Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing

by Janine Burke. Allen & Unwin, 2009.

Reviewed by Ann Skea ann@skea.com

"Creativity is place", says Janine Burke in the introduction to Source. And that place, she believes, is the beginning and end of every artist's journey. It is the childhood realm, "the original source of inspiration and identity". For all but one of the artists and writers in this book, however, it was not their birthplace but a found location in which they produced their major works. As the chapter titles in Source indicate, Burke has chosen a wide and disparate range of artists through which to explore this idea: 'Georgia O'Keeffe and the Desert', 'Picasso's Provence', 'Karen Blixen's Homelands', 'Jackson Pollock on Long Island', 'Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in Sussex', 'Ernest Hemingway in Key West', 'Monet, Blanche Hochedé and Giverny' and 'Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Utopia'. She outlines the creative lives of each of these men and women, discusses their desires and disaffections, their marriages, passions, strengths and weaknesses, and their work. She also visits the places in which they were most creative and offers her own vision of what inspired them. Inevitably, given the very unusual lives of all of her subjects, their stories involve "mourning and regeneration", and "patterns of illness, alcoholism, syphilis, breakdowns and suicide". But these are also stories of achievement and rebirth.

Source is an interesting book, not just because of the lives it documents but also because of the similarities which Burke traces between these creative lives. Sadly, the book cannot reproduce all the artistic work she discusses, but there is a good range of full-colour plates which help to illustrate her themes.Of particular interest, is her account of the work of Blanche Hochedé, the daughter of Alice Hochedé who became Monet's lover and, later, his wife. Blanche was part of Monet's household almost constantly, from the time he first took her family into his Vétheuil home when they were declared bankrupt, until his death at Giverny in 1926. As a teenager, Blanche decided to become an artist and she began to work beside Monet, learning all that she could from him. He, in turn, encouraged her and also painted her at work. Eventually, she became his studio-assistant and, as well as exhibiting her own work professionally, it is very likely that she helped Monet with his when he became older and less active. There is some debate over whether she actually worked on any of Monet's canvasses, but Burke makes a good case for her having done so, and she deplores the fact that Blanche has been given little recognition for the help and support which she certainly provided for Monet for much of his creative life.

The last of Burke's subjects, the Australian Aboriginal artist, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, is the least known to most people. Emily began to create batik art work when she was sixty-six years old and she did not paint her first picture until twelve years after that. Her first paintings immediately won critical acclaim and in 1997 she was a chosen representative of Australia at the Venice Biennale. Her work now hangs in major art galleries around the world. She died in 1996. Emily's painting grew from her kinship with the land of the Central Desert in the Northern Territories of Australia. She was a tribal elder, guardian of a particular Aboriginal food plant, and an important senior woman in her tribe. Her place of inspiration was the desert land on which she lived, and Burke visited this land as part of her research for Source. Faced with the reality of Aboriginal life in a remote part of the Central Desert, she struggles to come to terms with the "schismatic vision" of tribal people who produce "subtle and sophisticated art", who are intimately connected to the land of which they are the "spiritual custodians", and yet live in squalor and seemingly have "scant regard for their environment".Emily's Utopia (that is the name of the area where she lived and worked) is not the Utopia we might imagine. Burke's initial impression is that she has descended into "one of the circles of hell". She is shocked by the snotty-nosed children, the desecrated houses, the rubbish and the plastic bags festooning the desert; and she is angered by the unreproved cruelty that a young boy inflicts on a dog. Yet, from this seeming neglect comes delicate art based on tribal beliefs and stories. She recognizes her desire to impose her own cultural standards and she tries to come to terms with her own lack of understanding.

