1 comments about Homebush Boy a Memoir.

1. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a novel by Thomas Keneally and wondered about his "inner man" will be richly rewarded by this perceptive, unpretentious, and often light-hearted memoir of life during his 17th year. The year 1952, was, he says, a "reckless, sweet, divinely hectic and subtly hormonal year...the most succulent and the most dangerous [year]," one which "lightly embarked on, [has] not to this day ceased to tease, govern and turn on me."
   
   Capturing the confusion of adolescence, along with the trying on of roles, the dreams of the future, and his own willing surrender to aesthetic and otherworldly influences, he introduces the reader to his family, his school, his neighborhood, his church, and his psyche, as he "hungers for grandeur" and makes decisions which will ultimately affect the course of his life. Vividly depicting his friends, the Celestials, with whom he shares his last year at St. Pat's, a boys' day school about 15 miles outside of Sydney, he reveals himself, at seventeen, as an adequate athlete, an excellent writer, a devoted friend (especially to a blind student, the first ever to sit for the Leaving Certificate from a regular school), a dreamer of literary glory, a devout communicant, and a naïve worshipper-from-afar of the equally naïve Bernadette Curran.
   
   With his characteristically astute eye for imagery and an acute sensitivity (born, in this case, of hindsight) to the pressures pushing him to become a priest, Keneally reconstructs this tumultuous year and the decisions he and his friends ultimately make about their futures. As the reader empathizes with the seventeen-year-old Keneally and appreciates both the atmosphere of Homebush in 1952 and the power of outside forces to affect his life, s/he also appreciates more fully the nature of the true creative urge and the urgency of its release. Less then ten years later, when Keneally's voice finally (and brilliantly) bursts forth, literary history begins a glorious new chapter. Though out-of-print, this book is readily available on Used sites, and Keneally lovers will find it unforgettable. Mary Whipple

No comments about John Monash: A Biography.

5 comments about The Naked Island.

1. it is amazing that with all the hardship that these guys went thru, human nature can still make the best of an awful situation.



2. This is an unforgettable book: informative, educational, poignant and often delightfully humorous. It is a tribute to the British and Australian Forces used as slave labour in the construction of the Burma/Siamese Railway and their ability to live with dignity, compassion and decency under the most deplorable conditions imaginable. This book leaves an indelible impression on the reader and should be required reading for each successive generation.



3. One of my first introductions to Australian and Far East reading of WW11, thoroughly enjoyable, could not put it down until it was finished. Would recommend this book to all generations. Has given me the taste to find out more about the Far East and familiarise myself with further Australian literature. Thought only John Pilger could write riveting literature, I was wrong!



4. The Naked Island

   The autobiography of a young australian soldier who spent long years in captivity as prisoner of war of the Japanese.
   The first part is the description of the military life in Malaya before the attack of the Japanese with many ironical notes on that tedious life from the point of view of a soldier.
   The second part is the description of the useless fight of the Australian and British troops against the overwhelming enemy and then the attempt to escape the capture.
   Then the third, and most interesting part, is the description of the life during three long years of captivity in the different prisons where the writer was imprisoned and in the jungle camps where all prisoners were forced to work without food, facing malaria, beri beri and death for starvation.
   A book I would really recommend.
   Are you looking for another absolutely interesting book about a similar experience?
   Read the famous "Behind bamboo" by Rohan Rivett




5. The author went through some really horrific situations but at the same time can describe the strength of the human spirit. The author also has a great sense of humor. I think books like this are rare these days in our politically correct world. Well worth the read.

No comments about Adela Pankhurst: The Wayward Suffragette 1885-1961 (Melbourne University Press Australian Lives).

No comments about Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land.

No comments about Memoirs from the Corner Country: The Story of May Hunt.

1 comments about Kathleen Petyarre: Genius of Place.

1. This award winning art book is perhaps the best book I've found for explaining quickly and clearly the deep issues involved in interpreting Aboriginal art.

   The essay by Christine Nicholls deals with Petyarre's personal history and the cultural detail and Ian North's contribution focuses more on a personal viewpoint that contextualises the artist and her cultural productivity.

   Kathleen Petyarre is one of the very best contemporary practioners: her art uses current materials but is really traditional in the indigenous Australian sense.

   The book features many colour reproductions of her paintings, diagrams explaining motifs used in her work, and photographs of the artist working in her desert community and engaging at high professional levels around the globe.

No comments about 4000 Bowls of Rice: A Prisoner of War Comes Home.

4 comments about The Singing Line: Tracking the Australian Adventures of My Intrepid Victorian Ancestors.

1. An interesting effort by a distant, if not vague relation to an historically insignificant figure, albeit one from whom myths form with their customary accuracy. What bits of research and experience are fairly presented are harmed, in my view to no benefit, by gratuitous asides regarding her apparently long-suffering companion, family and (soon to be former?) friends. One must wonder what would have been the book had the author not worked for a newspaper, which one might suspect arranged its serialization gratis. The photos beg for the book guillotine.



2. I was fortunate enough to have the chance to live in Melbourne Australia for more than three years. I have experienced large parts of the journey Alice and her husband undertake in their quest to better understand her ancestor's experiences in creating the first telegraph line across Australia.

   I found the book to be very Alice Thomson-centric. She seems to glorify all aspects of her journey while continually placing Charles Todd higher and higher upon his pedestal. I was hoping she would rekindle some of my own memories of the Australia outback. However, Ms. Thomson invariably spends paragraph after paragraph describing her husband's illness or her own tiny adventures driving the Land Cruiser or walking around Coober Pedy. Her descriptions of the local towns and environs is terse, quick, and dull. I do not recommend this book to anyone except Alice Thomson and her immediate family.




3. I bought this book because I am interested in the early explorers and travellers in to the Australian hinterland and because I was about to travel to some of the same areas the author had visited. I found the bits about Todd, the man who came to Australia to look at the stars and ended up connecting Australia to the outside world by a telegraph wire, quite interesting. Although I thought perhaps Alice Thomson was a bit confused as to whether the story was about Alice Todd (the great grandmother for whom she was named) or Charles Todd who laid the line. And I could see where she was coming from in trying to relate the story of her own travels with her husband in the same area and the Todds adventures. But again I'm not sure she pulled it off exactly. By exaggerating her own hardships, she underplayed the genuine difficulties the Todds endured and both stories lost credibility - for me, anyway. But what I really disliked about this book was its horrid comments about Australians and the way they live, in these so-called remote areas. She makes it sound as though one hour out of Adelaide she was alone in the world with people almost unrecognisable as human beings. Spare us the "don't come the raw prawn", "strewth cobber" cliches (which are always only used by the English, anyway). And I hope she feels ashamed at the way she treated people who went out of their way to help her, for a few cheap laughs. In great frustration (it was so nearly a good book) I eventually threw it on the campfire, unfinished, at Lake Eyre, halfway along the Singing Line.



4. This was truly an amazing book. The author involves you in the very foundations that build up the Australian telegraph system - you become part of the history as she takes you through the life of her great-great-grandmother and grandfather. It reveals, once again, how many people gave up so much so that we can have a secure foundation in our society. Well worth owning.

No comments about King of the Australian Coast: The Work of Phillip Parker King in the Mermaid and Bathurst 1817-1822.