Download or read book The Cardboard Crown Text Classics written by Martin Boyd and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Australia and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, The Cardboard Crown presents an unforgettable portrait of an upper middle-class family who love both countries but are not quite at home in either. Martin Boyd is a deeply humane novelist, a writer of family sagas without peer.
Download or read book Swords and Crowns and Rings Text Classics written by Ruth Park and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Park’s Miles Franklin-winning novel brilliantly evokes Australia in the midst of the Great Depression. Written with warmth and affection, Swords and Crowns and Rings is a powerful story about human nature and the strength of an unlikely love.
Download or read book A Difficult Young Man Text Classics written by Martin Boyd and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handsome, proud, reprehensible, misunderstood. Dominic Langton is the dark heart of A Difficult Young Man. His brother Guy can scarcely understand where he fits into the pattern of things or what he might do next. Martin Boyd’s much loved novel is an elegant, witty and compelling family tale about the contradictions of growing up.
Download or read book The Long Prospect Text Classics written by Elizabeth Harrower and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharply observed, bitter and humorous, The Long Prospect is a story of life in an Australian industrial town. Growing up neglected in a seedy boarding house, Emily Lawrence befriends Max, a middle-aged scientist who encourages her to pursue her intellectual interests. Innocent Emily will face scandal, suburban snobbery and psychological torment.
Download or read book I Saw a Strange Land written by Arthur Groom and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-27 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While living in Central Australia Arthur Groom fell under the spell of our harsh and fascinating country, captivated by its limitless distances and unbelievable colour. Hermannsburg, the home of artist Albert Namatjira and of other well-known painters, became Groom's headquarters, and from there he made numerous expeditions into wilder and more inaccessible regions. Travelling on foot with an Indigenous guide and a team of camels, Groom explored the Macdonnell and Krichauff ranges, the desert country past the salty Lake Amadeus, Uluru and the Olgas. Based on the notes and photographs he took as he travelled, I Saw a Strange Land is Groom's wonderful record of his extensive journey through the heart of our continent - our 'strange land.' Arthur Groom (1904-1953) was the son of Arthur Champion Groom, member for Flinders in Australia's first Federal Parliament. Groom grew up on a cattle station in Rosabelle Downs, Queensland and later worked as a jackaroo and a journalist. Groom was passionate about the promotion of national parks and environmental protection and he went on to become the first honorary secretary of the National Parks Association of Queensland in 1930. He founded Binna Burra Lodge on the edge of Lamington Nation Park in Southeast Queensland in 1933 with Romeo Lahey. He is the author of four books including One Mountain After Another (1949) and I Saw A Strange Land (1953).
Download or read book The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke written by C.J. Dennis and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, a comic verse novel, was first published in book form in 1915 and sold more than sixty thousand copies in nine editions within a year. By the mid-1970s nearly three hundred thousand copies had been sold internationally.
Download or read book Down in the City written by Elizabeth Harrower and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Esther Prescott has seen little of life outside her wealthy family's Rose Bay mansion, until flashy Stan Peterson comes roaring up the drive in his huge American car and barges into her life. Within a fortnight they are living in his Kings Cross flat. Moody and erratic, proud of his well-bred wife yet bitterly resentful of her privilege, Stan is involved with his former girlfriend and a series of shady business deals. Esther, innocent and desperate to please him, must endure his controlling ways. This story of a troubled and obsessive marriage, set against the backdrop of postwar Sydney, is devastating. First published in 1957, Down in the City announced Elizabeth Harrower as a major Australian writer. Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928 and moved to London in 1951. She travelled extensively and began to write fiction. Her first novel Down in the City was published in 1957, and was followed by The Long Prospect a year later. In 1959 she returned to Sydney where she began working for the ABC and as a book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1960 she published The Catherine Wheel, the story of an Australian law student in London, her only novel not set in Sydney. The Watch Tower appeared in 1966. No further novels were published until May 2014 when Harrower's 'lost' novel, In Certain Circles, was released. Her work is austere, intelligent, ruthless in its perceptions about men and women. She was admired by many of her contemporaries, including Patrick White and Christina Stead, and is without doubt among the most important writers of the postwar period in Australia. Elizabeth Harrower died in Sydney on 7 July 2020 at the age of ninety-two. 'Down in the City marked the arrival of one of the sharpest authors of psychological fiction in Australian literature. Many of the things that happen in the novel are unpleasant, but are rendered with such intensity and psychological insight that the experience of reading about them is thrilling.' Australian 'a triumph from Text's project to recover forgotten Australian literature. Doused in melancholy and written from an accessible yet unnerving third-person perspective, Harrower's debut is a light read with weighty resonance.' Readings Bookshop
