Australia Books

A review of the great ones - Mahatma Ghandi to Madonna, Jesus Christ to Jimmy Carter from a Non-American and Non-European veiwpoint. Great bits on Australians as Jones is a great Australian thinker, but includes Asia and the Pacific as well. A great reference tool. Do your best to find it.

Banfield a Newspaper man and his wife escape conventional lifestyle and settle Beautiful Dunk Island off the north Queensland coast (Australia). This is a book for those who work and live in the urban jungle, It leads the imagination to delight in the simple and uncomplicated existence we all at times long for, but haven't the time to discover. Their abode (Dunk Island) is now a millionaire's playground. However, the cottage and surrounds that Banfield established are preserved as part of a National Park. This book is a good read. I am sure all that read it will be tempted to visit the area it portrays. I know I did. It was and is a wonderful tropical paradise.

This story is a testament to a mother who found answers for her children who had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Here you will read of her practical journey, the trail and errors in finding what she needed to bring order out of chaos and find a way to live normally as a family.

I read an abstract of this one day in a Doctors waiting room 2-3 years ago and have been waiting for the oportunity to find the full book. Written in the trenches, this is the most graphic depiction anyone could imagine about the harshness of war (Galipolli).
An engrossing read I only put down because I came to the end, unfortunately.

There are very few writers who have been able to respectfully penetrate the aboriginal culture and still preserve what is sacred. Rose's book immerses the reader into another reality, and she does so without superficial glorification or gratuitous pandering. Much better known in Australia than in the US (where the number of the books available about aboriginals is limited), this book is the best I've found. I recommend it to the reader who wants to get past the tour guide/New Age fare and into a much more authentic point of view.

I bought a copy of this book after seeing reviews just after it came out. My mother visiting from USA fell in love with it, couldn't find it in bookstores, so I gave it to her to take back. Now it's a rare book! It is the kind of book that can change lives as it provides great insight into the experiences Sally has gone through in her transition from WASPish TV person (excuse my lack of ability to come up with a better description) to person who is fully integrated with the aborigial community in Australia. No wonder it's become a rare book so quickly!

But I Thought It Had Already Been Discovered!

This is a good quality, glossy calendar, with twelve scenic photos. Featured are the downtowns of Brisbane, Melbourne and, of course, Sydney, as well as six landscapes from around Australia. The dates are in the corner of amply-sized grid boxes. Also included are the phases of the moon, which I enjoy having, and the previous and following months appear on each page.

After ordering this calendar, I wondered whether it would have U.S. holidays or Australia holidays. The publisher is located in the U.S.A. but, I am delighted to find, has included dates of events and holidays from around the world. For example, "Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (US)," "April Fools Day," "Senior Appreciation Day (Japan)," "Chung Yeung Festival (China)," and "Waitangi Day (NZ)." The equinoxes and solstices are here, of course, but so are the dates of Daylight Savings Time changes (U.S. and Canada).

Of the photos, all are colorful, but I would have preferred something less familiar than the shot of the "sails" of the Sydney Opera House. Regretfully, the shot of downtown Melbourne has a purple tint--probably because the skyline is not, in itself, remarkable. A big bonus: we are spared having to look at the all-too-familiar Ayers Rock for a whole month!

I've had this book for decades & use it often! I lived in Indonesia for 5 years & started using this book soon after I returned (a couple of decades ago) when my memory & taste of the Indonesian dishes were still fresh! Very authentic, with the following caveat -- Ms. Johns lives(d) in Australia at the time of writing this book, I believe. She made several adjustments for ingredients which I'm sure were necessary 25 or so years ago. For example, lime or lemon juice instead of tamarind water; similar substitutions for candle nuts, lemon grass (I'm not sure about this one), kaffir lime leaves...... If you know the cuisine & compare recipes in different books as I do, this kind of thing is easy to pick up & re-correct for. If not, the dish will still be good. There are a few nice color photos. The index is hard to use -- dishes not always listed the way I'd look them up. All in all, a very nice Indonesian c/b. Too bad it's out of print.

The title of this first collection of short stories (1986) by Janette Turner Hospital says it all. These characters are dislocated by space, time, religion, education, unforeseen events, even death. And though they may travel to the four corners of the earth, whether it is India, Canada, the United States or Australia, they never really ever leave their homeland. When left unattended, their thoughts return there.

Most of these stories have hard sayings. A burn victim, formerly a pretty young girl ("Golden Girl") must face a reconstructed future with a reconstructed face. A dying woman ("The Dark Wood") who two days ago learned of her death sentence longs to putter in her tomatoes. A friend whom the narrator has just left is killed by an automobile in "Some Have Called Thee Mighty and Dreadful" leaving the narrator overcome with guilt: "If I had invited them back to our house. If I had only tilted time a few minutes to one side or the other. This is shock. Of course I am not responsible. Life is random, brutally indifferent." In "After Long Absence" a woman returns to Brisbane and her family whose fundamentalist religion she has long since left behind. Her teetotaler father, so as not to embarrass her in front of her friends in a university lounge, "takes polite sips" of white wine. She, on the other hand, is unwilling to select a passage and read from the Bible as is the custom for visitors to do in her parents' home at the evening meal. "It cannot be a concession anywhere near as great as my father's two sips of wine. . . Yet I canot do it. 'I am sorry,' I say quietly, hating myself. . . Outside I hug the mango tree and weep for the kind of holy innocence that can inflict appalling damage; and because it is clear that they, the theologically rigid, are more forgiving than I am."

As always, Ms. Hospital gets right to the heart of the matter as well as the hearts of her readers.

This book is for anyone wanting to research the origins of Western musical culture in the Antipodes, with a close look at "the grandfather of Australian music" the composer and teacher Alfred Hill. Almost forgotten by his countrymen today, author John Mansfield Thompson acknowledges for the first time in this authoratitive book the importance of a fascinating life in music lived "down under" far from the more universally known and appreciated cultural mainstreams of Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth century. Hill used enormous personal influence and creative resource to initially help found the early orchestras and choral societies in Australia and New Zealand and was a revered teacher and conductor in his own time. Receiving his musical training in Europe at a time when names like Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Grieg were around, he is in some ways the creative figure who brought the flavour of all this music and the culture surrounding it to his antipodean home. An important chapter in the musical history of "down under" for anybody interested in knowing what was going on there musically in the early part of last century.