Paul Brunton is Emeritus Curator, State Library of New South Wales and an Honorary Associate of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney. He was Senior Curator, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, from 2002–12 and Curator of Manuscripts from 1986 to 2001. He is preparing an annotated edition of the original handwritten journal and logbook of William Bligh kept on HMS Bounty, 1787–1789, for publication by Allen & Unwin.
This volume is the fourth and last dealing with Australian writing in this American series of reference books. All four volumes have been edited by Selina Samuels; the editor and contributors are Australian. Fifty-seven writers who produced their first major work after 1975 are included.
What is literary biography? According to the DLB advisory board, it is ‘career biographies, tracing the deve ... (read more)
The final volume of the diaries of Donald Friend covers the years from 1966, when he was fifty-one, to 1988, the year before his death. For a little over half this period (represented by more than two thirds of the diary entries), Friend lived in Bali. He did so in some splendour, waited on by a retinue of houseboys and visited by the distinguished and the celebrated. This was before mass tourism. ... (read more)
My Brilliant Career, the book Miles Franklin published in 1901 when she was twenty-one, cast a shadow over her entire life. It sold well and made her famous for a time, but it did not lead to the publication of more works. The glittering literary career foretold by the critics did not eventuate, at least in Franklin’s opinion. ‘The thing that puzzles me,’ she wrote to Mary Fullerton on New Y ... (read more)
The twenty or so elegant Georgian buildings designed by Francis Greenway that stand in Sydney today are a civilising presence. Yet these represent less than a quarter of his output. The destruction has been wanton and impoverishing.
Greenway was born in November 1777, near Bristol. His father was a stonemason and builder, as had been generations of Greenways. Nothing is known of his early years, ... (read more)
It is not often that a truly ground-breaking work appears, publishers’ hype notwithstanding. Paul Eggert has produced two such works in the one year, which must be a record. Both relate to Henry Lawson (1867–1922), arguably the most famous Australian writer of all time.
... (read more)
This is the first major biography of Australia’s greatest book collector, David Scott Mitchell, whose peerless Australian and Pacific collection established the Mitchell Library. Mitchell was born in 1836, in Sydney. He rarely left the city and never ventured beyond New South Wales. Living on inherited wealth, he devoted his life to collecting 40,000 printed works, as well as manuscripts, maps, ... (read more)
