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Articles by Cathy Perkins
Lust for radical life • Cathy Perkins
When police arrested him in February 1917, Lesbia Harford’s former lover Guido Baracchi was giving an anti-conscription speech on Melbourne’s Yarra Bank. Having been baited by conservatives about his side’s callousness towards the men on the battlefield, he had agreed he did not support a war effort fuelled by nationalism.
Whispering in the reader’s ear • Cathy Perkins
While it’s generally poor taste to mention an author’s age, it’s uplifting for many reasons to read a highly accomplished biography by a ninety-four-year-old writer dealing with an author who produced her one and only masterpiece in four furious weeks during her late sixties. Australian biographer Brenda Niall’s latest book, Joan Lindsay, is fuelled by her desire to understand how her subject achieved this unusual feat when she wrote the classic Australian novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Clipping his own ticket | Michael Gill
Lionel Barber’s story goes to the heart of news media’s failings. To read it is to be heartened. Right through the postwar years the Financial Times was a remarkable host to great journalists and a rich source of insight and revelation. But it fell into the passionless and ultimately damaging embrace of people who neither understood nor cared for its purpose, their neglect accentuated by a wholly destructive period of digital mania circa 1996–2000.
Poet, writer, daughter
When it was time to go into the small sandstone church, we checked off our names at the door and picked up copies of the booklet with April on the cover. The black-and-white street photo, with her netted spring hat and shoulder-padded winter coat, summoned up the late 1940s when she was in her mid-twenties and working as a freelance writer and publishers’ typist.
BRIGHT AND FIERY TROUPERS – Lucy Sussex on Brenda Niall and Cathy Perkins
Long before the Stella Prize, there was Stella herself, but also Ada, various Marys, Catherines and Elizabeths, Tasma, Rosa and so on. The herstory of women writing in Australia is long and distinguished, a feminist literary tradition. Debra Adelaide’s 1988 critical anthology A Bright and Fiery Troop showcased the variety and innovation of Australia’s pioneering women writers, which included the first novel written and published in mainland Australia (The Guardian by Anna Maria Bunn, 1838).
The Shelf Life of Zora Cross
By Cathy Perkins $29.95 Sydney event: Cathy discusses Zora's life and work with Fiona Wright. Better Read Than Dead, 265 King St, Newtown, 18 March 2020. Register here. Melbourne event: Cathy Perkins in conversation with historian Yves Rees. Readings Bookshop, Carlton, 25 March 2020. Book now. 'A rare gem. This is biography at its best: boldly conceived and brilliantly written.
Everything familiar yet entirely strange | Cathy Perkins
Sky Swimming By Sylvia Martin | UWA Publishing | $24.99 | 166 pages If you walk through the sliding doors of Abbey’s bookshop in the centre of Sydney, pass the cash desk, turn right at the new releases table, left at new fiction, cross the diagonal threshold where the floor changes from beige-and-blue tiles to swirling indigo-and-navy carpet, step through Crime Alley (new, true, modern, Australian) and turn right, you’ll find Australian biography.
Idling in Green Places: A life of Alec Chisholm
Biography Reviewed by Danielle Clode • Idling in Green Places: A life of Alec Chisholm by Russell McGregor Australian Scholarly Publishing, $49.95 pb, 285 pp, 9781925801996 Biography Reviewed by Danielle Clode • Australian nature writing has come a long way in recent years. Not only do we have an abundance of contemporary nature writers, but we are also rediscovering the ones we have forgotten.
The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga
True Crime Reviewed by Jacqueline Kent • The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga by Imre Salusinszky Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 338 pp, 9780522875492 True Crime Reviewed by Jacqueline Kent • Since 9/11 and all its attendant horrors, the story of the bomb that exploded outside Sydney’s Hilton Hotel early on the morning of 13 February 1978, killing three people and injuring nine others, has largely been cast aside.
'Putting the terror in extraterritoriality' by Christina Twomey
Poem Poem I am from a very large island, a continent in fact. Yet smaller islands have meant more to me – trips to Bribie Island with my grandmother to drink shandies and eat crab sandwiches; two years living in an expatriate Australian community on the Malaysian island of Penang; an object lesson in the power of oceans while visiting American Samoa, when my then boyfriend and I were carried by the tide beyond the coral reef we were exploring with snorkels.
The Shelf Life of Zora Cross
Biography Reviewed by Brenda Niall • The Shelf Life of Zora Cross by Cathy Perkins Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 285 pp, 9781925835533 Biography Reviewed by Brenda Niall • Just over one hundred years ago, Sydney readers were speaking in hushed tones about a shocking new book by a young woman, Zora Cross.
“But no one remembers her!” | Cathy Perkins
I was sitting on the concrete floor of the Mitchell Library basement in 2008 when I first saw the name Zora Cross. Working as an editor at the State Library of New South Wales, which houses the Mitchell, I was preparing a small display on early Australian book publishing.
“But no one remembers her!” | Cathy Perkins
I was sitting on the concrete floor of the Mitchell Library basement in 2008 when I first saw the name Zora Cross. Working as an editor at the State Library of New South Wales, which houses the Mitchell, I was preparing a small display on early Australian book publishing.
Nothing is Wasted
The Mirror’s writing women If ever a magazine was a victim of its success, it was the Australian Woman’s Mirror. Having started out as the Bulletin’s little sister, it was so popular by 1960 that Frank Packer bought itin order to kill it and clear the market for his Australian Women’s Weekly.
So About the Money by Cathy Perkins
$3.99 When Holly Price trips over a friend’s dead body while hiking, her life takes a nosedive into a world of intrigue and danger. More info → Chapter One Big Flats, eastern Washington Holly Price picked the wrong moment to admire the Snake River. She managed a quick glimpse of blue water rushing between barren black cliffs before she tripped and staggered off the narrow trail. Alex Montoya glanced back.
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