Thea Astley won the coveted Miles Franklin Award for the third time with this powerful, bitterly funny novel, her favourite among her own works. Many lives orbit around the radiant genius of Jack Holberg - including wife, lover, child and acolyte - all slowly destroyed by their devotion to the blind musician.

This is the first biography of one of Australia's most beloved novelists, Thea Astley (1925–2004). Over a 50-year writing career, Astley published more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including The Acolyte, Drylands, and The Slow Natives, and was the first person to win multiple Miles Franklin Awards. With many of her works published internationally, Astley was a trailblazer for women writers. In her personal life, she was renowned for her dry wit, eccentricity, and compassion. Karen Lamb has drawn on an unparalleled range of interviews and correspondence to create a detailed picture of Thea the woman, as well as Astley the writer. She has sought to understand Astley's private world and how that shaped the distinctive body of work that is Thea Astley's literary legacy.

This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian

This second edition includes an updated bibliography.Astley's signature is a highly allusive, layered and self-conscious prose style, non-linear and open-ended (Gillian Whitlock, JASAL: Journal of Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 6, 2007, p. 154.)The essays offer insights into issues of language, art, gender and religion ... as well as Astley's evolving body of writing and the historical and literary context of her work (Lyn Jacobs, Australian Literary Studies v.23, n.3, 2008, p.358).

One family traced from the 1860s to the 1980s, beginning with Cornelius Laffey, an Irish-born journalist. Wresting his kin from the easy living of nineteenth-century Sydney, he takes them to northern Queensland where thousands of hopefuls are digging for gold in the mud. The family confronts the horror of Aboriginal dispossession, and Cornelius is sacked for reporting the slaughter. The cycles of generations turn, one over the other. Only some things change. That world and this world both have their Catholic priests, their bigots, their radicals. Winner of the inaugural Steele Rudd Award, this is an unforgettable tale of the other side of Australia's heritage.

Queensland? place of barren land and wild politics with subtropical weather, beaches, and natural wonders's the subject of this rich literary history. Chronicling a wide range of literature, from the first days of European settlement to the present day, this collection touches upon thematic topics such as travel stories, writing for children, and indigenous writings. The role of institutions such as schools, public libraries, the press, and publishers, as well as how they have contributed to the shaping of Queensland? literary development, is also included.

This paper examines the way in which contemporary Australian novelists use various tropes derived from exploration in order to embellish themes of personal search in their fiction. By doing so they have borrowed from the language and myths created by what was essentially an exercise in imperialism, and applied them to the quest by individuals in the settler society to find a permanent spiritual home in the new country. The exploration imagery proves to be apposite, in that just as the empire's hopes were dashed when exploration of the inland was repelled by the barren heart of the continent, so too has the metaphysical exploration of the same spaces foundered on uncompromising and withholding landscapes.