Eleanor Hogan

Into the Loneliness: The unholy alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates by Eleanor Hogan

April 2021, no. 430

Into the Loneliness is the story of two Australian women, opposites in temperament, who eschewed the conventional roles expected of women of their eras, lived unconventional lives, and produced books that influenced the culture and imagination of twentieth-century Australia. The book focuses on their complicated friendship, and on Ernestine Hill’s role in assisting Daisy Bates to produce the manuscript that was published in 1938 as The Passing of the Aborigines, which became a bestseller in Australia and Britain. Hill, a successful and popular journalist, organised the anthropological material and ghost-wrote much of the book, for which Bates privately expressed her gratitude, while not acknowledging it publicly.

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Cadence: Travels with Music: A Memoir by Emma Ayres

by Eleanor Hogan •

August 2014, no. 363

To take to the road on a bike, especially if you are a solo female cyclist, is to make yourself vulnerable, submitting yourself to hours of muscle-taxing solitude and reliance on the kindness of strangers. But while slower and physically more arduous than other modes of transport, cycling brings you closer to your surroundings. It offers different perspectives and unexpected insights.

ABC Classic FM breakfast presenter Emma Ayres’s Cadence recounts her ride on a Cannondale named Vita from Shrewsbury to Hong Kong with her violin (Aurelia) strapped to her back. Part memoir, part travel writing, Cadence is more than an account of an intercontinental cycling voyage. It is a coming-of-age story that turns on the trope of ‘[c]adence in music, cadence in cycling, cadence in speech’, narrating Ayres’s evolution as a professional musician, a serious amateur cyclist, and a radio broadcaster.

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