Australian Encounters


Book Description

What happened when Bob Hawke locked horns with Frank Sinatra, when Errol Flynn interviewed Fidel Castro, and when Norman Gunston joined Frank Zappa on stage? Australian Encounters is a one - of - a - kind book, written by Shane Maloney and illustrated by Chris Grosz. With abundant humour, it tells of 50 true encounters - public or private, ill - fated or fortuitous - between a renowned Australian and an international mover and shaker. Featuring politicians, socialites, film stars, artists, entrepreneurs and sporting legends, these portraits capture their subjects in a single, fleeting moment, when paths crossed and personalities collided. Subjects include Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Donald Bradman and Boris Karloff, Margaret Fulton and Elizabeth David, Michael Hutchence and Kylie Minogue, Nana Mouskouri and Frank Hardy, Martina Navratilova, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Brian Burke, Henry Kissinger, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Menzies, Helena Rubinstein, and many more. These lively encounters appear regularly in the Monthly and are presented here as a collection for the first time.







Australasian Bibliography....


Book Description




Tired of Winning


Book Description

Polarised, unequal, enraged and spiritually bereft, the American experiment, under Donald Trump, looks to be on the brink of failure. In this award-winning series of dispatches and essays, Richard Cooke explores US society before, during and after one of the most high-stakes midterm elections in history. From the aesthetics of semi-automatic rifles to the aftermath of a media mass shooting, from #MeToo at the Capitol to the paintings of former president George W. Bush, Cooke's travels take him from the climate change coast all the way to Silicon Valley. But this is not another diner-hopping, two-week car journey into Trump country. Instead, it's a radical effort to capture dissonant and varied Americas, more often unreal than "real". The nation has shattered under a barrage of social estrangement, malign politics, dark money, and the pull of the internet and social media. This chronicle collects the glittering shards. Entertaining, terrifying and timely,Tired of Winningis searing analysis from an inimitable political thinker, set loose on the schisms and the clamour of contemporary America.




The Australia First Movement


Book Description

‘Australia First’ is a good slogan that has been adopted by several quite different political ideologies. This book deals with the movement that began in a small way before 1914, developed slowly from about 1936, and came to an abrupt and inglorious end in March 1942. It grew out of the Victorian Socialist Party and the Rationalist Association At first it attracted literary figures such as Xavier Herbert, Eleanor Dark, Miles Franklin. When it became heavily political, there were among its members and associates three former Communist Party members and one Nazi Party member; some worked for the Labor Party, some for the United Australia Party (later Liberal Party), while there were strong links with the Social Credit Party. One was a paid agent of the Japanese. Some were connected with Theosophy, some with Odinism, and in Victoria most were Irish Catholics with links to Archbishop Mannix and Sinn Fein.




Plein Airs and Graces


Book Description

Plein Airs and Graces examines the extraordinary life of George Collingridge de Tourcey, a landscape painter of the late nineteenth century, just ahead of the Australian impressionists. When he emigrated from France to Australia he grew passionate about the possibilities of his new country, and worked tirelessly to contribute to it - not least for his Discovery of Australia (1895), in which on the evidence of ancient maps he argued controversially for Portuguese and Hispanic pre-discovery of Australia.







His Natural Life


Book Description

His Natural Life has retained Australian classic status for over one hundred years. Scarcely ever out of print since first written during the early 1870s, it has provided successive generations with a vivid account of a brutal phase of colonial life. The main focus of this great convict novel is the complex interaction between those in power and those who suffer, made meaningful because of its hero's struggle against the destructiveness of his wrongful imprisonment. While much of the story is necessarily grim, Marcus Clarke has used elements of romance, incidents of family life and passages of scenic description to both relieve and give emphasis to the tragedy that forms its heart.