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Gillian Whitlock

Gillian Whitlock is an ARC Professorial Fellow at the University of Queensland, where she is working on the letters of asylum seekers.

Gillian Whitlock reviews 'So This Is Life: Scenes From A Country Childhood' by Anne Manne

December 2009–January 2010, no. 317 01 December 2009
Anne Manne’s publisher invites us to include So This Is Life in the classical canon of autobiographies of Australian childhood – Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony and Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father. In Australian letters there has been a long tradition of autobiographical writing of childhood; this produced some of the earliest critical writing on autobiography – by R ... (read more)

Gillian Whitlock reviews 'England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth Century Fiction'

October 2001, no. 235 01 October 2001
In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, much of the action occurs amongst the migrant clientele of the Hot Wax Club. The club is decorated with waxworks of England’s notable but unacknowledged migrant ancestors: Mary Seacole, Ignatius Sancho and Grace Jones, among others. As Leela Gandhi points out in her discussion of Rushdie’s novel, we are encouraged to read the Hot Wax clubbers as histor ... (read more)

Gillian Whitlock reviews 'Faith: Faith Bandler, gentle activist' by Marilyn Lake

October 2002, no. 245 01 October 2002
I came to this book after reading Don Watson’s biography of Paul Keating. On the cover of Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Keating is seen through a window frame, head bent, reading engrossedly, shirt sleeves rolled up – a remote and distant figure. He is seemingly careless of the attention of his photographer, and biographer; a recalcitrant subject. The contrast with Faith could hardly be ... (read more)