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Showing 1 - 17 of 17 items
By Elisabeth Wynhausen. 1989
Elizabeth Wynhausen was four when her family came from Holland intent on fitting in. In this memoir she propels herself…
from one comic debacle to another, pausing to comment on the customs of the natives.By John Lyons, Sylvie Clezio. 2017
A gripping memoir of life in Jerusalem from one of Australia's most experienced Middle East correspondents. Leading Australian journalist John…
Lyons will take readers on a fascinating personal journey through the wonders and dangers of the Middle East. From the sheer excitement of arriving in Jerusalem with his wife and eight-year-old son, to the fall of dictators and his gripping account of what it feels like to be taken by Egyptian soldiers, blindfolded and interrogated, this is a memoir of the Middle East like no other. Drawing on a 20-year interest in the Middle East, Lyons has had extraordinary access - he's interviewed everyone from Israel's former Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert to key figures from Hezbollah and Hamas. He's witnessed the brutal Iranian Revolutionary Guard up close and was one of the last foreign journalists in Iran during the violent crackdown against the 'Green Revolution'. He's confronted Hamas officials about why they fire rockets into Israel and Israeli soldiers about why they fire tear gas at Palestinian school children. Lyons also looks at 50 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank - the mechanics of how this works and the effect it now has on both Israelis and Palestinians. Lyons explains the Middle East through every day life and experiences - his son's school, his wife's friends and his own dealings with a range of people over six years.By Inga Simpson. 2017
Each chapter of this absorbing memoir explores a particular species of tree, layering description, anecdote, and natural history to tell…
the story of a scrap of forest in the Sunshine Coast hinterland - how the author came to be there and the ways it has shaped her life. In many ways, it's the story of a treechange, of escaping suburban Brisbane for a cottage on ten acres in search of a quiet life. Of establishing a writers retreat shortly before the Global Financial Crisis, and losing just about everything. It is also the story of what the author found there: the literature of nature and her own path as a writer. Some of the nature writing that has been part of this journey is woven through the narrative arc. The Language of Trees is about connection to place as a white settler descendent, and trying to reconcile where the author grew up with where the author is now. It is her story of learning to be at home among trees, and the search for a language appropriate to describe that experience. That journey leads Inga to nature writing, to an environmental consciousness, to regenerating this place and, ultimately, to learning Gubbi Gubbi and Wiradjuri.By Brian Matthews. 2008
Manning Clark was one of the most influential Australian intellectuals of the last half century. His political pronouncements were often…
highly provocative and his sweeping judgements, dire denunciations and oracular prophecies infuriated conservatives and made him a controversial figure. His most enduring legacy, however, was his magisterial six-volume History of Australia. In it he reshaped the now familiar story of our nation's modern evolution; from the First Fleet's arrival, the convicts, the rum rebellion, gold, the sheep's back, Federation, and the glorious defeat at Gallipoli, up to the nation emerging from the Great Depression and on the threshold of a new world war. But behind this ambitious work was a man as flawed as the historical figures he was presenting. He was wracked with self-doubt, and dogged by fears of failure and personal weakness, he craved forgiveness for the betrayals that stalked and threatened his marriage to Dymphna, and wrestled with an elusive Christ in whom he longed to have a secure faith. Behind the signature broad hat and the stern unsmiling visage was a tortured man. That is the complex, enigmatic and thoroughly enthralling Clark who emerges in this remarkable biography.By Robert Dessaix. 2009
One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, France, Robert Dessaix chanced upon the castle where the famous French…
writer Andre Gide spent his childhood. Recalling the excitement Robert felt when he first read Gide as a teenager, he set off to recapture what it was that once drew him so strongly to this enigmatic figure.On a magic carpet ride from Lisbon to the edge of the Sahara, from Paris to the south of France and Algiers, Robert takes us to the places where the Nobel Prize-winning author, in ways still scandalous to modern sensibilities, lived out his unconventional ideas about love, marriage, sexuality and religion. Features meditations and conversations with fellow-travellers on such diverse subjects as why we travel, growing old, illicit passions, and the essence of Protestantism.By Anne Summers. 2018
The inspiring autobiography of one of Australia's most influential women, from journalist to policy maker to change agent at large.…
'I was born into a world that expected very little of women like me. We were meant to tread lightly on the earth, influencing events through our husbands and children, if at all. We were meant to fade into invisibility as we aged. I defied all of these expectations and so have millions of women like me.' This is the compelling story of Anne Summers' extraordinary life. Her story has her travelling around the world as she moves from job to job, in newspapers and magazines, advising prime ministers, leading feminist debates, writing memorable and influential books. Anne has not been afraid to walk away from success and to satisfy her constant restlessness by charging down new and risky paths. Whatever position she has held, she has expanded what's possible and helped us see things differently-often at high personal cost. Anne shares revealing stories about the famous and powerful people she has worked with or reported on and is refreshingly frank about her own anxieties and mistakes. She shares a heart-breaking story of family violence and tells of her ultimate reconciliation with the father who had rejected her. Unfettered and Alive is a provocative and inspiring memoir from someone who broke through so many boundaries to show what women can do.By Brenda Niall. 2012
Growing up in suburban Perth in the 1920s, the two Durack girls were fascinated by tales of the pioneering past…
of their father and grandfather overlanding from Queensland in the 1880s and setting up four vast cattle stations in the remote north. A year spent together on the stations in their early twenties ignited in the sisters a lifelong love of the Kimberley, along with a growing unease about the situation of the Aboriginal people employed there. Through war, love affairs, children and eventual old age, the Duracks continued to write and paint - their closely intertwined creative lives always shaped by the enduring power of the Kimberley region. With unprecedented access to hundreds of private family letters, unpublished memoirs, diaries and family papers, Brenda Niall gets to the heart of a uniquely Australian story that spans the twentieth century.By Raimond Gaita. 2011
