Hidden Author
2005 ABR Reviewing Competition
This year we received eighty-seven entries, with a good range in all three categories, children’s/young adult books; fiction; and non-fiction/poetry. New South Wales contributed almost half the entries; but each state was represented. It’s always interesting to note the most popular titles. This year they were Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender and Christos Tsiolkas ... (read more)
ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.
... (read more)
ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month and must include a telephone number for verification.
... (read more)
David Musgrave is the author of four volumes of poetry, the most recent being Phantom Limb. His first novel is Glissando (reviewed on page thirty-three). He is also the publisher at Puncher & Wattmann. See www.davidmusgrave.com
Why do you write?
It’s not really a choice, but a necessity. Usually, it is the pressure of an idea or an emotional state that only seems to be satisfactori ... (read more)
ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.
Pushing ahead
Dear Editor,
Beverley Kingston has written a rather world-weary review of my book The Commonwealth of' Speech (ABR, December 2002/January 2003). I read ... (read more)
William Kostakis
Jackie French explores the impact of World War I on both the home- and battlefronts in her extensively researched and earnestly written A Rose for the ANZAC Boys (Harper-Collins), which finds three young girls ditching the irrelevant deportment classes of an English boarding school to start a canteen in France for wounded soldiers. Barry Jonsberg’s Ironbark (Allen & Unwin), ... (read more)
Patrick Allington
Of 2009’s emerging Australian novelists (such a silly term: emerging from what?) Craig Silvey’s second novel, Jasper Jones (Allen & Unwin), stands out. A dark and funny morality tale set in a 1960s Western Australian mining town, it ruminates on death, secrets, racism, dodgy parenting and adolescence. For anybody who once dreamed of sporting greatness, the cricket match ... (read more)
ADB replies to Paul Brunton
Dear Editor,
Paul Brunton has written of the quotas used in the selection of subjects for inclusion in the Australian Dictionary of Biography in a review (ABR, February 2006) headed ‘Mysterious quotas’, and in a follow-up letter (ABR, April 2006).
The explanation of ‘quotas’ is straightforward. At the beginning of each new period (now a decade), the ADB is co ... (read more)
Busted
Dear Editor,
In his essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ (May 2010), David Hansen focused on the politics around the Benjamin Law busts of Truganini and Woureddy. As an aside, he mentioned that ‘Law’s only other known bust, of Robinson himself, has been lost’. It is ironical that, as Hansen’s essay was going to print, Gareth Knapman (Museum Victoria) and Olga Tsara (State Library of Victo ... (read more)