FOR EDUCATORS
FOR EDUCATORS
TERTIARY STUDIES
Aboriginal Issues
- Over My Tracks: A Remarkable Life by Evelyn Crawford as told to Chris Walsh (Penguin)
Evelyn Crawford tells the life of an Aboriginal family as it was in the 1930’s and as it is now. - My Place by Sally Morgan (Fremantle Arts Centre Press)
A powerful autobiography of three generations. A deeply moving account of a search for truth, into which a whole family is drawn; finally freeing the tongues of the author’s mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.
Biography
- Inside Out by Robert Adamson (2004, Text Publishing)
‘Robert Adamson is one of Australia’s national treasures.’
~ John Ashbery
Robert has written a wonderful autobiography. In this book, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes funny, Robert tells the story of his childhood and early adulthood in fifties and sixties Australia. Having spent much of his adolescence in boys’ homes and prisons he is introduced to books and dreams of becoming a writer. - Eating the Underworld - a memoir in three voices by Doris Brett
Evocatively told via three voices – the diarist, the poet and the voice of fairy tale and myth – this memoir explores the intricate dynamics of family, truth and memory. - Over My Tracks: A Remarkable Life by Evelyn Crawford as told to Chris Walsh (Penguin)
Evelyn Crawford tells the life of an Aboriginal family as it was in the 1930’s and as it is now. 
Mary Martin: A Double Life, Australia - India 1915-1973 by Julie Lewis (University of Queensland Press)
Mary Martin is best known for the bookshops that still bear her name. In postwar Adelaide, her bookshops became a gathering place for intellectuals and radicals attracted by her unconventional views, her warm manner and her freshly brewed coffee. In the 1960s Martin began a new life in India, determined to encourage an intellectual and artistic awareness between Eastern and Western cultures. She worked with the charismatic Dr Narasimhan among tribespeople of the Nilgiri Hills while supporting herself and her staff through her international bookselling operation.
Cultural Studies
The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia by Alison Broinowski
‘This superbly illustrated history of Australian aesthetic responses to Asia’
~ Robin Gerster, The Age- About Face: Asian Representations of Australia by Alison Broinowski
The question, “What do Asians think of Australians?”, is often asked. A new survey of historical and contemporary accounts of Australia in ten Asian countries, provides at least part of the answer to this. It reflects both reality and image: what people observe and experience about Australia, and how opinion makers in the public sphere want Australia to be perceived.
Three contemporary case studies are used to test the historical evidence. They consider the responses in the Asian media to Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the reporting of Australia’s role in East Timor, and fiction written since the 1980s by Asian Australians. - Mary Martin: A Double Life, Australia - India 1915-1973 by Julie Lewis (University of Queensland Press)
Mary Martin is best known for the bookshops that still bear her name. In postwar Adelaide, her bookshops became a gathering place for intellectuals and radicals attracted by her unconventional views, her warm manner and her freshly brewed coffee. In the 1960s Martin began a new life in India, determined to encourage an intellectual and artistic awareness between Eastern and Western cultures. She worked with the charismatic Dr Narasimhan among tribespeople of the Nilgiri Hills while supporting herself and her staff through her international bookselling operation.
Australian Fiction
- The Plains by Gerald Murnane (2001, Text Publishing)
Gerald won the Patrick White Award in November 1999 at a stage when none of his books was in print in Australia. This award is presented annually to a writer whose work, in the opinion of the judges, “has not received adequate recognition”. Text Publishing righted this wrong by releasing The Plains. It has recently been published in the USA by Western Michigan University, and will be published in Swedish in Sweden shortly. - The House at Evelyn’s Pond by Wendy Orr (2001, Allen & Unwin)
Around the structure of a woman’s voyage to arrange her mother’s funeral, Wendy Orr weaves the life stories of three generations of women and their loves.
Ruth is not an easy mother to live up to. Oxford-educated, a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary during the second world war, she marries a Canadian navigator and returns with him to the family farm in Nova Scotia, where she throws herself into researching his Acadian French ancestors and carving a heritage for her three children. Clever, witty and proud, she keeps resolutely hidden her grief over her own lack of history or family.
Her daughter Jane, a primary school teacher, travels to Europe in the 1960s, and on the Magical Mystery bus tour, meets and marries an Australian dairy farmer. She reflects later: “...she’d gone to Europe to finish growing up, but she’d married Ian instead and somehow along the way she’d exchanged living up to her mother for living up to her husband.” Even Jane’s daughter Megan, a mildly psychic acupuncturist, exudes a self confidence that escapes her mother.
Now, while Megan is hiking Canada’s west coast and falling in love, the recently widowed Ruth returns to England for the first time in fifty years, and dies in her cousin’s home. Jane must fly out from Australia, make the arrangements and return her mother’s ashes to Canada. She will stay with her mother‘s cousin outside London, where she had also stayed thirty years earlier on the trip when she met Ian. It is a time for memories and reflections, not all of them comfortable, and this will only intensify when she returns to her mother’s house at Evelyn’s Pond. