Paul Carter

A take no prisoners' approach to life has seen Paul Carter heading to some of the world's most remote, wild and dangerous places as a contractor in the oil business. Amazingly, he's survived (so far) to tell these stories from the edge of civilization, and reason.

Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse

An Illustrated Almanac of Technical Information

The Backstage Handbook

British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering Staff

Parenting a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Strength Life Legacy

Base Building

LRB 365

Places Made After Their Stories shows how the emotional geographies we carry inside us and the ecstatic desire at the heart of democratic community-making can come together to inform contemporary landscape and urban design. Using Australian case studies of public space design from Alice Springs to Perth and Melbourne. Paul Carter describes a new approach to place-making in which topography and choreography fuse. He counters the symbolic neglect of functionalist design with a brilliant account of poetic and graphic techniques developed to materialize ambience. Carter describes a practice of sense-making and form-making that embodies fundamental gestures of welcome, arrangement, and exchange in the built setting.

Design and the Art of Choreotopography

Places Made After Their Stories

Sally Friedman Carter

Backstage Handbook

Yet More Tales of a Country Doctor is the third in Carter's trilogy of stories drawn from his much-loved rural practice, where he served the local community as their doctor for thirty-three years. The stories, which are all drawn from true events, reflect the very personal, as well as equal, relationships which are a feature of country life. Like life itself, many of these stories are simultaneously both funny and sad. Yet More Tales of a Country Doctor, through the exploits of the various characters, explores many of the issues which face us all, and celebrates the indomitable spirit of every day heroes in overcoming whatever obstacles might lie in their way. As with the two earlier books in the trilogy ("Tales of a country doctor", and "The further tales of a country doctor"), this collection of stories will keep you highly entertained, and stay in your mind for a long time to come.

Yet More Tales of a Country Doctor

In a narrative of Australian history, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy are utilized as interpretive tools in considering the writings of explorers and settlers to determine the attitudes and perceptions of Europeans toward their new home

An Exploration of Landscape and History

The Road to Botany Bay

In Repressed Spaces Paul Carter tours the cultural history of agoraphobia, the fear of open space. Its symptoms were first described in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton, the British scholar and writer, although it wasn’t until 1871 that Carl Otto Westphal coined the term to describe several of his patients who experienced severe anxiety when walking through streets or squares. There have been many attempts to explain and treat the condition: critics of modernization have linked it to bad city planning; psychoanalysts, calling it "street panic", have blamed it on the Oedipus complex; psychiatrists have tied it to existential insecurity and describe it as the fear of places or situations that have triggered panic attacks. Freud believed that agoraphobia, like all phobias, was part of an "anxiety neurosis" and had a sexual origin. Taking as his starting-point the fact that Freud himself was agoraphobic, and analyzing the way people have negotiated open spaces from Greek and Roman times to the present day, Paul Carter finds that "space fear" ultimately results from the inhibition of movement. Along the way, the author asks why Freud repressed his agoraphobia, and examines literature, the work of architects and theorists – including Le Corbusier, Walter Benjamin and R. D. Laing – artists such as Munch, Lapique and Giacometti, and the German "street films" of the 1920s. He concludes by proposing a new way of regarding open space, a new "poetics of agoraphobia", one that is sensitive to the agoraphobe’s point of view and provides lessons for architects and urban planners today.

The Poetics of Agoraphobia

Repressed Spaces

Translations is a personal history written at the intersection of colonial anthropology, creative practice and migrant ethnography. Renowned postcolonial scholar, public artist and radio maker, UK-born Paul Carter documents and discusses a prodigiously varied and original trajectory of writing, sound installation and public space dramaturgy produced in Australia to present the phenomenon of contemporary migration in an entirely new light. Migrant space-time, Carter argues, is not linear, but turbulent, vortical and opportunistic. Before-and-after narratives fail to capture the work of self-becoming and serve merely to perpetuate colonialist fantasies. The ‘mirror state’ relationship between England and Australia, its structurally symmetrical histories of land theft and internal colonisation, repress the appearance of new subjects and subject relations. Reflecting on collaborations with Aboriginal artists, Carter argues for a new definition of the stranger-host relationship predicated on recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty. Carter calls the creative practice that breaks the cycle of repeated invasion ‘dirty art’. Translations is a passionately eloquent argument for reframing borders as crossing-places: framing less murderous exchange rates, symbolic literacy, creative courage and, above all, the emergence of a resilient migrant poetics will be essential.