Download or read book The Unknown Industrial Prisoner written by David Ireland and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Miles Franklin Award in 1971. On the shores of Botany Bay lies an oil refinery where workers are free to come and go. But they are also part of an unrelenting, alienating economy from which there is no escape. In the first of his three Miles Franklin Award-winning novels, originally published in 1971, David Ireland offers a fiercely brilliant comic portrait of Australia in the grip of a dehumanising labour system. This edition of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner comes with an introduction by Peter Pierce. David Ireland was born in 1927 on a kitchen table in Lakemba in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer. Ireland started out writing poetry and drama but then turned to fiction. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future. David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagull. textclassics.com.au 'A harsh and remarkable work...it will leave you shaken mildly or terribly according to your life experience.' National Times 'When I think of my favourite Australian novels, two 1970s works by David Ireland are near the top of the list: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Glass Canoe.' Stephen Romei
Download or read book Ash Road written by Ivan Southall and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-25 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best selling Ash Road is an action-packed adventure story, so evocative of rural Australia you can taste the Eucalyptus. It's hot, dry and sweaty on Ash Road, where Graham, Harry and Wallace are getting their first taste of independence, camping, just the three of them. When they accidentally light a bushfire no one would have guessed how far it would go. All along Ash Road fathers go off to fight the fires and mothers help in the first aid centres. The children of Prescott are left alone, presumed safe, until it's the fire itself that reaches them. These children are forced to face a major crisis with only each other and the two old men left in their care. Ivan Southall was the first Australian author to receive the Carnergie Medal, and was awarded the Australian Children's Book Council Book of the Year on three occasions. An icon of Australian children's literature, he wrote over sixty books in his lifetime and has been published in twenty-three different countries. He died in 2008.
Download or read book Outbreak of Love written by Martin Boyd and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our minds are like those maps at the entrance to the Metro stations in Paris. They are full of unilluminated directions. But when we know where we want to go and press the right button, the route is illuminated before us in electric clarity. Diana von Flugel warned her husband: a piece of toast that hard could break a tooth. When Diana goes to Melbourne to have the tooth fixed, Wolfie is far too concerned with finding inspiration for his musical compositions to realise the chain of events he has just set in motion. On Collins Street, Russell Lockwood catches a glimpse of his childhood friend and knows at once that she is a rare woman... Now Diana and Wolfie's marriage is under threat, the Great War is approaching, and no one quite knows where their hearts belong. First published in 1957, the third novel in Martin Boyd's celebrated Langton Quartet is a beguiling comedy of manners about the outbreak of love in inconvenient places. This edition of Outbreak of Love comes with an introduction by Chris Womersley. Martin a' Beckett Boyd was born in Switzerland in 1893. After leaving school, he enrolled in a seminary, but he abandoned this vocation and began to train as an architect. With the outbreak of World War I, he sailed for England where he served in the Royal East Kent Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps. Boyd eventually settled in England after the war. His first novel, Love Gods, was published in 1925. Three years later The Montforts appeared. Following the international success of Lucinda Brayford in 1946 Boyd decided to return to Australia where he wanted to restore his grandfather's house, but by 1951 he was back in London. In the coming decade he was to write the Langton Quartet: The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man, Outbreak of Love, When Blackbirds Sing. In 1957 he went to Rome, where he lived and continued to write until his death in 1972. textclassics.com.au 'His characters are wise, witty and relevant...[Boyd's novel is] an indispensable glimpse into the social and political mores of upper-middle class Melburnians in the years leading up to World War I.' Chris Womersley
