UWAP

IntroducingMick

across fiction, poetry,non-fiction and scholarly

U W A P U B L I S H I N GC A T A L O G U E

J A N U A R Y - M A Y 2 0 1 6

New poetrycollections fromRose Lucas andPaul Hetherington

Mick: A life ofthe first full bioRandolph Stow.

Randolph Stow by Suzanne Falkiner is graphy of Australian literary great

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PLUS

UWA PUBLISHINGJANUARY - MAY 2016

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Love House28 Broadway (Cnr Cooper St)Nedlands WA 6009

uwap.com.au08 6488 3670marketing-uwap@uwa.edu.au

Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, by Suzanne Falkiner (3)Desert Writing: Stories from Country, edited by Terri-ann White (4)Leaving Elvis: and other stories, by Michelle Michau-Crawford (5)

Asylum, by John Hughes (7)In in her Veins: the troubled life of Aileen Palmer, by Sylvia Martin (8)Unexpected Clearing, by Rose Lucas (9)either, Orpheus, by Dan Disney (10)

Perth: a guide for the curious, edited by Terri-ann White (12)Skin Deep: Settler impressions of Aboriginal Women, by Liz Conor (13)Plevna, by Geoff Page (14)

Burnt Umber, by Paul Hetherington (16)

Media enquiries should be directed to Charlotte Guest atcharlotte.guest@uwa.edu.au or 08 6488 3670

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Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian writers of his generation. His novel Tothe Islands – written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission –won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after publishing seven remarkablenovels and several collections of poetry, Stow’s literary output slowed. This biographyexamines the productive period as well as his long periods of publishing silence.

In Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner unravels the reasons behindRandolph Stow’s quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world. Meticulouslyresearched, insightful and at times deeply moving, Falkiner’s biography pieces togetheran intriguing story from Stow’s personal letters, diaries, and interviews with the peoplewho knew him best. And many of her tales – from Stow’s beginnings in idyllic ruralAustralia, to his critical turning point in Papua New Guinea, and his final years in Essex,England – provide us with keys to unlock the meaning of Stow’s rich and introspectiveworks.

MickA life of Randolph Stowby Suzanne Falkiner

ISBN: 9781742586601RRP: $50.00Format: C-format, hardbackExtent: 896 pagesCategory: Literary Biography

Suzanne Falkiner is a full-time writer based in Sydney. Her previous books include MrsMort’s Madness: The True Story of a Sydney Scandal (XOUM 2014), Eugenia: A Man(Second Edition, XOUM 2014), Joan in India (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2008),Lizard Island: The Journey of Mary Watson (Allen & Unwin 2000), The Writers’Landscape: Wilderness (Simon & Schuster 1992), The Writers’ Landscape: Settlement(Simon & Schuster 1992), After the Great Novelist: and Other Stories (Picador 1989),and Rain in the Distance (Penguin 1986). Suzanne has travelled widely and lived inParis, Umbria, and New York. She has studied at the University of New South Walesand Columbia University. In 2005 she was awarded a Doctorate of Creative Arts at theUniversity of Technology, Sydney.

About the author

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Desert WritingStories from country

edited by Terri-ann White

ISBN: 9781742586212RRP: $24.99Format: C-format, paperback Extent: 250 pagesCategory: Australian writing, anthology

In September 2013, just before the weather turned even more intense, a group ofintrepid writers made their way to three Australian desert settings to work withgroups and individuals wishing to write. Both Aboriginal people with a profoundconnection to country and residents of more recent arrival who had made thechoice to live in remote places participated in workshops. You'll read new voicesand hear perspectives on living in extreme geographical and climactic regions intoday's Australia.

In the variety presented here we welcome you into the vitality of remotecommunities, often isolated but full of commitment and hope for the future.

Marie Munkara and Ktima Heathcote at Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory

Ali Cobby Eckermann and Lionel Fogarty in Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara(APY) Lands in South Australia

Kim Mahood and Terri-ann White in Mulan in Western Australia

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Leaving Elvisand other stories

About the author

by Michelle Michau-Crawford

ISBN: 9781742588025RRP: $24.99Format: C-format, paperbackExtent: 156 pagesCategory: Fiction, short stories

We’re travelling light, without excess, into our future. Gran had been rough as she uncurledmy hands from their position, gripped around the open car doorframe, and shoved me intothe passenger seat.