No such shock is produced by the creative utopias of Burke's other artists and writers. She visits their houses with delight and describes them and the landscape around them glowingly. Perhaps too glowingly at times. It is interesting to compare her description of Jackson Pollock's studio at Springs on Long Island with that of art historian Robert Hughes. Burke's visitor stands, as she has done, in Pollock's paint spattered studio and "feels energy rushing up from the floor, from the web of painted lines, so fast and intense it seems she is lifted off the floor". Hughes, in his vast and impressive book American Visions, describes the "shrine" of "Jack the Dripper" (a title he borrowed from an early Time magazine feature on Pollock). He sees only the "Miraculous brushes", the "Sanctified Shoes" and the "surplus drips of the Master, the sacramental ichor" that went off the edges of his great works.Nevertheless, Source is an interesting and absorbing book. The illustration are beautiful, the photographs of her subjects are unusual, and Burke makes a very pleasant, relaxed and informed companion and guide to the lives and work of her chosen artists and writers.

The book is dead, long live the book

by Sherman Young. USW Press, 2008.

Sydney academic Sherman Young believes that, as an influence in society the importance of the book has declined almost to the point where it is dead as an object. He chooses to convey this message in a book, so I suppose there’s life in the old format yet, but he makes a strong case all the same. In many ways books have been overtaken by newer formats. Older texts can be found on sites such as Project Gutenberg, and newer books are increasingly available in e-book format. In due course, a sufficiently attractive e-book reader will be on the market, and then we can expect the book to go the way of the vinyl record, becoming little more than a niche market. Young points out that this is not altogether a bad thing. For instance, there is much more likelihood of specialist texts being found by their target audience in an electronic format – no more haphazard ordering from book-shops which can only carry a fraction of the material being published. Young’s argument is persuasive, and spells a worrying message for booksellers, which will have to reinvent themselves, perhaps carrying a smaller range of stock and selling more coffee. But what does it imply for public libraries? Can we carry on buying and shelving books as we have done for the last hundred and fifty years, or do we move into e-books in a bigger way before it’s too late? Should we blog a bit more? Young has an entertaining style, and his book can be digested fairly rapidly. I recommend it to anybody who likes reading; we’re still just about in the majority.

- John

(Update: Sherman Young also has a companion blog for his book)

The freedom paradox

By Clive Hamilton.

Over the past two centuries most citizens of affluent countries have gained unprecedented freedom and economic independence. Why is it, then, that we are discontented? Why, according to a report prepared by Harvard School of Public Health for the WHO, is depression "predicted to become the world's second most burdensome disease by 2020"? Why has the affluence we have struggled so hard to achieve not brought us the contentment and wellbeing we expected? This, says Clive Hamilton, is "The Freedom Paradox". We have never been more free to shape ourselves and our lives but, at the same time, we have never been more subject to social and commercial pressures to conform to collective goals. We are constrained by a new form of "unfreedom". Subtle pressures persuade us that we must have more money, a bigger house and car, a perfect body, a particular toothpaste, even, if we are to make our mark in the world. The consumer society in which we live focuses on generating needs, then, for a price, filling them. The market - commercial and economic - offers us our identity but also fosters conformity and intolerance towards those who break away from the common goals.

There is nothing new here. This is the condition which has been labelled 'Affluenza'. What is new, is the solution Clive Hamilton offers us for our malaise. What we need, he says, is "inner freedom": the reasoned ability and the courage to evaluate the commonly accepted route to happiness and to stand aside from it, the freedom to set our own goals, and the will to achieve them. But we cannot achieve this inner freedom, he says, without committing ourselves to a moral life - without imposing constraints on ourselves and living according to the values and standards these constraints require. Only in this way can we achieve a true sense of Self.

So, what is this 'inner freedom'? What constitutes a moral life? What does Hamilton mean by 'a true sense of Self'?

To answer these questions, Hamilton turns to philosophy. Examining earlier theories of morality, he writes clearly and concisely about the philosophies of Plato, Mill, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and of more recent philosophers like Sartre and Rawls. He also examines science, psychology, religion (eastern and western), and he discusses God, death, Marxism, suicide, various sexual practices, art and poetry. His project is hugely ambitious but his aim is to establish a new basis for morality and moral judgments.Hamilton's project is important and the book is full of thought-provoking argument and discussion. For anyone with any background in philosophy, however, this book is hard to read. Philosophers want to examine the validity of every argument along the way, and Hamilton covers almost every major topic of philosophical debate since the time of Plato and Aristotle. Better, to read this book in the manner in which Hamilton says he wrote it:"Contentious philosophical debates underpin much of the discussion....I exclude or skate over most of the controversies if pausing to review them would interrupt the flow of my argument". This is an easy way of avoiding having to point out and deal with the flaws in his own argument, although he does say he will offer some hints of these "controversies" in his notes.