In 1998, Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father was first published - the story of his father who came to Australia…
from Europe with his young wife Christine and their four-year-old son after the end of the Second World War. In the isolated landscape of country Victoria, Christine succumbed to mental illness, and a series of tragedies befell the family. Described as 'a profound meditation on love and death, madness and truth, judgment and compassion', Romulus, My Father became an instant classic. Now, thirteen years later, and four years after the release of the film, Raimond Gaita has put together this collection in which he reflects on the writing of the book, the making of the film, his relationship to the desolate beauty of the central Victorian landscape, the philosophies that underpinned his father's relationship to the world and, most movingly, the presence and absence of his mother and his unassuaged longing for her.By Ross Campbell. 1981
This wonderfully warm Cold War memoir is full of unforgettable characters and events. It follows the formative years of the…
author from the home front to original sin and first love. It also charts his adventures with the amazing and inventive Jim Egoroff.By Gabrielle Carey. 2020
Gabrielle Carey narrates a riveting journey through the life and work of one of last century's most successful - and…
almost forgotten - women novelists, Elizabeth von Arnim. 'When I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim, I found, for the first time, a writer who wrote about being happy.'Elizabeth von Arnim is one of the early twentieth century's most famous - and almost forgotten - authors. She was ahead of her time in her understanding of women and their often thwarted pursuit of happiness. Born in Sydney in the mid-1800s, she went on to write many internationally bestselling novels, marry a Prussian Count and then an English Lord, develop close friendships with H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster, and raise five children. Intrigued by von Arnim's extraordinary life, Gabrielle Carey sets off on a literary and philosophical journey to learn about this bold and witty author. More than a biography, Only Happiness Here is also a personal investigation into our perennial obsession with finding joy.By Elizabeth Lane, Geoffrey Blainey, Richard Lane, Fiona Kells, Stuart S Kells, Louise Paton. 2021
Richard Lane was one of three brothers who founded Penguin Books in 1935. But like all great stories, his life…
didn't start there. After sailing to Adelaide in 1922, Richard began work as a boy migrant – a farm apprentice living in rural South Australia as part of the 'Barwell Boys' scheme. In Australia, he deepened his appreciation for literature, and understood how important it was to make good writing widely accessible. Richard's diaries – the honest and moving words of a teenager, so very far away from home, capture vividly his life and loves; the characters he met; the land he worked; the families he depended on; and his coming of age in a new land. A remarkable social record and one of the best first-hand accounts of the child migrant experience, the diaries also capture the ideas and the entrepreneurship that led to the founding of the twentieth century's most famous publishing house. Richard Lane's diaries are an important document for the history of rural Australia and global publishing.By Chloe Hooper. 2022
Let me tell you a story...When Chloe Hooper's partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she has to…
find a way to tell their two young sons.By instinct, she turns to the bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss? Hooper embarks on a quest to find what practical lessons children's literature-with its innocent orphans and evil adults, magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals-can teach about grief and resilience in real life.As she discovers, 'the right words are an incantation, a spell of hope for the future.' From the Brothers Grimm to Frances Hodgson Burnett and Tolkien and Dahl-all of whom suffered childhood bereavements-she follows the breadcrumbs of the world's favourite authors, searching for the deep wisdom in their books and lives. Both memoir and manual in an age of worldwide uncertainty, here is a profound and moving exploration of the dark and light of storytelling.By Clementine Ford. 2021
Clementine Ford is a person who has loved deeply, strangely and with curiosity. She is fascinated by love and the…
multiple ways it makes its home in our hearts and believes that the way we continue to surrender ourselves to love is an act of great faith and bravery. This tender and lyrical memoir explores love in its many forms through Clementine's own experiences. With clear eyes and an open heart, she writes about losing her adored mother far too young, about the pain and confusion of first love - both platonic and romantic - and the joy and heartache of adult love. She writes movingly about the transcendent and transformative journey to motherhood and the similarly monumental path to self-love. 'We love as children, as friends, as parents and, yes, sometimes as sexual beings, and none of it is more important than the other because all of it shows us who we are.' How We Love is heartfelt, funny, confessional, revelatory, compassionate - and essential reading. It shows us to ourselves in moments of unwavering truth and undeniable joy.By Geert Mak. 2008
Geert Mak spent 1999 crisscrossing Europe, tracing the history of the continent from Verdun to Berlin, from Saint Petersburg to…
Auschwitz, from Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe on the cusp of a new millennium. The result is an account of that journey, full of diaries, newspaper reports, and memoirs, and the voices of prominent figures and unknown players - from a grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Adriana Warno, the eighteen-year-old ticket taker at the gate of the Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.By Barry Dickins. 1981
By Melissa Roberts, Trevor Watson. 2022
As Russian rockets slam into a Ukraine hospital, Kabul falls to Taliban fanatics, millions flee upheaval and democracy is under…
assault - Australia's women correspondents are there, reporting the stories that shake our world. With empathy they also tell of ordinary people swept up in chaos; the quest for love in war-torn Gaza; a boy's search for his lost mother; women robbed of their dreams by religious zealots. And, for the first time, Australia's most acclaimed women correspondents, many of them still in the field, tell their own personal stories behind the stories. Australian women journalists fought their way from the social page to the front page with courage and single-minded determination. Through her eyes reveals the qualities they bring to our understanding of a turbulent world.