Migration, colonial Australia and the creative encounter

Translations, an autoethnography

This biography of Richard Nixon covers his uniquely Southern California life in full circle, from his birth in Yorba Linda to his final resting place just a few yards from the home in which he was born.

California's Native Son

Richard Nixon

Lost Subjects

There is no person so lost as the person falsely assured that he is saved. The devil knows his Bible and recalls that Jesus said: On that day many will say to me, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?" And then will I declare to them, "I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness." (Matthew 7:22-23, ESV) The devil wants to maximize that "many." He wants as many people as possible to put confidence in their sincere confession ("Lord, Lord!"), spiritual gifts (which can be faked and counterfeited), or good works (which can be deceitful). He wants to rob God of glory and rob his children of eternal life. This book wasn't written to steal away your assurance. It was written to explore how Jesus defined the fully-converted life. It was written to light the path that Jesus said his disciples would walk as they followed him. It was written to mark off false paths that lead to deception, death, and ruin. It was written to provide a Biblical grid to support honest self-reflection so that a person might look at the picture of fully-converted Christian living provided by Jesus Christ and fall to their knees and pray, "Is this born in me?" Ask him that and let him give you the only assurance that ever mattered. False assurance has sent more men and women to hell than just about anything else I can think of. The Bible says: Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. (1 Corinthians 10:12, ESV) Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction and many there are who go that way. Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life and there are few who find it. This is the Narrow Way. Blessed are all who walk it.

The Narrow Way

Roger Highfield

A less-than-flattering biography of the great genius draws on archives and interviews to expose a man of powerful emotions and a deeply troubled family life.

The Private Lives of Albert Einstein

The next eagerly awaited, high octane, seat-of-your-pants adventure from the author of the bestselling Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs (she thinks I'm a piano player in a whorehouse) sees (the surely a bit bonkers) Paul Carter circumnavigating Australia on a bio-diesel motorcycle.

One man, one bike and the first lap around Australia on used cooking oil

Is That Thing Diesel?

'Great two-fisted writing from the far side of hell.' - John Birmingham, bestselling author of He Died with a Felafel in his Hand 'A unique look at a gritty game. Relentlessly funny and obsessively readable.' - Phillip Noyce, director of The Quiet American and Clear and Present Danger Paul Carter has been shot at, hijacked and held hostage. He's almost died of dysentery in Asia and toothache in Russia, watched a Texan lose his mind in the jungles of Asia, lost a lot of money backing a mouse against a scorpion in a fight to the death, and been served cocktails by an orang-utan on an ocean freighter. And that's just his day job. Taking postings in some of the world's wildest and most remote regions, not to mention some of the roughest oil rigs on the planet, Paul has worked, gotten into trouble and been given serious talkings to in locations as far-flung as the North Sea, Middle East, Borneo and Tunisia, as exotic as Sumatera, Vietnam and Thailand, and as flat out dangerous as Columbia, Nigeria and Russia, with some of the maddest, baddest and strangest people you could ever hope not to meet. Strap yourself in for an exhilarating, crazed, sometimes terrifying, usually bloody funny ride through one man's adventures in the oil trade. When not getting into trouble on the rigs Paul lives a quiet life in Sydney.

Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs...She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse

Written by one of the most prominent thinkers in sound studies, Amplifications presents a perspective on sound narrated through the experiences of a sound artist and writer. A work of reflective philosophy, Amplifications sits at the intersection of history, creative practice, and sound studies, recounting this narrative through a series of themes (rattles, echoes, recordings, etc.). Carter offers a unique perspective on migratory poetics, bringing together his own compositions and life's works while using his personal narrative to frame larger theoretical questions about sound and migration.

Paul Carter

Books

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