Tanya Dalziell

Joan London's remarkable body of work, including the award-winning novels and short fiction The Golden Age, Gilgamesh and Sister Ships, tells everyday stories of family, love and loss, with her signature poetic vision. London's stories portray how ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary circumstances and come to live in a world of violence and fear, of beauty and hope. In London Tanya Dalziell takes the reader through the literary career of the Western Australian living treasure, journeying through space and time to offer a unique insight into the development of Australian literature and women's writing across the past four decades. London engages deeply with Joan London's work to reflect on its artistry and the conversations it provokes with the changing times. Dalziell invites readers to traverse London's writing and discover the significant contributions she has made to the contemporary literary landscape.

London

Karen Welberry

Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, The Secret Life of the Love Song (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of The Proposition (2005) and the Grinderman project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. Cultural Seeds brings together an international range of scholars and practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary culture, but set up a dialogue between fields all-too-often separated in the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth; the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the postcolonial Australian-ness of his humour; his interventions in film and his erotics of the sacred. These essays offer compelling insights and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic practice.

Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave

Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics is an accessible guide to the writings of the award-winning Australian author Gail Jones.

Word, Image, Ethics

Gail Jones

Paul Genoni

Half the Perfect World is a social and literary account of the expatriate artist community on the Greek island of Hydra from 1955 to 1964, and is richly illustrated by LIFE Magazine eye-witness photographer James Burke. Fostered by celebrated Australian literary couple Charmian Clift and George Johnston, this fabled 'colony' came to include renowned singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and numerous other writers and artists, including many whose youthful ambitions were never realised. What brought this group to Hydra? What life did they live there? And what does their story reveal about the post-war world? Looking at the Hydra expatriates through their writing, letters, diaries and photographs, Genoni and Dalziell identify a deep restlessness within a rapidly changing time of emerging social movements and counter-cultures, travel, tourism and leisure, shifting geo-political realities, incipient pop-cultures, new technologies of communication and entertainment, and altered understandings of what it meant to live as an expatriate artist.

Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955¿1964

Half the Perfect World

Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, The Secret Life of the Love Song (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of The Proposition (2005) and the Grinderman project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary.

Tanya Dalziell

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