Category: Blog

Walter’s live blogging – Helen O’Neill

18 November 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

by Walter Mason I remember stumbling upon Helen O’Neill’s exquisite illustrated biography of Florence Broadhurst when it was first released. I suffered a terrible author envy witnessing such a lushly illustrated and produced object. It is every writer’s dream to create such a text, but Helen is one of the rare few to have it realized. A couple of weeks ago I received her new book, a lavishly illustrated biography of the iconic Australian architect Harry Seidler, published by Harper Collins. As well as looking beautiful, with its modernist-influence half-slipcase, it is very well written and offers a fascinating insight…

Walter’s live blogging – Claire Scobie

18 November 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

by Walter Mason Whenever I teach travel writing workshops I always ask my students what their favourite travel books are. Partly it’s because I want them to start thinking about the kind of writing they want to do, and also because I want to be sure they have some kind of grasp of the genre. Certain books and writers are constantly mentioned (Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux and Norman Lewis), but one of the books that is brought up every time is Claire Scobie’s classic piece of travel writing, “Last Seen in Lhasa.” This year Claire has published her first novel,…

Walter’s live blogging – Thomas Keneally

18 November 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

by Walter Mason It seems only fitting that, being a guest for the day at the Tom Keneally Centre at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, I should have the opportunity to speak to the great man himself. I had spent most of the day sitting in front of an immense portrait of him, so when he loomed into the doorway of the office I felt surrounded. Keneally is, of course, famous for his garrulous good humour, affability and approachability. I saw it all at work today as he spoke to a gathering of about 50 people who had come…

Walter’s live blogging – P M Newton at the Tom Keneally Centre

18 November 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

by Walter Mason Greetings! And welcome to the first post from Southerly’s first day of live blogging at the Tom Keneally Centre at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts. My first guest today was the crime writer P M Newton. We sat down in some comfy seats and talked writing, crime and sci-fi – all things that P M Newton is expert in. I first discovered her after I read her fantastic first novel “The Old School,” a gritty and very Australian book set in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown in the late 1980s. What intrigued me about the book…

Cabramatta Books

13 November 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

by Walter Mason At one point I wanted to do my post-graduate work on the free books distributed at Buddhist temples in Australia. The various media on offer – books, tracts, holy cards, pamphlets, CDs and DVDs – have always attracted me, appealing as they do my bower bird instinct. But I was encouraged instead to concentrate on my other great passion, the literature of self-help. So the final word on free Buddhist literature must await the attentions of another scholar. That doesn’t mean, however, that my interest in such ephemera has abated. Not at all. It has just shifted…

Next monthly blogger – Walter Mason!

7 November 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Many thanks to David Brooks for his excellent posts last month, leading up to the issue 73.2 Liar/Lyre. This month, our fabulous blogger is Walter Mason. His bio is below: Walter Mason is an academic, blogger, speaker and writer. He is part of the Writing & Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, where he is completing his doctoral thesis on the history of self-help books in Australia. Walter has spent long periods studying Buddhism and meditation in Asia and together with Stephanie Dowrick he runs the Universal Heart Book Club, an online book group that concentrates on matters of the…

A Photograph

4 November 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

By David Brooks In my previous piece I wrote of the selection of photographs for a small exhibition. The photographs were not my own, but at one point there was some consideration of adding to it some photographs that were. When I wrote about the selected photographs I endeavoured to balance the impression created by one of them – of six ducklings in a pond – with a story of the tragedy that had taken five of their siblings a few days before the photograph was taken. It was a small point of scruple, perhaps, hardy a matter of the…

Wild Ducklings

29 October 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

by David Brooks At the Animal Liberation NSW ‘Animals and Art’ fund-raising event I wrote of in my second blog my wife Teja Pribac exhibited some of her photographs, each of which was available for purchase through silent auction. The most popular was of six ducklings in a pond, a striking, Monet-like image of intersecting ripples of green pond-water and the lightness of first feathers, the sharpness and already-fine features of beak and face. Several viewers spoke of their love for ducklings, and not surprisingly that photograph (not the one I reproduce here, but very like it) was almost the…

Swallows (The Narrow Road through the Deep North)

24 October 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

by David Brooks I have just searched the Oxford English Dictionary – not the on-line version, but the two (huge) volume, ‘compact’ version I bought myself on special offer when I was a graduate student, beloved books now battered and torn from their bindings – for the word souciant and find that it is not there, nor (now that I have checked) in the on-line version. The reason I’ve looked is that, reading about cicadas the other day, I came across mention of them as a symbol of insouciance, of care-less-ness, of living for the day. It suddenly occurred to…

How to Ride a Horse

17 October 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

by David Brooks October 4th was World Animal Day and I was privileged to be asked to read in Sydney at an Animals and Art fundraising event for Animal Liberation NSW, to an audience which included some of the people I most admire. Of course, declaring myself a member and dedicated supporter of Animal Liberation would have one marked out in some countries – the United States and Austria, to name but two – as a potential terrorist, it being seen as a serious offence in most parts of the world to impede or draw attention in any way to…

Cicada Season

10 October 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog4 Comments

by David Brooks Early October and it’s uncommonly warm. September’s average maximum was six degrees higher than the long-term average and this month seems as if it will be no different. Last summer was longer and warmer than any I can remember here in the mountains, and it seems as if this one will be a repeat. In the chemist’s, the greengrocer’s, the hardware store, the bank, and when now and again you stop to talk with some friend or acquaintance in the street, everyone agrees that the climate is changing. It seems incredible that so many politicians are still…

October monthly blogger – David Brooks!

8 October 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Many thanks to Rebecca Giggs, for her excellent, thought-provoking posts. This month, our blogger will be David Brooks, one of our managing editors and editor of our upcoming Liar/Lyre issue, writing on animals, ethics, and literature. His bio is below: David Brooks has published several collections of poetry, short fiction and essays, and four novels, the most recent of which is The Conversation (UQP 2012). His work has been highly acclaimed, widely translated and anthologised, and short-listed for the Miles Franklin, NSW Premier’s, Adelaide Festival, Banjo and many other awards. In 2011 he published The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley,…

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