Charmian Clift and her husband George Johnston were two of Australia's most celebrated writers of the mid-20th century. They also became famous for their personal lives. Having left Australia at first for England, they then moved to Greece and were key figures of a bohemian, expatriate colony on the island of Hydra. The colony became known as cosmopolitan, whilst also given to heavy drinking and extra-marital affairs. Johnston's fictionalised autobiographical novels provide a frank portrait of their marriage, though Clift was more circumspect. In 'The End of the Morning' we have an autobiographical novella by Clift that has just been published for the first time. It is a charming and evocative account of her childhood growing up near Kiama, on south coast of New South Wales, in a small working-class community. As always, Clift's writing is exquisitely clear and precise. Here we learn about her larger-than-life father, an English migrant and quarry mechanic. Her Irish-Jewish mother from rural New South Wales is his foil. We can piece together how a girl from a poor family living close to a wild beach grew up to be an insightful cultural observer and powerful writer.
'In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off. Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time - symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome shaped cover'
During the years of the Great Depression, Cressida Morley and her eccentric family live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a wild beach. Outsiders in their small workingclass community, they rant and argue and read books and play music and never…
It's long been assumed that in the 19th century most women (other than domestic servants) stayed home, limited to being wives and mothers. Catherine Bishop's marvellously researched book completely changes our understanding. Through extensive cross-checking of different kinds of records (such as trade directories, newspapers, and personal accounts) Bishop has given us a startling, fact-based picture of colonial Sydney. Suddenly we see the numerous women running boarding houses, taverns, shops, and various kinds of schools, even owning property. They may have been largely excluded from politics and professions, and subject to coverture, but they were astute and active participants in the public, commercial world -- not the 'angel in the house' of earlier misleading representations.
There are few memorials to colonial businesswomen, but if you know where to look, you can find many traces of their presence as you wander the streets of Sydney. This book brings the stories of these entrepreneurial women to life, with fascinating details of their successes and failures, their determination and wilfulness, their achievements, their tragedies and the occasional juicy scandal.
Until now we have imagined colonial women indoors - as wives, mothers, domestic servants or prostitutes. This book sets them firmly out in the open.
It's well known that in the 20th century Australia reoriented its dependence on a large northern hemisphere power from Britain to America. The shift in military and security cooperation has been central. Undisputed but harder to pin down has been the cultural realignment. Yves Rees gives us a new, historically rich account of how this reorientation has happened. Based on exhaustive research on a large cohort of Australian women who travelled to the United States between 1910 and 1960 for educational, professional and career reasons, Rees shapes the book around detailed stories of ten women. The ten were all achievers, but across fields ranging from a modernist artist, to a musician, a decorator, a swimmer and an economist. What they had in common was finding opportunity in the modern world of which the United States was the acme. They were drawn to it for its size, fast pace of life, new technologies, and much wider opportunities for women than were to be found in Australia. The vivid accounts of these adventurous women give us a whole new way to understand Australia's 20th-century attraction to America.
A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk.
A century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across the Pacific to make their fortune. In doing so, they reoriented Australia towards the United States years before politicians began to lumber down the same path.
For the artist Mary Cecil Allen, this meant spreading the word about American abstract expressionism. For the naturopath Alice Caporn, it meant evangelising fruit juices and salads. For the swimmer Isabel Letham,…
The first major biography of Don Dunstan, one of the few state premiers to stride the international stage and make a lasting mark on Australian life. Don Dunstan was one of the most significant political figures of twentieth-century Australia. As Premier of South Australia, he blazed a trail of reform. But his influence reached far beyond his home state. He was seen as the architect of a new kind of Australian society, and his decade in office marked a golden age.
This is the first comprehensive biography of a larger than life figure. Angela Woollacott recounts how he battled Adelaide's conservative establishment to win office for Labor, and then pioneered Aboriginal land rights, abolished the death penalty, supported women's rights, relaxed censorship and drinking laws and decriminalised homosexuality. He helped to end the White Australia Policy, outlawed racial discrimination, and was an ardent supporter of the arts and food. Although he was much loved by the public, Dunstan's career was marred towards its end by scandal surrounding his personal relationships. After politics, he stayed in the public eye as a writer, TV host, and restaurateur, as well as an advocate of an Australian republic and of gay and bisexual rights.
Dunstan's life story helps us to appreciate just what a watershed era the 1960s and 1970s were in Australia, and to see how one state could, for a time, lead a nation.