The problem with Hamilton's approach, however, is that fundamental to his argument is his attempt to dismiss the carefully argued positions of some important philosophers in order to establish a distinction between what he terms the 'phenomenal world' ( the which we construct by the use of reason from what we experience through our limited range of sense data) and the 'noumenal world' (which is outside the range of our senses). The noumenon is undifferentiated, unmanifest, timeless, spaceless, causeless. It is essentially the same, although Hamilton does not say this, as the Ein Soph of the Jewish Cabbalists, the Ancient Greeks' mythological Chaos, the Scientists (and magicians') Aether. It is transcendental (it transcends all physical and phenomenal existence). Poets, artists, musicians, saints and, occasionally, ordinary human beings have moments when they intuit a connection with it. And according to Hamilton, the moment of creation of a new life constitutes connection between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, and sexual ecstasy, too, as in Tantric beliefs, is the result of such a connection.

Having established the existence of the noumenon, Hamilton goes on to argue that it contains a universal human essence which is made manifest in each of us in the phenomenal world. We intuit our connection with this 'Universal Self', and this is the basis of the new morality he proposes. Intuition and the recognition of some shared human essence which links us all to the Universal Self is what should guide our moral judgments. The fundamental idea is simple and attractive but Hamilton ties himself in a few philosophical knots trying to work out the practical details. Just for example, his undifferentiated, unmanifest, a-causal noumenon suddenly acquires individual essences, similar to Platonic Ideas, as he tries to determine a moral basis for general revulsion to the sexual act of bestiality.The main problem with the noumenon, however, and with any hypothesis of such a non-rational world (rationality is a human attribute and therefore confined to the phenomenal world) is that its existence cannot be proved by reason. Like all religions, and Hamilton's hypothesis constitutes his own religious interpretation of the world (or worlds), it relies on faith. Yet Hamilton's whole book is an attempt to rationalize his view and, especially, to offer a philosophical framework for his proposed code of morality. No wonder, as he comments in his 'Acknowledgements', the four (un-named) philosophers who read the early draft of his manuscript, offered him 'bracing' criticism.

Nevertheless, The Freedom Paradox makes stimulating reading and it deals with important issues which should be the topic of discussion and debate. Hamilton's chapters are short and easily digestible, and, as some of his chapter headings suggest, the range of topics he covers offers interesting material for thought and discussion. There is much to consider, for example: 'Do we prefer what we choose?': 'The decline of free will' ; Subtle coercion'; 'A digression on the existence of God'; On death'; 'Suicide'; 'Nature'; 'Emotions as judgments'; 'Egoism and malice', and much more.

Whatever I think of the philosophical basis of Hamilton's arguments, he proposes a form of morality based on common humanity and an awareness of the world around us, including something wonderful which is intuited and transcendental, which I find emotionally satisfying, even if reason cannot support it. What I am lacking, I fear, is faith that such morality can or will ever prevail.

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NOTE: Clive Hamilton was recently appointed Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne. You can listen to his presentation of some of the arguments in his book at http://www.themonthly.com.au/tm/node/1166

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Copyright © Ann Skea 2008

Book week winners

The winners of the 2008 Children's Book Week awards have been announced! View details of all the winners here. Manly Library has copies of all the shortlisted and award winning books. Search the online catalogue to view availablity and place your holds.

Prime Minister's literary awards

The Prime Minister's literary awards are a new initiative to boost the visibility of Australian authors on the world stage. The 2008 shortlist can be viewed here.

Leaf litter

by Rachel Tonkin. HarperCollins, 2006.

