Murray Bail is one of the most boldly innovative and intellectually challenging of contemporary writers. He is widely appreciated in his homeland, Australia. Although a casual reading of Bail's work affords shocks, laughter and stimulation aplenty, it usually raises of a host of questions that nag and tantalize readers for years to come. This is a legacy of his unambiguous declaration in favour of the novel of ideas and, above all, of bold invention and risk taking. Also his individual works can seem at first sight unrelated: a novel that recounts the world-wide peregrinations of tourists through museums, real and imaged (Homesickness); its sequel in a parodic novel of education that attacks Australian parochialism (Holden's Performance); followed by what Michael Ondaatje has called 'one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature' (Eucalyptus), and most recently the depiction of a failed attempt to live the life of an original thinker, which explores the rival interpretative claims of philosophy and psychology (The Pages). This first critical study of Murray Bail maps out the coordinates, and sheds invaluable light on, the intellectual labyrinth afforded by his novels. Its author, Michael Ackland, outlines deftly the literary and artistic heritages that influenced Bail's early thought, then traces key preoccupations in his fiction and non-fiction, as well as provides authoritative interpretations of individual works. Equally adept in describing how painterly problems are adapted to speculative fiction, or in foregrounding the role played by diverse heritages of Western philosophy and science, Ackland explores the layered depths, conceits and lightning interplays that inform individual scenes, and reveals the Australian writer's immense ambitions. This study demonstrates Bail's work to be as contemporary as postmodernism, yet timeless in its probing of the human condition, and of what individuals may achieve in a world subject to both global forces and mutability. This is an important book for all literature, cultural studies, and Australasian collections.

Henry Handel Richardson is celebrated for her classic Australian novels The Getting of Wisdom and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, yet her own life-story is still to be fully told. This enthralling 2004 book is a complete biography of this enigmatic Australian literary icon. Drawing on previously unavailable records, the book sheds light on Richardson's unconventional life. Beginning with her traumatic childhood, then tracing in detail the largely unknown story of the eleven formative years Richardson spent on the Continent, the book goes on to explore the personal and social forces that moved her during her long years as a London intellectual, concluding with her last ordeal as a frail spectator in the front-line of the Battle of Britain.

Henry Handel Richardson is celebrated for her classic Australian novels The Getting of Wisdom and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, yet her own life-story is still to be fully told. This enthralling 2004 book is a complete biography of this enigmatic Australian literary icon. Drawing on previously unavailable records, the book sheds light on Richardson's unconventional life. Beginning with her traumatic childhood, then tracing in detail the largely unknown story of the eleven formative years Richardson spent on the Continent, the book goes on to explore the personal and social forces that moved her during her long years as a London intellectual, concluding with her last ordeal as a frail spectator in the front-line of the Battle of Britain.

In telling the personal stories of Australians in Japan and Japanese in Australia, this book explores issues of race, identity, and ambition in times of war and peace. The essays collected here illuminate a variety of fascinating lives and individual achievements, from trade to literature and the arts, the media, and the justice system. For over 150 years, people have been shaped by and contributed to the breadth, strength, and diversity of the Australia-Japan relationship. As the editors and their contributors contend, a transnational relationship is ultimately constituted by hundreds of untold, seesawing, and yet fruitful, personal encounters that overcome prejudice, and blur the boundaries set by official and unofficial racial mores.