Book Description

This is a dual biography, the story of Louis Esson, the distinguished playwright who has been called 'the father of Australian drama', and his wife Hilda, who did her own pioneering in the theatre and in public health. The plays they wrote and performed reflected the drama of their lives: creative angst, intellectual conflict, untimely death, romantic entanglement, jealousy and despair. Yet Peter Fitzpatrick's book is more than a good read. As a critical appraisal of Louis Esson's plays and an exploration of the relationships the Essons had with well known literary and theatrical figures in Australia and overseas, the book is an exploration of a developing Australian culture and identity. It is also about the dynamics of a marriage between two brilliant people, reflecting not only the patterns of gender relationships in their own time, but universal passions and strategies. ... Read more

Book Description

This concise introductory study showcases Carey's storytelling talents. Carey's success, in Australia and elsewhere, owes much to his ability to lure his readers into a world at once familiar and fantastic. Carey's fictions are products of the dream factories of twentieth century corporate capitalism. He debunks the utopian myths of western consumer culture, revealing beneath New Age cant the brutal worship of wealth and power. The world of which they speak is less exotic than grotesque but it is not, for all that, irredeemable. Huggan argues that Carey's fictions present both a satire on destructive material values and a defence of the right to change, to invent new pasts and futures. ... Read more

Book Description

Henry Handel Richardson is one of Australia's major novelists, and one of the most elusive. An expatriate for most of her life, she worked hard to maintain her privacy, and to conceal her personal views behind an impartial authorial style. This study explores the well-springs of her fiction, her abiding concerns, and the intellectual heritage which informs her major writing. ... Read more

Book Description

In this, the first biography of Alice Henry (1857-1943), Diane Kirkby presents us with an intelligent, formidable woman of great energy who was a pioneer in both the Australian and American labor movements early in this century and a feminist who fought for the rights of millions of women in both countries. Alice Henry The Power of Pen and Voice is sympathetically written and it is clear that in the course of the author's meticulous research she has developed great warmth for her subject and the friends who were central to her life, women such as the Australian writer Stella Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career, who supported Alice Henry throughout her difficult old age. While empathizing with Alice Henry, readers can increase their understanding of a critical period in history, when progressive networks were far more international than might be expected and women played a central role in the creation of the welfare state. ... Read more

Book Description

Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfied in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Angela Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Writing at a time when the First World War and the changing attitudes towards empire problematized definitions of foreignness, the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

A Surprise!
I came at this book from the Mansfield camp and a little exhausted by all of the stale comparisons between Mansfield and Woolf. However, Smith's work is full of well-researched and thoughtful analysis. It's an amazing study--particularly of Mansfield, I think--and one that belongs on the same shelf as Kaplan's KM & THE ORIGINS OF MODERNIST FICTION and Dunbar's RADICAL MANSFIELD. Essential reading for Mansfield scholars and fans alike.

A Surprise!
I came at this book with an interest in Mansfield (and to a lesser extent Woolf) and was tired of the countless studies (chapters and essays) comapring the two. Needless to say, then, I approached this study with trepidation and assumed I would not think much of it. But what a surprise! Smith has done a terrific job with her research and has produced a study that towers over the others I've seen. The study smells of sweat and hard work. I put it alongside Sidney Janet Kaplan's and Patricia Dunbar's studies of Mansfield. It is one of the best. ... Read more

Book Description

The letters in this volume cover the eighteen months Katherine Mansfield spent in England, France, and Switzerland from May 1920 to the end of 1921. It is the period of her finest stories, and when her life took its most decisive turn. The qualities of her earlier correspondence remain undiminished--the precision and directness, the intelligence and wit, the dark incisiveness and sheer fun. Above all, these letters attest to her considerable courage, against increasingly adverse odds, as she approached the final years of her life. ... Read more

Book Description

"I danced and danced because the neon light across the road had just blinked on, because it was the middle of spring, because I was twenty-one, because my father was playing beside me. . . ."

In this vivid, seductive, gorgeously written memoir, Mandy Sayer recounts the fascinating years she spent performing on the streets of New York and New Orleans with her father. Gerry Sayer was a jazz drummer, a beguiling Irish charmer with a million stories and an insatiable love for jam sessions and all-night parties. Mandy grew up captivated by his outrageous tales even after he left the family for good and her mother descended into the distance of drink. When her siblings failed him by rejecting the bohemian performing life, Mandy saw her chance to become a character in his stories, part of the only life he really loved. So she learned to tap-dance, and they set off together to satisfy their grand ambitions on the toughest stage in the world--New York.

