Lunacy is a crime when Lizzie sets foot in the new colony of Victoria, Australia, in 1855. Based on extensive research, this is the story of her struggle with mental illness - at a time when limited medical knowledge about her condition existed, stigma was omnipresent, and treatment was archaic and inhumane. Shrouded in secrecy for more than a century, her story, as told through her own voice and that of her daughter and estranged husband, begins with her journey from her home in England with three young children in tow, to her eventual incarceration in gaol and Victoria's first mental institution - Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum - where she spent the last four decades of her life.

A woman artist struggles to successfully raise her children during desperate times. A recreation of the stories Sheila Buchanan Buell told to her daughter the author, Patsy Buell Stierna.

SOUNDING 3 begins with Echo 34: DERRIMUTT THE GO-BETWEEN. This clan head of the Bunurong people was the traditional ‘owner’ of the town site that became Melbourne’s CBD on the western side of the river. Bible-bashing Protector Thomas’s journals of camping with the natives at what is now the Botanic Gardens is eye-opening and reveals mind-bending mysteries and misery with grog and gun-control issues that resonate on up to today. This Sounding personalises many local Kulin identities such as Polierong aka Billy Lonsdale and Yabbee aka Billy Hamilton who name-swapped with the early leading townsmen and squatters on their ‘country’. Next follow snippets from Mick Woiwod’s fictional but faithful novel The Last Cry, along with his Yarra Valley anthropology and reconciliatory vision. Surveying and selling off the Yarra and Diamond Valley ‘badlands’ stringybark forest leads into discussions on sorcery, smallpox and culture-collapse into fringe-dwelling. The frontier moves on north, west and east and the tone changes to academic, political and biographic studies of Aboriginal workers and surviving kooris including the life and times of Wurundjeri clan heads Billibellary, Simon Wonga and William Barak. In the decades after World War 2, academic historical analysis led to the politicized ‘history wars’ as reaction to the racist colonial ‘white Australia policy’ lies, fears and distortions cloaked by denial and patriotism. Echo 49: THE NATIVE POLICE – Turncoats or adaptation [?] is the largest echo in this Sounding and the question is posed in five parts, the last being Irish observer Claire Dunne on applying the bloody colonial lessons of Port Phillip to frontier Queensland and beyond to Central Australia’s mass-murderer Constable Willshire and the cultural logic of settler nationalism. Echoes follow on re-visioning Aboriginal / white history and historical geography research of ‘high country’ clans and language groups in my unsatisfied search of a supposed ‘superior tribe’ in the Alps who reportedly ‘dwelt in stone houses all year round’. Sounding 3 ends with echoes titled COLONIAL OBSERVATIONS OF HIGH SOCIETY EMIGRANTS containing Georgina and her son George McCrae’s journals of Yarra-side and pioneering the Mornington peninsula in the 1840s along with early 1860s photographs of native people collected by gentleman squatter John Hunter Kerr.

The Alchemy of Poetry promises access to some of the greatest poems ever written. It demonstrates the various ways a close reading or analytical interpretation can be conducted and in so doing provides tools for a life time of poetry reading. This text is personal. It establishes a relationship between the reader and the poem and myself. Why? It is in relationships that we are able to most effectively learn and teach and grow. I think great Art belongs to everyone; thus, it is crucial that we continue the dialogue between ourselves and the poem. It is in this dialogue that we witness the alchemy of poetry; the way it transmutes from language form and feature to a universal elixir, an undiscovered gold and most significantly, "A thing of beauty". Poetry makes sense of life, it offers us truths, it brings us unimagined worlds and it liberates our pain. I have selected 160 poems that you cannot live your life without!Poetry offers ritual and cadence; sacrifice and secrets. Poetry offers a nation state, a place within a place when it no longer confers sovereignty upon you. Poetry is sacred and profane and thus it is at once sublime and mighty. It is audacious and disturbing but always - and this applies to all great poetry - yours. Mine. Ours. Indeed, what is the point of living if there is no Art? And poetry is the most concentrated of all Art. It is the oldest of all literary forms. Without poetry we are an idiotic uncivilized people telling tales "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Poetry is, in one crowded hour, the only one in the room. So, we read poetry to face the truth. To stand there and dig in, to stumble over words we don't get, to find a phrase that flicks a light on in our memory, to cat-paw over and over an image that was laid down long ago. Most of all, we read poetry to remind ourselves of what really matters. To witness the soaring light that tears up our small lives.