A man returns from World War II and struggles to come to terms with what hashappened in his absence. Almost seventy years later, his middle-aged granddaughterpacks up her late grandmother’s home and discovers more than she had bargainedfor. These two stories book-end thirteen closely linked stories of one family and therippling of consequences across three generations, played out against the backdrop ofa changing Australia.

A debut collection—as powerful as it is tender—from the winner of the 2013 ABRElizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

Michelle Michau-Crawford’s short fiction has been published in Australian BookReview, Westerly and Spiny Babbler, and she has also published poetry and non-fiction and had one of her plays performed. In 2013 she won the prestigious ABRElizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. She has also worked as a university lecturer,speechwriter, researcher and public relations officer, and has a PhD in ComparativeLiterature. Michelle lives with her menagerie in a house surrounded by vegetablegardens and fruit trees

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Asylum

by John Hughes

ISBN: 9781742588261RRP: $24.99Format: C-format, paperbackExtent: 170 pagesCategory: Literary fiction

In the Sanctuary, two robed men cut the hair of clients who have been called to passthrough the White or Black Door. Along with their hair, the clients shed stories: of thehorrors of their past, the Place they’ve inhabited since their escape, and what lies beyondthe Doors. These stories are inscribed as Legends, but do they record a vision of Paradise orHell?

This allegory, echoing Kafka, illuminates the stark terror of the modern age, marked by aborder in constant shift between gods and men, truth and deception, freedom andconstraint, memory and forgetting, revealing a world whose essence is its hiddenness - aworld that hides, not in darkness, but in the light.

‘What I will tell you now is only guesswork. Because when a person is called they justdisappear and are never seen again. We assume that their case is finally being heard, thatthey have moved on from here to the next stage. You seem to think of it as somethingdreadful, but it’s why we came here after all. We came here of our own free will, you mustremember that, and we are free to leave at any time.’

Just because you can’t see the chainsdoesn’t mean they don’t exist.

John Hughes is a Sydney-based writer whose work has been recognised in a number ofawards. His first book, The Idea of Home, won the 2005 NSW Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction and the 2006 National Biography Award. Someone Else: Fictional Essays, won theAdelaide 2008 Festival Award for Innovation and the 2008 Queensland Premier’s Award forShort Stories. His previous books, The Remnants and Gardens of Sorrow, were received tocritical acclaim. John is the librarian at Sydney Grammar School.

About the author

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Ink in her VeinsThe troubled life of Aileen Palmer

by Sylvia Martin

ISBN: 9781742588254RRP: $29.99Format: C-format, paperbackExtent: 350 pagesCategory: Biography, Australian literary history

Aileen Palmer – poet, translator, political activist, adventurer – was the daughter oftwo writers prominent in Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century.Vance and Nettie Palmer were well known as novelists, poets, critics and journalists,and Nettie suspected that their eldest would grow up with ‘ink in her veins’.

Aileen certainly inherited her parents’ talents, publishing poetry, translating the workof Ho Chi Minh, and recording what she referred to as ‘semi fictional bits ofegocentric writing’. She also absorbed their interest in leftist politics, joining theCommunist Party at university. This, combined with her bravery, led to participation inthe Spanish Civil War and the ambulance service in London during World War II.

The return to Australia was not easy, and Aileen never successfully reintegrated intocivilian life. In Ink in Her Veins Sylvia Martin paints an honest and moving portrait inwhich we see a talented woman slowly brought down by war, family expectations,and psychiatric illness and the sometimes cruel ‘treatments’ common in the 20thcentury.

Sylvia Martin is a scholar based at the University of Tasmania. Her previouspublications include Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and MilesFranklin (Onlywomen Press 2001), and Ida Leeson: a Life - Not a bluestocking lady(Allen & Unwin 2006). Ida Leeson won the Margarey Medal for biography in 2008.