This is one of the best illustrated children’s books I have ever seen. But although Leaf Litter is a children’s book, adults should take the time to examine its wonders too. Rachel Tonkin illustrates a small patch of ground beneath a tree, and shows the changes that occur among the leaf litter over a year. Plants and animals co-exist, each with their part to play. Minute eggs hatch out. Insects forage among the dead leaves, ready to eat or be eaten. There are flaps to be lifted, to give a sort of 3-D effect – see what takes place inside the ants’ nest. At the end of the book there are lists of things to find in each double-page spread, and this is when you will need your wits about you and your strongest magnifying glass. Tonkin is a scrupulous illustrator, and must have laboured for many hours in the creation of this book. Her message is that without leaf litter there is nothing to stop the rain from washing the soil away, there is nothing for creatures to eat. It looks like debris but is vital for the environment’s future.

- John

Miles Franklin award winner 2008

This year's Miles Franklin Award has gone to Steven Carroll for his novel The time we have taken. Set in suburban Melbourne of the 1970's the novel is described by the judges as a 'moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives'.

Carroll said of the award:

"It's instantly recognisable so hopefully these things help you and kick in
and help you in your writing career and make sure it doesn't go bum."

Here's the link to the ABC news story.
Manly Library has several copies of the book. To check availability and place your hold please visit our online catalogue.

Book sculpture

If you're anywhere near Mandurah in Western Australia you should get along to the Falcon Library to check out Graham Hay's book sculpture.

Based on the idea of creating a shaped stack of the books a person could read in a lifetime, all the books are for sale, with proceeds going to the Save the Children fund.

Goodness knows what would happen if you wanted the one on the bottom.

http://www.grahamhay.com.au/200805Falcon.html

Autobiography of my Mother

by Meg Stewart. Vintage Books, 2007.
Cover design by Christabella Designs.

Reviewed by Ann Skea. http://ann.skea.com/

What do you do if you have spent hours talking to your mother and recording her memories, researched some of the family history, and published it all as a ghost-written autobiography, and then you read a chapter headed 'Mistress and Wife' in someone else's book and realize that there was something your mother omitted to tell you?

This is what happened to Meg Stewart, whose mother, Margaret Coen, was a well-known Australian artist and whose father, Douglas Stewart, was an equally well-known Australian poet.

Margaret Coen's 'autobiography' begins with the story of her grandmother, Margaret O'Connor, who arrived in Australia in 1844 as a sort of mail-order bride. Her husband, Patrick Moloney, was a prosperous 'New Chum' who was thirty years her senior. He had migrated to Australia in 1838 to work on the land and he had done well. He saved enough money to buy a property in sheep country south west of Sydney and then, not wanting to marry a convict woman, he wrote back to his parish priest in Ireland and asked him to find him a wife. So, Margaret O'Connor, aged eighteen, set off for a new life in Australia. Between them, Paddy and Margaret Moloney produced eleven children in twenty years, and their seventh child was Margaret Coen's mother, Mary Moloney.

Margaret Coen's paternal grandfather was also Irish. He had been attracted to Australia by the discoveries of gold, but he soon bought a hawker's cart and did so well that he eventually established a General Store in Yass. He became a wealthy and prominent citizen but died at the age of fifty-six. Grandma Coen, who was also considerably younger than her husband, took control of the store and ran it for the rest of her long life. The Coen family, who were staunch Catholics, also prospered and grew, and religion in Grandma Coen's house was taken very seriously. There was daily family prayer, one son became a Passionist priest and three daughters became nuns. Margaret, who was born in 1909, spent much of her childhood in her grandmother's house and was so impressed by the religiousness that she decided she was going to be a saint. Fortunately, she remained a very normal, mischievous child, and her memories of those early years are fascinating.

Equally fascinating, are her memories of her unusual schooling at a small Sydney boarding school, Kincoppal, which was run by the Sacre-Coeur nuns, many of whom were French.

