Edition 9
Up North
- Published 6th September, 2005
- ISBN: 9780733316715
- Extent: 232 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
In major new essays and reportage it demolishes some of the most potent myths about the north, and re-evaluates our understanding of the Japanese threat during the Second World War.
This edition turns the map upside down to imagine a new integrated and reconciled future.
Moving memoirs and fiction recreate the enduring quest for the exotic as outstanding writers travel further and further north pursuing their dreams.
In this Edition
Develop the north
NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT WAS high on the Commonwealth agenda in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to such projects as the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme. It is no coincidence that this was a period of optimism and high morale in the country. But vision for the long-term...
Turning the map upside down
IF WE TURN the map upside down and start Australian history where its documentation properly begins – in the north – the kaleidoscope of Australian history falls into a completely different pattern. Prior contact with Muslim Asians on the north coasts and the cultural...
A symbolic life
GATJIL DJERRKURA LIVED the last decade of his life moving between two worlds – the world of Canberra politics and his distant homeland that looked out on the Arafura Sea. A senior elder of the Wangurri people of the East Arnhem land/Yirrkala Aboriginal community...
Howard’s way: northerly neighbours and western friends
IT IS VERY hard to find good, objective writing about the philosophies, motivations and political skills of this country's second-longest-serving prime minister. It seems to have been difficult for many commentators to approach John Howard objectively. There is a mountain of writing that ranges...
Of the bomb
HE WAS A small old man and he sat alone in the tram. It was late July and very warm and the tram was making its way through the southern suburbs of Hiroshima to the ferry terminal for the sacred island of Miyajima. The...
Threat made manifest
DARWIN AIRPORT WAS the very first bit of Australia that I stepped onto as a nine-year-old migrant on the afternoon of September 23, 1966. My family was part of a plane load of ten-pound migrants bound for a new life in sunny South Australia....
Our man up there
GIL JAMIESON SAT looking over Three Moon Flat, a shotgun across his sarong-covered knee as the sound of the crows in a vast gum tree filled the air. "They make a hell of a racket," I said, stating the obvious."They know I've got the...
From a moving car
IT'S 1979 AND I'm 15, fucked up and restless. My mother and I are living alone after years of domestic violence with her deranged or drunken boyfriends. Finally, everything is quiet. Too quiet. I've long left school, having refused to continue on the grounds...
Return of the camel lady
DARWIN IS COMING up somewhere ahead, in the dark. Thirty hours semicircling the Earth to get here, in which time the moon has turned the right way up and summer has passed into winter. I check the internal landscape for signs of that physical...
Even further north
WHEN I WAS at primary school in Earlwood, a solid western suburb of Sydney built largely for, and by, Diggers returned from the First World War, "the north" meant the North Shore, a snooty region inhabited by rich people speaking an odd, different language....
The exotic at home
EARLY IN 1982, when I had just finished Fly Away Peter and was writing back and forth to my publisher at Chatto about how it was to be published, I wrote an afterword to the book. It was an account of my experience with...
These people
MAY 1995. AT an open-air market in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, brightly coloured bilums (string bags) hang from the wire perimeter fence and the concrete benches are laden with organically grown produce – oranges, sweet potato, peanuts, coconuts, cabbages and local greens. Clutching...
The delegation
Everything must changeIn order that nothing changes– Giuseppe di LampedusaLONG BEFORE EIGHT-PACK units, a Mexican restaurant, two newsagents and a music school had bloomed on the hill like a rash on an unblemished cheek, our university share house had been a stately homestead in...
We’re all eccentrics here
HALFWAY BETWEEN DARWIN and Tennant Creek – around 500 clicks each way – there's a wide spot in the road called Larrimah. Some travellers reckon it's another country. Those unable to get mobile coverage or anything on the car radio will tell you it's...
Curtin’s hand of friendship
I was engaged in conversation with the Governor-General and his wife after the dinner when an elderly lady, apparently a friend of the Governor-General's wife, sidled up to me and kindly said, "Mr Curtin, who you just met, is not a man who has...
The angel in the travelling show
IN THE NORTH of Queensland, at the cusp of the modern age, many singular events were recorded and others, no less true for not being recorded, fell outside the legal jurisdiction and moral grip of both the old world and the proconsuls in the...
The Einstein canaries
I FELT LIKE I should kiss her or hug her, but while I was still thinking she got in her car. I felt like I should thank her or crack a gag or say something profound, but while I was still thinking she said,...
Featured Contributors
David Malouf
David Malouf is a distinguished Brisbane-born author, essayist and librettist. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including...
Matthew Condon
Matthew Condon is the author of ten novels and story collections, including A Night at the Pink Poodle, winner...
Andrew Belk
Andrew Belk is a writer and filmmaker based on the New South Wales south coast.He studied journalism at the...
Meera Atkinson
Meera Atkinson is a Sydney-based literary writer, academic, and the author of Traumata (UQP, 2018), The Poetics of Transgenerational...
