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Susan Sheridan

Elizabeth Harrower’s début novel was first published by Cassell in London in 1957. Down in the City begins with a hymn to Sydney, with its beaches, harbour suburbs, city arcades – and disreputable Kings Cross, ‘a haven for the foreigner and racketeer; a beacon for long-haired boys, mascaraed women and powdered men. It is Montmartre: it is bright and wicked.’

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When Gabrielle Carey wrote Puberty Blues (1979) with her school friend Kathy Lette, it was closely based on her own experience as a teenager. This initiated a writing career specialising in autobiography. Her novel The Borrowed Girl (1994) is based on her experience of living in a Mexican village, and So Many Selves (2006) is a personal memoir. Her new book extends the work of mourning and remembering her parents, which began with In My Father’s House (1994), an attempt to understand the suicide of her father, Alex Carey, and continued with Waiting Room (2009), an account of her mother Joan’s illness with a brain tumour.

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This volume contains all the poems that Rosemary Dobson wants to preserve. They represent a substantial portion of her output, which seems right for a poet who began with a degree of quiet confidence and poise that belied her youth. From the earliest, published when she was in her twenties ...

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In April 1934 sisters Mary and Elizabeth Durack joined their eldest brother, Reg, at Argyle Downs Station in the Kimberley. Mary was twenty-one, her sister eighteen. Educated at Loreto Convent in Perth, they had been reared on a diet of stories about life in the north told by their father, Michael Patrick Durack (known as ‘MPD’), when he returned from the family’s pastoral holdings every wet season to spend time with his wife and six children. Both girls had spent time up north with their parents, and loved the place. This time, however, they were on their own. At Argyle, ‘they were paid union wages for helping in the kitchen, where they learned to make bread for the homestead and for the twenty or more Aborigines on the station’, and later they took up duties at another Durack company station, Ivanhoe. They stayed up north for eighteen months, saving up for a trip to Europe, for even the Durack family fortunes had been hit by the Great Depression.

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The international air hostess was the ultimate twentieth-century modern girl – mobile, cosmopolitan, glamorous. She was paid to travel around the world, journeys that, in the early years of intercontinental travel, could take several days and involve stopping at exotic places such as Singapore, Calcutta, Karachi, and Cairo on the ‘Kangaroo Route’ between Australia and London. She was, of course, a ‘girl’ (she had to resign from her job on marriage), she had to have a ‘good appearance and personality’, and her height and weight had to fall within narrowly defined limits. Her look had to match the glamorous mobility and cosmopolitanism that she signified. At the same time, her job was to look after people: she had to be easily identifiable as a staff member, and one belonging to a specific company. She had to wear a uniform – something anonymous that might seem to counteract the glamour of the job.

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Susan Sheridan’s Nine Lives, a ‘group biography’, analyses the life stories and literary achievements of nine Australian women writers. The purpose, according to Sheridan, is not only to rediscover the life story of each, but also, by exploring their publishing and aesthetic context, to create a ‘fresh configuration’ of our literary history.

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Dorothy Hewett is a vivid presence in all her poetry. This selection from her life’s work opens with a poem written in her last year at school.

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‘Everyone I talk to remembers Tirra Lirra by the River as a wonderful book, sometimes even as a life-changing one. But why don’t we hear anything about it today?’ This was a young journalist who ... ... (read more)

The dreamy-eyed young girl from Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock, whose image adorns the cover of this anthology, gives a misleading impression of the ‘Australian girl’ who features in most of the stories. This girl may be the central figure in the colonial romance genre, as the editors propose, but she is characterised by energy and independence, rather than by the kind of sexually charged haze that surrounds the girls in the 1975 film. For the most part, her romantic experiences lead straight to marriage, give or take the odd misunderstanding along the way, and marriage was an institution entangled in economic security, social stability and, ultimately, the national destiny of white settler Australia. The Australian girl of the period was of necessity a clear-eyed realist where marriage was concerned. ‘Lorna Travis; A Christmas Story’ makes the economics of marriage very clear, while in Ada Cambridge’s ‘A Sweet Day’, an English aristocrat in disguise falls for a capable colonial girl and rewards her with a title as well as a wedding ring.

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This updated edition of essays on Thea Astley’s fiction will appeal to readers beyond the academy. It plays with the question as to why Astley (1925–2004) has been the subject of so little literary scholarship, despite her many literary awards (including four Miles Franklin Awards – only Tim Winton has won as many).

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