Driven by their dream of making it big, Mandy and Gerry arrived in the city with no place to stay and only costumes to their names. They became part of the thrilling, precarious world of street performers--jugglers, magicians, fire-eaters, dancers--who eked out their livings at the mercy of the elements, the cops, complaining neighbors, and lurking thieves. In cinematic detail, Sayer tells of the first exhilarating season in New York City, earning $200 a night on Columbus Avenue; offsetting the physical pain of endless performance with the incomparable rush that accompanied it; the long, difficult winter in New Orleans, surviving on avocados and raw vegetables in unheated apartments; and their final unforgettable return to New York.

Entwined with this singular story of a busker's life is the deeper, more intimate story of Mandy's transformation from a girl searching for her father's love into a woman who could invent her own language and find her own voice. For ultimately Dreamtime Alice is a triumphant record of a young woman's discovery that she could create her own story at last. ... Read more

Reviews (8)

Streets of passage
As the author of the authoritative how-to book on street performing (Be a Street Magician!: A How-To Guide), I can tell you that this girl has been there. The book's authenticity bleeds through on every page--the street characters, the money obsession, the work ethic, the vulnerability to all the world's scammers. If you want to know how it is to play the street for a living, it's all here.
But this is more than just a book about the street. In a strange way, it's a chick book in that it explores with earnestness and innocence the yearning of a 20-year-old girl for her good-for-nothing father. But it's more than that, too, because chicks may find the grittiness, sleaze, and violence to be a bit more than Kate Chopin usually offers.
One good sign: Some nights, I found myself involuntarily staying up reading this book until 1 or--God forbid!--2 am. I just couldn't stop reading! Parts of the book dragged, but then, why couldn't I put it down? I can't tell you except to say that the narrative held me.
I know street performers who played New York City during the early '80s and knew Mandy, and they talk favorably about her (if you're reading this, Mandy, they'd like to contact you!).
At times, I wondered whether the narrator fully realized her emotional attachment to her father, and I still wonder. But the book built to a triumphant emotional ending that I didn't expect. It's not the kind of Hollywood ending that we like to expect not to expect, but instead, a triumph of the soul. I learned something about maturing innocence and the growth of the personality.
The book doesn't move like a novel, for this is the recollection of real life. Action doesn't proceed as mathematically as it does in a Le Carre or Grafton book; instead, it proceeds in stalls and jerks. But that's why we love memoirs, isn't it? To breathe in the whiff of what reallly happened. To utter "Wow, she lived through it." Not to pretend, but to know what's true.
Give the book a read. You'll learn something about the street and, at the same time, streets of passage.

A POIGNANT, SAVVY MEMOIR
Very much like the two men who looked out from prison bars, one seeing mud and the other seeing stars, Mandy Sayer saw more rainbows than rain when eking out a precarious living tap dancing with her jazz drummer father, Gerry, on the streets of New York City and New Orleans. In a powerful, boldly provocative memoir, Dreamtime Alice, she reveals that her rosy- hued vision was airbrushed by a hunger to share in the life of her alcoholic father, an Irish charmer, a raconteur par excellence who looked to her to draw an audience and looked the other way when his friends sought her sexual favor.

Dreaming of their future, she wrote, "It was in New York... that we would be successful... It was there that we would have lots of glorious fun and return home with bags of money. There that we would live out the long, warm nights that would later fill the repertoire of my father's stories, a repertoire of which I had longed to be a part."

Ms. Sayer, who has been named among "10 Best Young Australian Novelists" has woven a rich tapestry of her recollections - the surface is brilliantly colored, a sometimes coke induced kaleidoscope of aspirations and full money buckets while the seamy underside reveals a busker's gritty existence. Familiar streets and those who earn their living on them will not look the same to us again after having seen them through Ms. Sayer's eyes.

In 1983 the father/daughter act, he 63, she 20, left Australia with little more than their costumes. Rather than the mecca of her imagination, glinting "like a thousand Chrysler buildings," New York City was a tract of unyielding pavement which taught her how to cope - with the police (including a lecherous officer who offered protection for a price), with rival entertainers, with complaining businesses, and with capricious weather.