Download or read book The Dyehouse written by Mena Calthorpe and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written with unerring skill and insight, The Dyehouse is a masterly portrait of postwar Australia, when industrial work was radically transformed by new technologies and society changed with it. Mena Calthorpe—who herself worked in a textile factory—takes us inside this world, vividly bringing to life the people of an inner-Sydney company in the mid-1950s: the bosses, middlemen and underlings; their dramatic struggles and their loves. This powerful and affecting novel was first published in 1961, and is the hundredth book in the Text Classics series. The new edition comes with an introduction by Fiona McFarlane, acclaimed author of The Night Guest. Mena Calthorpe was born in Goulburn, New South Wales, in 1905, and grew up there. After marrying, Calthorpe moved to Sydney and lived for most of her life in the Sutherland Shire. Working in office jobs and writing in her spare time, she was active in literary groups and in the Labor Party—for some years she was a member of the Communist Party, and she opposed B. A. Santamaria’s attempts to stop communism in trade unions. The Dyehouse (1961) was followed by The Defectors (1969), which dramatised unions’ internal power struggles. Mena Calthorpe’s third and final novel was The Plain of Ala, an Irish migrant story, which was published in 1989. She died in 1996. ‘[The Dyehouse] is executed with a singular combination of charm, grace and tough-mindedness.’ Meanjin ‘The Dyehouse is an extraordinary book—a true ensemble novel, written with astonishing control and animated by compassionate intelligence. With its indelible Sydney setting, it deserves—more than deserves—to take its place among the great Australian novels about work, and to be celebrated as the 100th Text Classic.’ Fiona McFarlane ‘A reminder of how rarely these days fiction tackles the world of work that so dominates our lives...Worth reading as much for its social history and its understanding of human nature as its rendering of the labour/capital clash.’ Australian ‘Vivid, fresh and utterly unsentimental...Re-reading The Dyehouse now I am struck by how technically accomplished it is, and how each of its many characters is made distinct and alive with extraordinary economy...Calthorpe's own experience of factory and office work provides The Dyehouse with many authentic touches (including much detail about the dyeing process) but that is not what generates this novel's compelling power. What is so remarkable is how it captures and presents a microcosmic world, in which the human elements are all parts of a moving whole.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘The Dyehouse has themes that are as true today as they were at the time of writing...Beautifully written.’ Booksellers New Zealand ‘A masterly portrait of post-war Australia...vividly bringing to life the people of an inner-Sydney company in the mid-1950s.’ Womankind ‘The Dyehouse is the perfect novel for the Text Classics centenary. It’s a shining example of a book ‘we’ve never heard of’ that is very good reading indeed...I started reading The Dyehouse last night when I went to bed at 10 o’clock. I became so absorbed in it, that I didn’t turn the light out till four o’clock in the morning. That speaks for itself, I think!’ ANZ LitLovers ‘Fresh and lively...I really can’t recommend this book enough.’ Whispering Gums ‘[A] fascinating novel of women and work.’ Australian Women’s Weekly
Download or read book The Chantic Bird written by David Ireland and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-25 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chantic Bird is the confession of a teenage anarchist, who combines a contempt for contemporary society with a great tenderness and warmth for his younger siblings and for Bee, the girl who looks after them. The first of David Ireland's masterful novels, The Chantic Bird contains the same characteristic indictment of the bovine mindlessness of collective humanity, and the home-owning wage slaves. This edition of The Chantic Bird comes with a new introduction by Geordie Williamson. David Ireland was born in 1927 in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future. David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagull. 'One of the most remarkable novels - first, fifth or fifteenth - to appear on the scene for many a long day...Compassionate and pitiless, savage and sad, ironic and naive, horrifying and farcical.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Gloriously and savagely comic.' Adelaide Advertiser
Download or read book To the Islands written by Randolph Stow and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the uneasy trees rose the hills, and beyond them again the country of the lost, huge wilderness between this last haunt of civilization and the unpeopled sea. Exhausted and losing faith, an Anglican minister flees his mission in Australia’s northwest for the vast emptiness of the outback. In the soul country of the desert the old man searches for the islands of the Aboriginal dead, reflecting on past transgressions and on his life’s work. A Lear-like tale of madness and destruction, published when Randolph Stow was only twenty-two, To the Islands is compelling and wise—a poetic masterpiece. Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished. He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite. For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’. Praise for To the Islands ‘To the Islands is a deeply moving and compassionate novel whose message and wisdom is still important today, which is why it deserves to be recognised as an important work of Australian literature.’ Conversation ‘To the Islands is a masterpiece.’ ANZ LitLovers ‘Powerful and convincing...An Australian classic.’ Anthony J. Hassal
Download or read book The Fringe Dwellers written by Nene Gare and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a remote area of Western Australia, The Fringe Dwellers is the story of two part-Aboriginal sisters, Noonah and Trilby, who live in a family camp on the fringe of white society. Noonah accepts her position—but Trilby refuses to.