A major part of the book, however, is devoted to Margaret's memories of life as a budding artist in Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s, and her later years as an established artist, familiar with all the most prominent artists, poets and writers of the time. The Circular Quay area of Sydney at that time, was a place full of art-schools and artists' studios. During the depression years of the early 1930s, space could be rented in old buildings very cheaply. This suited the artists, because their earnings, too, were meagre. They clearly enjoyed life, however, and hardship probably bonded them together more firmly than financial security might have done. Margaret Coen remembered an easy-going group of artists, art teachers, artists' models and other creative people who frequented their own chosen coffee houses and pubs in the area, where they would sit and talk for hours. She especially remembered the parties. The annual Artists' Ball was the highlight of the year, and it was obviously a very lively and uninhibited affair. When Margaret's mother, concerned for the reputation of her daughter, ordered an older brother to escort Margaret to the ball, Margaret worried that he might be shocked. Luckily, he dropped her off and disappeared for his own night on the town, then returned to pick her up later.

Amongst the artists and poets Margaret knew were Antonio Datillo-Rubbo (who taught her), Grace Cossington-Smith, Thea Astley, Donald Friend and Ken Slessor. She also befriended a visiting American illustrator, Jack Flanagan ( whose work she had long admired) who filled her head with stories of famous artists in New York, fed her Clover Club cocktails, and introduced her to another artist, Norman Lindsay. Lindsay, whose many paintings, etching and sketches of nudes had made him notorious in Australia, was a driven man. When he was not painting, etching or writing books, he worked on model ships for which he made every piece himself. Margaret tells of one attempt he made to relax by taking up cards: he cut out and painted every single card himself. Margaret had clearly idolized Lindsay because of his work. When she eventually met him, he became her mentor and taught her a great deal about water-colour painting, at which she became expert. And Lindsay, so it seems, also became her lover. In remembering her life, Margaret told her daughter nothing about this.

The unexpected revelation of this affair to Meg Stewart as she read Joanne Mendelssohn's book, Letter and Liars, left her distressed and, as her mother's biographer, "stricken". The term 'mistress’, with all the connotation it has acquired, particularly upset her. What did she do? She set about finding out if it was true. Family, when she consulted them, knew nothing and didn't believe it. The author of a book about Lindsay's art charted the progress of the affair from Lindsay's work. And although her mother's undated correspondence with Norman Lindsay (which, after her mother's death, Meg had deposited unread at the State Library of New South Wales) revealed an "undeniable bond" and real affection between the two which lasted until Lindsay's death in 1969, there was nothing "salacious" in them.

So, Meg Stewart updated her mother's 'autobiography' with newly revealed facts about her art, then simply added an extra chapter about her own researches in to the 'affair'. She describes the process of reading and dating her mother's correspondence with Lindsay as "by turn tantalising, tacky and addictive", and her conclusion, finally, is "What does it matter?". Her mother was loved by two remarkable and creative men, her own father, who had also been a close lifelong friend of Norman Lindsay, and Lindsay himself. If she chose to forget "the sexual indiscretions or passions of youth" or to keep them secret from her daughter, it was nobody's business but her own.

Meg Stewart's Autobiography of My Mother is the sort of book many of us would like to have written about our mothers but left it too late to sit down and record all the details of their memories. It is a fascinating account of a life and a fascinating picture of Sydney in the early years of the twentieth century. Sadly, there are only two of Margaret Coen's painting reproduced in black-and-white in the book, but there are photographs which show that she was a beautiful young woman, and an etching of a party by Norman Lindsay in which someone who Meg says looks "very like my mother" is dancing, scantily dressed, for an appreciative audience.
Copyright Ann Skea 2007

Dead lucky: Life and death on Mount Everest

by Lincoln Hall. Random House, 2007.

Reviewed by Ann Skea. http://ann.skea.com/

At 7.30pm on May 26th 2006, at 8600 metres on the face of Mount Everest, Lincoln Hall died. At 9am that morning he had stood on the summit and spoken by radio-phone to Alexander Abromov, the expedition leader at Advance Base Camp. He spoke briefly, letting Alex know that he and the three Sherpas, Lakcha, Dorje and Dawa Tenzing who were with him, were on their way down. One hour later cerebral oedema struck him and he began to hallucinate. For the next few hours he lapsed in and out of coherent consciousness. At times he was lucid and capable, at other times crazy: he refused his oxygen mask, fought to go back up the mountain, and tried to jump off Kangshung Face. The three Sherpas, soon joined by another, Pemba, pushed and pulled him down the mountain.