About the author

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Unexpected ClearingPoems

by Rose Lucas

ISBN: 9781742588254RRP: $22.99Format: B-format, paperbackExtent: 120 pagesCategory: Poetry

Praise for Even in the Dark (2013) by Rose Lucas

Rhythm and pattern follow with precision the rich tonality of Lucas’s visualand aural perceptions, delivered with just enough tension to allow a line torun free or a word to drop and hang alone where it dances, or stops.AMANDA JOY, CORDITE

Lucas’s collection shines with a clear intelligence and keen observation ofthe everyday, landscape, place, art, love and grief. The poems, evocative andmoving, also sit so lightly on the page.LUCY DOUGAN, PHILIP MEAD AND MARCELLA POLAIN, MARY GILMOREAWARD JUDGES 2014

Lucas’s poems are composed of vivid bursts of colour.CASSANDRA ATHERTON, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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either, Orpheus

by Dan Disney

ISBN: 9781742588193RRP: $22.99Format: C-format, paperbackExtent: 90 pagesCategory: Poetry

Dan Disney's highly original either, Orpheus remakes the villanelle. The 'sound-swarms'in this contemporary 'orphic' work riff laterally on received poetic and and philosophicalideas and incorporate fascinating shreds of thinking and saying. Rainer Maria Rilke andSøren Kierkegaard are the presiding spirits in the volume, and Disney is also indiscussion about divergent ways of seeing and understanding with writers from all overthe globe. This inventive poetry explores culture, authenticity and translation, andquizzes the lyric modes of apostrophe and song.PAUL HETHERINGTON

Dan Disney's either, Orpheus arrives with the force of a tropical weather event to delivera series of pulsating shocks to the languages of everyday life. Neither strictly poetic norpurely philosophical, these deliriously pedagogical poems summon Rilke, Levertov,Ashbery, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Cage and multitudinous others to reconsider what wethought we knew of authorship, form, religion, phenomenology, and love. For Disney, theproper response to Bloom's anxiety of influence is 'a godless both/and' in which a seriesof 'elegiac anthroposcenes' transforms the labyrinth of solitude into the kinds of worldsthat 'non-residents' might want to inhabit. Hospitable, demanding, festive and fearless,either, Orpheus passes through 'where previously it was not evident that anyone couldfind a passage.FIONA HILE

About the authorDan Disney is an Australian poet whose previous collection, and then when the waspublished by John Leonard Press in 2011. He is also coeditor of a forthcoming collectionWriting to the Wire, to be released by UWA Publishing in 2016. Dan Disney teaches in theLiterature Department at Sogang University, Seoul.

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Pertha guide for the curious

edited by Terri-ann White

ISBN: 9781742587554RRP: $24.99Format: C-format, paperbackExtent: 250 pagesCategory: travel writing, non-fiction

Where do you find a city’s soul? Where is its pulse, its personality? When we walk acrossthe skin of a city, do we listen for its laugh?

Terri-ann White draws together an eclectic group of Perth people in this collection toshare their insights on a rapidly evolving city. From an architect’s perspective on heritageto a historian’s ruminations on Perth’s swampy origins; from a walk down streets that don’texist to Noongar place names; from the union movement to public art to criminal Perth toconversational Perth, this book encourages new encounters with the city. Perth: a guidefor the curious traverses social, cultural and political spaces as the reader traverses thestreets, kindling a sense of curiosity about a city by unearthing buried treasure.

This is not a book of nostalgia. It doesn’t posit a golden age or list a series of laments. Thisis a book about continuities and unfolding narratives. Perth situates the present in thepast and illuminates possible futures.

Perth: a guide for the curious is meant to be thumbed through in cafes, stuffed into satchelsand walked around the city like a tireless companion. Perth promises to delight and inspireboth visitor and local alike.

ContributorsTerri-ann White; Len Collard, Clint Bracknell and Angela Rooney; Malcolm Mackay; HelenWhitbread; Kate Hislop; Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown; Michel Lewi; Julian Bolleter; MarcusCanning; Peter Kennedy; Clarissa Ball; Diana Warnock; Paul Carter; Geoffrey London; SarahBurnside; Conrad Liveris; Nick Allbrook; Antonio Buti; Beth George; Alannah MacTiernan;Gillian O'Shaughnessy; Andra Kins; David Whish-Wilson; Craig Smith; Ruth Morgan.

