The Heidelberg School was the name given to a circle of 19th century Australian artists, led by Tom Roberts, whose figure paintings expressed deeply rooted human fears, wishes, and preoccupations. This comprehensive overview examines the art in a social and cultural context and reveals how the paintings helped to develop the rural mythology extant in Australia at the time.

This publication accompanies two exhibitions that celebrate the 125th anniversary of the establishment of Geelong Gallery in 1896; that honour one of the first and greatest acquisitions to enter the collection; and that assert this Gallery's enduring commitment to the critical visions of contemporary artists.Frederick McCubbin-Whisperings in wattle boughs takes its lyrical title from McCubbin's quietly mesmerising painting of 1886, in which he depicts a solitary man in repose, contemplating the earth, listening to the rustling of the bush around him while his tea boils in the billy nearby. This evocative work sets the tone for an exhibition centred on one of the treasures of Geelong Gallery: McCubbin's much loved A bush burial 1890, the first major painting to enter the Gallery's collection, purchased through public subscription in 1900. A bush burial is brought into dialogue with a selection of other now-iconic paintings in which McCubbin redefined the Australian bush and elaborated the place and roles of human subjects within it. It is, therefore, a focussed thematic survey rather than a broad ranging retrospective of McCubbin's output and follows two recent Geelong-curated scholarly thematic exhibitions: Land of the Golden Fleece- Arthur Streeton in the Western Districts (2016) and Fred Williams in the You Yangs (2017).

Eugene von Guerard, colonial painter, failed goldminer, procrastinator. His birth coincides with Napoleon's demise and the invention of the waltz. He has two left feet, just like his father, as well as his father's gift for forensic detail with a paintbrush. He embarks on a low-budget grand tour as Vienna waltzes away the terrors of collaboration. Seeking fame and fortune, he boards a creaky immigrant ark for the Antipodean goldfields. Can Louisa, with her fear of water and poor English, partner Eugene across worlds? What of the forcibly indentured girl, Laven-Dah, who ruins his painting sightlines with her attention-seeking acrobatics? And what is the mystery of Queen Parrot Falls, a place where love and loss dismantle the painter's dream of a perfect waterfall? Eugene's Falls melds novel with art history and non- fiction in the manner of Peter Robb's M or Susan Sontag's Volcano Lover. This compelling portrait of the artist as a young man dissects the melancholy at the heart of colonial progress, imbuing the waltz of memory with the power and inevitability of falling water.

This new collection extends themes taken up in The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street (2012). Environmental degradation and theme park notions of the natural endure. Accordingly, these poems reflect with tenderness, anger and irony on the ways humans chronicle, construct and war upon their natural environments. 'Rendition' puns on the idea of a song lyric, translation, surrender and also torture. In the anti-pastoral, anti-war poems offered here, groups of human beings and individuals are also shown as either tragically marginalized, lost of held too close. Cautionary ecocritical threnodies splice with personal elegies and historical cultural reflections to suggest a world awash with maladies of different kinds, as if to say that human beings must recalibrate love, death, survival and history as matters of urgency.

Aflame begins in Soviet Moscow and ends with a Tibetan Buddhist monk's self-immolation; residing between them - improvisations after celebrated Japanese Haikus. Written in an intricate and polyphonic structure, Subhash Jaireth's rare and carefully crafted rhythms reveal the creeping melancholic joy of silence and life's elusive beauty.

Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage examines key developments in the field of the Australian postcolonial historical novel from 1989 to the present. In parallel with this analysis, A. Frances Johnson undertakes a unique study of in-kind creativity, reflecting on how her own nascent historical fiction has been critically and imaginatively shaped and inspired by seminal experiments in the genre – by writers as diverse as Kate Grenville, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, and Rohan Wilson. Mapping the postcolonial novel against the impact of postcolonial cultural theory and Australian writers’ intermittent embrace of literary postmodernism, this survey is also read against the post-millenial ‘history’ and ‘culture wars’ which saw politicizations of national debates around history and fierce contestation over the ways stories of Australian pasts have been written.