At Mushroom Rock, still 300 metres above Advance Base Camp, the Sherpas were exhausted, they had no oxygen, no food or drink, Hall was unresponsive and dying, and the weather forecast was bad. The Sherpas were ordered to cover Hall with stones and leave him.No-one had ever survived a night on Everest at 8600 metres. Exhaustion, hypothermia, lack of oxygen, the retention of fluid in the brain so that the whole metabolism is affected, snow blindness, detached retinas, all these things are common at this altitude and all can be fatal.

At the time of Hall's descent eleven climbers had already died on the mountain in the few months of the climbing season, the last just hours before Hall and the Sherpas reached Mushroom Rock. Alex, at Base Camp, phoned Hall's wife, Barbara, and broke the news to her that at 7.30pm, on Everest, her husband had died.

Barbara told their two teenage sons, rang a few people, and family and friends began to rally round to support her. Amongst others, she contacted Ang Karma, a Buddhist friend in Kathmandu, and asked him to perform the appropriate Buddhist ceremonies for her dead husband, who had become a practising Buddhist in the late 1960s. Only late in the evening of the next day did Barbara hear that her husband was still alive, but that he had only a 50-50 chance of surviving.

Hall had tackled Mount Everest twenty-two years earlier but had been forced to turn back before he reached the summit. He joined the 2006 expedition as an experienced, high-altitude cameraman for a fourteen-year-old boy, Christopher Harris, and his father, who intended to climb the highest mountains on each continent, seven summits in all. Unfortunately, Christopher had experienced a severe drop in blood pressure shortly after leaving Advance Base Camp. A second attempt had produced the same result, so, recognizing that it was too dangerous for them to press on, he and his father turned back. Hall however, was urged to go ahead, and did.

Lincoln Hall is a very experienced mountaineer, veteran of some thirty-six years of mountaineering expeditions both as a climber and a guide. He is also a writer and film-maker, and he is co-founder of the Australian Himalayan Foundation.

Dead Lucky tells the story of his last expedition to Mount Everest, his death and his survival. Even for a non-climber like me, it is a fascinating story. His account of the difficulties of the climb, the expeditions and climbers he met, the harrowing descent, and his subsequent treatment for frostbite is gripping and well-written. He has no doubt, just as the Sherpas had no doubt, that he died. His description of his psychological state, his hallucinations, and the few moments of lucidity which surrounded that death alone on the ridge at 8600 meters is totally absorbing. I was surprised to read of the large number of people who now climb Everest during the brief season when summiting is possible. I was surprised, too, to read of the fixed ropes and crevasse-crossing ladders which are put in place by Sherpas each season for some expedition organizers and which make the ascent marginally safer. Nor did I expect to hear that Hall reach the summit after passing a number of dead bodies, some of which have lain there for years, and that the summit was littered with empty oxygen cylinders and marked with yellow urine stains. I was shocked to read his account of the two Sherpas who were sent to help him when another climber found that he had survived the night at Mushroom Rock, and who bullied and threatened him, cut a rope at one critical moment, and attacked him with an ice pick (he had bruises to prove that this was no hallucination). Luckily, other Sherpas arrived in time to save him.

In spite of the organized expeditions, the final stages of the ascent of Everest are still extremely hazardous. Survival above 8300 metres is, to use Hall's word, "desperate". The oxygen level is so low that even with oxygen support just speaking is exhausting. The final stages of the ascent are begun in darkness, vision is restricted by an oxygen mask, and clothing is cumbersome. Gaining the summit and the euphoria of doing so often takes all the climber's energy, so descent is even more hazardous. As Hall discovered.