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Skin DeepSettler Impressions of Aboriginal Women

by Liz Conor

ISBN: 9781742588070RRP: $50.00Format: C-format, paperbackExtent: 310 pagesCategory: Australian History, Cultural Studies

Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters withAboriginal women and the tropes, types and perceptions that seeped into everydaysettler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal womenand culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australiaand in Europe, with names, dates and locations erased so that individual women came tobe an anonymised as ‘gins’ and ‘lubras’. Liz Conor identifies and traces the various tropesused to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonialimagination even after conflicting records emerged.

The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued.Construction of Aboriginal women’s gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control,and Conor shows how the industrialisation of print was critical to this control, emergingas it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginalwomen through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke anunderstanding that was surface-based and halfknowing: only skin deep.

About the authorDr Liz Conor joined the National Centre for Australian Studies in September 2011 as aLecturer following an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow in the Departmentof Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. She is former editor ofMetro Magazine and Australian Screen Education and has published essays andfreelance articles in the The Age, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Arena,Overland, Metro, Sydney Child, The Drum, and in a range of academic journals. Lizcompleted her doctorate in Australian cultural history at La Trobe University and writesregularly on gender, history and politics in the press and scholarly publications.

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Plevna

by Geoff Page

ISBN:9781742588209RRP: $24.99Format: C-format, paperbackExtent: 120 pagesCategory: verse biography

He was a Melbourne surgeon. He worked for the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-TurkishWar. He was the oldest man at Gallipoli, and took illegal photographs during a nine-hourtruce. He repaired Ned Kelly after the Siege of Glenrowan. He cut quite a figure in“Marvellous Melbourne” of the 1880s and 90s. He did remarkable things. He wrote it alldown.

In this verse-portrait of Sir Charles Snodgrass ‘Plevna’ Ryan (1853- 1926), Geoff Pageweaves the writing of Ryan together with his own voice as biographer, setting down the lifeof a man forgotten by history at the same time as reflecting on his role as intermediary.Page’s sensitive investigation into the lost life of Charles Ryan probes broader topics ofmortality, posterity and collective memory. Written in second person and in verse, Pagereflects both on the power and the unreliability of storied lives.

Why have we no biography, three hundred pages,dense with footnotes, boasting your achievements?

About the poetGeoff Page is a Canberra-based Australian poet who has now published twenty-threecollections of poetry as well as two novels, five verse novels and several other worksincluding anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. Heretired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at NarrabundahCollege in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, includingthe ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, theQueensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Hisbook,1953 was shortlisted in the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Selections from hiswork have been translated into Chinese, Hindi, German, Serbian, Slovenian, Greek, Catalanand Spanish.

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Burnt Umber

by Paul Hetherington

ISBN: 9781742588063RRP: $22.99Format: C-format, paperbackExtent: 132 pagesCategory: Poetry

Praise for Burnt Umber

In this expansive and exciting collection Hetherington moves with power andgrace through an impressive range of form and content. The poems burst withtense and detailed images, shot through with meditations on grief, absence andhope. The work in Burnt Umber is always controlled, and full of colour. Here is apoet at the height of his powers singing what it means to be alive.PROFESSOR NIGEL MCLOUGHLIN, UNIVERSITY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE

Somehow this collection landed seamlessly, each section, each page, each poemaligned perfectly. Burnt Umber is a collection of precision and clarity andhandstitched joy.PROFESSOR ANDREW MELROSE, WINCHESTER UNIVERSITY

Paul Hetherington has previously published nine full-length collections of poetry.He has won multiple awards and fellowships. Recently he was awarded anAustralia Council for the Arts Residency at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome, and in2012 he was awarded one of two places on the Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland.His poems have been published in anthologies, journals, magazines and onwebsites in a variety of countries. He is head of the International Poetry StudiesInstitute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra, where he is Professor of Writing,and he is one of the founding editors of the international online journal Axon:Creative Explorations.

About the poet

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MEDIA ENQUIRIESMedia enquiries should be directed to Charlotte Guest atcharlotte.guest@uwa.edu.au or 08 6488 3670