Now reading: Text OzLit Classics

For Christmas I read Geordie Williamson’s The burning library and a sea-side sinkhole opened up in my reading list. A sinkhole of neglect for many of Australia’s now-unknown literary gems. Yes, I had read Patrick White’s marvellous novels Voss, Tree of Man and The vivisector; Randolph Stow’s great Tourmaline; as well as works by Thomas Keneally,…

… Once it was said they died for us …

The call of a bugle in the early morning. … The day of the dead began. … We stopped by the war memorial. Slowly the others gathered, from the shanties and from the camp, called by that ancient and haunting bugle-cry, whose sound to me is like the memory of a grief so old that…