Download or read book Wish written by Peter Goldsworthy and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.J. is back living at home in Adelaide, unemployed and drifting after a messy divorce. Then he is offered a job teaching Sign to Eliza. His new pupil is smart, sensitive, attractive - and a gorilla recently liberated from a medical research laboratory by animal rights activists. First published in 1995, the third novel by the acclaimed writer Peter Goldsworthy is unique in Australian literature: a dazzling, moving story about scientific experimentation and ethics, language and love. This edition comes with a new introduction by James Bradley. Peter Goldsworthy has won the FAW Christina Stead Prize for fiction, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Helpmann Award, shared with the composer Richard Mills, for the opera Batavia. His poetry and novels have been widely translated; four of his novels and the short story 'The Kiss' have been adapted for the stage. His most recent book is the short-story collection Gravel, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal for Literature. This year Penguin is publishing His Stupid Boyhood, a comic memoir, and Maestro, his debut novel, is being reissued as an Angus & Robertson Australian Classic. '[Goldsworthy's] greatest achievement...Brave, brilliant, as intellectually challenging as it is playful, it is testament to a restless and unpredictable imagination.' James Bradley 'Stylish, imaginative, poignant, and hugely unsettling.' Australian 'A deeply satisfying book...represents a new achievement in his fiction...Read it. You won't find another novel like it.' Adelaide Review
Download or read book The Suburbs of Hell written by Randolph Stow and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His eyes are on the one eye of the rifle. His mouth splits open his brown beard. He throws up a hand, palm outward, in an unwilled, futile gesture to ward off death. A killer is hounding the seaside town of Old Tornwich. Residents are gripped by fear and suspicion, and the finger of blame is pointed in all directions. But the bodies keep falling and the crimes remain unsolved, the culprit at large. No mere whodunnit, The Suburbs of Hell—its story inspired by a real-life serial killer—is a profoundly disturbing psychological drama with a devastating conclusion, the final work of one of Australia’s greatest writers. Julian Randolph 'Mick' Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer's third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished. He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite. For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’. Praise for The Suburbs of Hell ‘Both a traditional murder mystery and a meditation on the random depredations of death.’ Australian Book Review ‘Poetic accuracy is only one aspect of a rich talent...Mr Stow has a narrative gift as well...He is, in fact a real novelist.’ Observer ‘A cleverly crafted whodunit... Stow is an example of the high calibre of Australian writers of yesterday. Many of these authors have been forgotten or perhaps overlooked. It’s pleasing to see that Text Publishing released this edition in 2015 and continue to foster some of Australia’s buried talents by re-publishing under Text Classics. For fans of the psychological thriller and those readers who enjoy a foray into a metaphorical tale, Stow delivers the goods.’ Salty Popcorn
Download or read book The Long Green Shore written by John Hepworth and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in 1947 but not published until 1995, John Hepworth's debut novel is a gripping account of Australian soldiers fighting in New Guinea at the end of World War II. The product of Hepworth's own experience, The Long Green Shore recounts the lives - and deaths - of a group of soldiers battling the Japanese in the rain-soaked jungle. In sublime prose, it captures the terror and the monotony of war. On its publication The Long Green Shore was met with immediate critical acclaim. It was recognised as one of the world's great war novels. John Hepworth was born in 1921 and lived in Melbourne. A journalist, author, playwright and poet, he is well remembered for his contribution to the Nation Review in the 1970s and for his work at the ABC. He wrote many books, some co-authored with Bob Ellis and others illustrated by Michael Leunig. He died in 1995 soon after learning that The Long Green Shore would finally be published. 'Australia's All Quiet on the Western Front...The timeless record of a generation of men who had it hard and copped it sweet, and went off into battle not knowing what the day would bring.' Bob Ellis 'This novel is a masterpiece of war fiction.' Publishers Weekly