She met Romano, a handsome street magician, then Bruno and Grimaldi: "Drawn to characters who lived just beneath the surface of convention." When winter threatened, the pair fled to New Orleans and a pink courtyard room behind a witchcraft shop, where Ms. Sayer, an avowed believer in the supernatural, uncomplainingly settled in.

Bourbon Street proved even less hospitable than the Fifth Avenue entrance to Central Park, officially limiting their work evening to a two hour stint so as not to compete with indoor nightclub entertainment. Their small nest egg dwindled. Gerry, concerned that he would be deported, found an American wife in a local bar. Although he was not divorced from Mandy's mother, he married in order to obtain a green card.

Throughout the dank chill of Louisiana's winter the pair subsisted on raw vegetables and avocados. Then, with hope again high, they returned to New York City. But there was no reprise. She soon fell ill and was trundled off to an emergency room not by Gerry but by a neighbor. After recovering from an almost fatal disorder she walked alone from Bellevue Hospital, "I fixed my eyes on the horizon," she writes, "....numb with the realization that I had lost faith in my beautiful, difficult father."

Ms. Sayer does not reflect with bitterness but rather with grace, humor and understanding, describing their 18 month odyssey as having "made me grow in directions I could never have anticipated... For I started off wanting to become a character in my father's story, now he's a character in mine."

And what a remarkable story she gas given us - more than a vivid recollection of life on the edge this is a meritorious coming-of-age tale, radiant yet unsparing. Ms. Sayer's enchanting mix of pluck and naivete will win hearts; her haunting, lyrical way with words will garner plaudits. Dreamtime Alice is her triumph.

Ultimately disappointing
As a tap dancer and as someone who loves both New York and New Orleans, I really wanted to like this book. It just left me cold. Maybe it was that her obsessive search for an orgasm was such a lame metaphor. Maybe it was her complete self-absorption. Maybe it was the fact that her father seemed to be a much, much more interesting character than she was, and yet he wasn't given nearly as much play. While it definitely has its moments, this book is ultimately a disappointment. And when she finally HAS an orgasm, my guess is most readers will say "so what?"

If you've spent time in NYC or NO, you will enjoy this book.
If you've ever wondered "Who IS this person? Why are they here?" while watching a street performer, this book might satisfy your curiosity. I enjoyed the descriptions of life in the "underworld" of New York and New Orleans.

Did I miss something here?
Reading all the other rave reviews, I'm left wondering what I missed. For me, this book totally failed to engage me or even make me care about Mandy and what happened to her. I found her treatment shallow and the whole tale somehow lacked real substance. It just never came alive for me. It seemed there could have been so much more yet all we got was surface descriptions. ... Read more

Book Description

This is the first biography of MartinBeckett Boyd (1893-1972), Anglo-Australian novelist and member of Australia's best known family of artists. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A general biography on the way to becoming a minor classic
Martin Boyd A Life
By Brenda Niall
First edition: Melbourne University Press 1988
Martin Boyd (1893-1972) is a contender for recognition as Australia's greatest novelist. Dr Niall's is the only full-scale biography available so it is gratifying that this book is itself a remarkable achievement.

Boyd was an enigmatic figure. He wrote principally about life in Australian settings yet he spent most of his life living in England and on the Continent. No simple view of the writer emerges from his fiction, and the picture given in his correspondence differs significantly from what emerges from his personal diaries.

Niall had good access to the friends of Boyd who remained alive, to his larger family, the houses he lived in, and much of his writing. I suppose this biography could be said to be authorized although the researcher has not shied away from controversy.

It remains a general biographer and specialists will want more. Coming from a continuing family of visual artists of acclaim, Boyd was very serious about his "hobby" of painting and drawing, and more needs to be said on this. Who were the Bloomsbury people he met who so influenced him? Then it would be interesting to know about the book reviews Boyd published anonymously to fit a convention of the times. And Boyd has always had a public in the United States, but what did U.S. reviewers say about his writing? Niall acknowledges that since she finished writing on Boyd (to go on to another renowned biography) new and important data have come to light.

Niall's life of Boyd remains an authoritative general biography and seems set to become at least a minor classic of the genre.

Kevin J. Batt - Ph.D. Melbourne, Australia

(c/- daniel_batt@msn.com) ... Read more