages the facts relating to the disappearance of five men at Bermagui in 1880. One was the ... (read more)

In this, her fourth autobiographical volume, Naomi Mitchison takes on a difficult task – that of making travellers’ tales interesting. Her first three autobiographies dealt with childhood, youth, the between-war years. She demonstrated great literary skills in selective recall and in creating the wholly misleading impression that this was an artless narrative. In fact she gave us a brilliant a ... (read more)