‘This is an outstanding volume of poetry. It is wonderfully original and deliciously complex. Its intellectual pirouettes and cutbacks are a pleasure to follow, always offering an incredibly agile and aesthetically stimulating journey.’ – Lachlan Brown
Earlier in the series, Poppy featured Kate’s poem ‘Frost’ from the same collection. It’s a calming and quiet celebration of the ordinary beauty of nature (read Poppy’s thoughtful post about it here). In a similar vein, this week’s feature poem is an intimate and gentle study of creativity and friendship.
‘In a wild tale arcing from 1845 to the present, in poetry underpinned by meticulous research, we inhabit settler society with all its attendant joys, hardship and grief as we careen with Caroline through her journey of love, loss and horror into madness.’
– Biff Ward, author of In My Mother’s Hands
This week, Valerie Volk writes about her search for her distant relative Anna Werner, who in 1889 left the German town of Lewin to search for her son in the distant colonies of Australia. This search culminated in Valerie’s novel, In Search of Anna, a story that Valerie describes as a journey book, historical fiction, a study of motherhood, a detective novel, and a romantic tale all rolled into one.
This week features Anne Black, author of Pendragon: The life of George Isaacs, Colonial wordsmith. Anne writes about her first encounter with little-known literary icon George Isaacs, and the death certificate that sparked an obsession and a biography.
This week, the poetry spotlight shines once again on award-winning poet Geoff Goodfellow. This week’s poem comes from Waltzing with Jack Dancer: A slow dance with cancer. The collection was written by Geoff in the aftermath of his diagnosis with throat cancer, and chronicles his experiences with treatment, hospitals, and the Big C.
Travelling between England and Australia and working on stage, in film and on television for over fifty years, Ed Pegge knows all the tricks and all the trials of a working actor’s life.
In this guest post, Ed writes about the nuances of fame, and the benefits of taking a brief rest every now and again from being a star.
These are the questions author and teacher Stephen Orr asked himself after visiting the remains of the Auschwitz prison camp. In this guest post, Stephen writes of the importance of feeling pain that is not necessarily yours, and of remembering what has happened in the past as a way of improving the future.
John Read is used to working remotely, and often in accidental isolation. An ecologist and author, John lives on South Australia’s largest privately managed nature reserve with his wife, children and endangered malleefowl and marsupials.
Like many others, we’ve recently begun the transition from office work to working from home. It’s a strange transition to make, and we need some help. We’ve interviewed a collection of our favourite authors to get their best tips, tricks and truths about working from home.
Next in the series is Lainie Anderson. Lainie has been a weekly columnist with Adelaide’s Sunday Mail since 2007, and previously worked at the Herald Sun in Melbourne and The Times in London. In 2017 she travelled to nine countries on a Churchill Fellowship to gauge the significance of the pioneering 1919 flight from England to Australia and the Vickers Vimy aircraft now housed at Adelaide Airport. Lainie was South Australia’s Epic Flight Centenary 2019 program ambassador.
Using war diaries, letters and Churchill Fellowship research from along the race route, Lainie’s Long Flight Home recreates one of the most important – and largely forgotten – chapters in world aviation history.