Remembered Gardens


Book Description

Presents the story of Elizabeth, Edna and six other women whose passions for their gardens and for garden making have shaped our relationship with the Australian landscape. Through personal records and public archives, the author brings to life these women's experiences.




Remembered Gardens 1788-2000


Book Description

Elizabeth Macarthur sailed into the fledgling settlement of New South Wales in 1790, after a horrific voyage from England. As a comfort and a way to evoke home in this distant and foreign land, Elizabeth set about creating her remembered garden, filling it with roses and oak trees. Edna Walling came to gardening in the 1920s, one hundred and fifty years after Elizabeth's first encounter with the Australian 'wilderness'. Immediately captivated by the natural landscape and indigenous plants, she became a leading proponent of the Australian native garden. Through personal records and public archives, Holly Kerr Forsyth brings to life these women's experiences. Their challenging and sometimes tragic stories are set against the backdrop of their gardens, which provided them with sanctuary and a way to express themselves in this often hostile environment. For later women like Edna Walling and Kath Carr, gardens also allowed them to carve out a significant career and reputation. Beautifully illustrated, Remembered Gardens celebrates these women's lives with more than two hundred photographs of some of Australia's foremost gardens. It is a rich commemoration of more than two centuries of gardening in Australia and of the role of women in establishing a rich gardening heritage. Australia's gardens would not be the same without them.




Genteel women


Book Description

During the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, colonial expansion prompted increasing numbers of genteel women to establish their family homes in far-flung corners of the world. This work explores ways in which the women’s values, as expressed through their personal and household possessions, specifically their dress, living rooms, gardens and food, were instrumental in constructing various forms of genteel society in alien settings. Lawrence examines the transfer and adaptation of British female gentility in various locations across the British Empire, including Africa, New Zealand and India. In so doing, she offers a revised reading of the behaviour, motivations and practices of female elites, thereby calling into doubt the oft-stated notion that such women were a constraining element in new societies.




The ReaperÕs Garden


Book Description

Winner of the Merle Curti Award Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize Longlisted for the Cundill Prize ÒVincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning and powerful historical imagination, he calls upon the departed to explain the living. The ReaperÕs Garden stretches the historical canvas and forces readers to think afresh. It is a major contribution to the history of Atlantic slavery.ÓÑIra Berlin From the author of TackyÕs Revolt, a landmark study of life and death in colonial Jamaica at the zenith of the British slave empire. What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The ReaperÕs Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in AmericaÑand a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force. In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s, the Grim Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in JamaicaÑbelonging and status, dreams for the future, and commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape, Brown unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes, eulogies, and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins, and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers, all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, Òmortuary politicsÓ played a consequential role in determining the course of history. Insightful and powerfully affecting, The ReaperÕs Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.




First Knowledges Design


Book Description

Aboriginal design is of a distinctly cultural nature, based in the Dreaming and in ancient practices grounded in Country. It is visible in the aerodynamic boomerang, the ingenious design of fish traps and the precise layouts of community settlements that strengthen social cohesion. Alison Page and Paul Memmott show how these design principles of sophisticated function, sustainability and storytelling, refined over many millennia, are now being applied to contemporary practices. Design: Building on Country issues a challenge for a new Australian design ethos, one that truly responds to the essence of Country and its people. About the series: Each book is a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and editors; the series is edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia. Other titles in the series include: Songlines by Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly (2020); Country by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (2021); Plants by Zena Cumpston, Michael Fletcher & Lesley Head (2022); Astronomy (2022); Innovation (2023).




House of Leaves


Book Description

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.




Landscape, Association, Empire


Book Description

This book tells a compelling story about invasion, settler colonialism, and an emergent sense of identity in place, as seen through topographical and landscape images by seven fascinating artists. Their ways of imagining the Vandemonian landscape are part of a much larger story about how aesthetic forces shaped empire and colony, place and migration, and people’s lives. They remain intriguing through-lines of global significance and local meaning.







The Broadview Anthology of Poetry - Second Edition


Book Description

Among the poets new to this edition are such leading names as Americans Robert Pinsky, Louise Erdrich and Louise Glück; Britons James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy; and Canadians Anne Carson, Robert Bringhurst, and Christian Bök. A number of names who may be new to many readers of poetry are also included among them: Ohioan Debra Allbery, Vancouverite Elise Partridge, and the Cree poet Connie Fife; as with the first edition, the editors have endeavored to include much that is fresh as well as much that is familiar. There are many additions to the selections from poets who appeared in the first edition including selections from the recent work of Leonard Cohen, Les Murray, and Margaret Atwood. As before, the anthology includes work from English-language poets throughout the world from India, Africa, and the Caribbean as well as from Britain, North America, and Australia. Although the selections from the work of poets of earlier eras are largely unchanged from the first edition, there have been some changes; among poems added for this edition are Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Bradstreet’s “Employment,” Dickinson’s “I cannot live without You,” Frost’s “Once by the Pacific,” and Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” As before, the text emphasizes work of the past century; poems from 1900 or later take up more than half of the anthology’s pages. In its first edition The Broadview Anthology of Poetry included biographical information about the poets at the back of the anthology; for the new edition, biographical material appears in a headnote to each poet. Two other features are also new to this edition: the date of first publication is appended after each poem, and line numbering is used throughout. The numbers have been kept unobtrusive, however; as with the first edition, the designers have endeavored to give a clean look to the pages of the anthology. A substantial section on prosody, figures of speech, and so on is included as an appendix.




Abraham Lincoln


Book Description

This biography of the sixteenth president explores Lincoln's life and political career along with insights into his philosophy, religious views, and moral character.