Dead Lucky tells an amazing story. Occasionally, I found the listing of names daunting and confusing. Hall seems to have felt obliged to name everyone on the mountain that year. His acknowledgements, too (thankfully tucked at the back of the book) run to seven pages and even include the cafe where he typed part of his manuscript whilst attending hospital for the treatment of his frostbitten fingers and toes. Nevertheless, the book is a pleasure to read, the photographs are interesting and the glossary useful. One is still left wondering what prompts anyone to expose themselves to the agony, danger and trauma of trying to reach the top of Mount Everest. Hall's own list of reasons doesn't solve that riddle. Looking back, he sees the mountain as a mirror into which climbers look to find themselves. His brush with death has given him a new perspective on life and, as he says at the very end of the book, now that he has summited Everest his life can move on.

- Copyright Ann Skea 2007

Children's Book of the Year winners

The CBCA Children's Book of the Year award winners for 2007 have been announced! The official page can be found here, or there is an easy to print PDF. Here's the list of winners, including Manly Library call numbers:

Book of the Year - Older Readers: Red spikes, Margo Lanagan (YA /LANA)
Book of the Year - Younger Readers: Being Bee, Catherine Bateson (JF /BATE)
Book of the Year - Early Childhood: Amy & Louis, Libby Gleeson (EA /GLEE)
Picture Book of the Year: The Arrival, Shaun Tan (QJF /TAN)
Eve Pownall Award for Information Books: The penguin book: birds in suits, Mark Norman (J 598.47/NOR)

You can check the availability of these titles and place holds via our online catalogue.

2007 NSW Premier's Literary Award winners announced

Listed below with Manly Library holdings information. The book may be on loan, but you can check and place holds through our online catalogue. Holdings information correct as of 30th May 2007.

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
Peter Carey, Theft: a Love Story: F /CARE

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non Fiction
Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know: a Memoir: 920/HUG

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
John Tranter, Urban Myths: 210 Poems: 829.1/TRA

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature
Narelle Oliver, Home: Held at Lanecove, Stanton.

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature
Ursula Dubosarsky, The Red Shoe: YA /DUBO and YAPB /D

Play Award
Tommy Murphy, Holding the Man (adapted from the book by Timothy Conigrave): The book is held at Chatswood.

Script Award
Tony Ayres, The Home Song Stories: Not held.

Community Relations Commission Award
Shaun Tan, The Arrival: QJF /TAN

Gleebooks Prize for Critical Writing
Gideon Haigh, Asbestos House: the Secret History of James Hardie Industries: 338.76/HAI

UTS Award for New Writing
Tara June Winch, Swallow the Air: F /WINC

Book of the Year
Shaun Tan, The Arrival: QJF /TAN

Special Award
Gerald Murnane: Has written books such as Invisible yet enduring lilacs (A 824.3/MUR) and Velvet waters (F /MURN)

NSW Premier's Translation Prize & PEN Medallion
John Nieuwenhuizen: Translated The book of everything by Guus Kuijer (YAPB /K)

You can view judges comments on the award winners at the Arts NSW website.

Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung. Black Inc, 2006.
Cover photography Narelle Autio. Cover design Thomas Deverall.

Alice Pung is the daughter of Chinese refugees from Cambodia. She was born only months after they arrived in Melbourne from a refugee camp in Thailand.

She was called Alice after Alice in Wonderland because her parents thought Australia was ‘wonderland’. She calls them the ‘wahsers’ because they “Wah!” at so much that astonishes them from the vast array of things to buy, to the red and green lights that drivers and pedestrians actually obey -

“We wait for the Mao Ze Dong man to disappear before we move. He stops everything.”

Some of it is laugh-out-loud funny.

It is ironic that the pain sets in as the prosperity grows. When their frantic desire to succeed it is realized, then they have trouble stopping and enjoying their success. At 17 Alice has a mental breakdown, as if she is a mirror of all that afflicts her now successful community.Her story gives a vivid insight into the Chinese community of Footscray and through it, an understanding of what it is like to grow up part of an extended Chinese family in Australia.

- Ines.