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Bettina Bradbury, Caroline’s Dilemma: A colonial inheritance saga
Bettina Bradbury, Caroline’s Dilemma: A colonial inheritance saga NewSouth, November 2019, 352pp, p/bk, ISBN: 9781742236605, RRP: AUD$34.99 If you hold a romanticised appreciation of living a middle-class life on the land in the Victorian era, then this non-fiction book will challenge that…
Cathy Perkins, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross
Cathy Perkins, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross Monash University Publishing, November 2019, 285pp (inc Index), ISBN (pb): 978-1-925835-53-3, RRP: $29.95 ‘£20 and you shall have her’ (p.60). This financial exchange in 1917 between Sydney bookseller James Tyrell and publisher George Robertson…
Philippa Sandall, Seafurrers: the Ships' Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World
Philippa Sandall, Seafurrers: the Ships' Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World Affirm Press, 2017, 244pp., ISBN: 9781925712155, h/bk, AUS $24.99 Matthew Flinders was onto something when he wrote his little treatise about his faithful cat Trim. He could not have foreseen that cats would…
The Penrith Museum of Printing
Albion Printing press, c1860 at the Museum of Printing, photo by Alison Wishart The Penrith Museum of Printing Sydney is lucky to have one of the few operational printing museums in the world. Yes, all the old printing presses in this museum actually…
Robert Wainwright, Rocky Road
Robert Wainwright, Rocky Road Allen and Unwin, 424pp., ISBN: 9781760291556, p/bk, RRP: $32.99 ‘Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get’ – Forrest Gump’s philosophising may not be the most prosaic observation but it…