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Fremantle Press

How I Became the Mr Big of People Smuggling is sold as a crime novel, but this is a crude categorisation for an unusual book. Mr Big is more like a fictional memoir; the story of Nick Smart, a high-school graduate who signs up to work as a jackaroo at the remote Palmenter Station, but quickly discovers that it is a front for a people-smuggling outfit. He then kills the station’s murderous namesake and takes over the operation.

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Sarah Drummond’s début is a poetic memoir of life among the fishermen and women on the southern extremities of Western Australia.

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Fremantle is rapidly becoming a preferred setting for novelists seeking to explore the hidden costs of the mining boom. Within weeks of the publication of Tim Winton’s Eyrie, which is haunted by the crime and gritty emptiness of the city’s rough side, we now have Getting Warmer, Alan Carter’s second novel and the sequel to Prime Cut (2011).

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The relationships between daughters and their mothers provide fascinating, fertile ground for exploration. Mothers in books are sitting ducks, really, and these three new Young Adult books take aim. One mother is a cavalier, emotionally blackmailing bank robber; another is adored, but nosy and old-fashioned; while the third, obsessed with organic food, is diagnosed with cancer. In All This Could End (Text, $19.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781921758447), Steph Bowe challenges the controlling mother trope by portraying one who robs banks. Antonella Preto treads the complex terrain between an Italian migrant mother and her first-generation Australian daughter in The Mimosa Tree (Fremantle Press, $19.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781922089199), while the prospect of losing one’s mother encourages sweet soul-searching in Aimee Said’s new novel Freia Lockhart’s Summer of Awful (Walker Books, $16.95 pb, 288 pp, 9781921977800). If being a mother is tough, being a daughter is no picnic.

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‘If you don’t like movies, I’m not sure you will like these stories.’ So warns Ron Elliott in his introduction to Now Showing, after having explained that the five stories in this collection are unproduced screenplays repurposed as novellas. It may be useful to clarify Elliott’s warning: unless you are a cinéaste who appreciates screenplay structure and enjoys seeing new variations on the same old Hollywood themes, you may find these stories lacking.

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Harmless by Julienne van Loon

by
May 2013, no. 351

A drunken woman stumbles into a party where people are gathered around a bonfire, determined to give the baby girl under her jacket to its father. When he refuses, she seizes the baby by the foot and throws it into the air above the fire. The child is Amanda and this is her start to a life that will be informed by criminals, harmed people – the crushed, flawed, abused. The image of Amanda as a baby – underweight, ‘wide-eyed’, suspended over the fire – effloresces and settles through this novella by Julienne van Loon.

 

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In To the Highlands, the second instalment in a trilogy entitled ‘One Boy’s Journey to Man’, Jon Doust provides a gripping examination of racism and male sexuality in 1960s Australia.

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Randolph Stow, who died in 2010 aged seventy-four, must now be considered part of the Australian canon, whether that concept is conceived broadly or as a smaller cluster of Leavisian peaks. This status derives from his eight novels, which include the Miles Franklin Award-winner To the Islands (1958), the celebrated children’s book Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (1967), the much studied The Merry-go-round in theSea (1965), and the book that many (including me) think his masterpiece, Visitants (1979).

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‘Everything should not be told, it is better to keep some things to yourself.’ So begins Susan Swingler’s The House of Fiction with this quote from much-loved Australian novelist Elizabeth Jolley as an epigraph. And what a loaded beginning it is, too, given the subject matter of this memoir: the discovery by Swingler of the fraudulent and secret double life her father Leonard Jolley led with Elizabeth (or Monica Knight, as she was called), his second wife. In this family drama, which began in England, there are two women who were once friends and who look uncannily alike, two daughters whose names begin with S who were born to these women at almost exactly the same time, and, centre-stage, one taciturn father, Leonard Jolley.

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According to the summary on the inside of Women of Note’sattractive jacket, being a female composer in the twentieth century was a ‘dangerous game’ – strong words indeed, but not without justification. Rosalind Appleby notes her own initial surprise to discover how many women composers there actually were in Australia. My own experience while writing a PhD about four Australian composing mothers is consistent with this perception. I have lost count of the number of times I described my topic to polite questioners and, on explaining that it was about Australian women composers, was asked, ‘Are there any?’ Well, yes – in 2011 the Australian Music Centre recorded that twenty-five per cent of Australian composers are women.

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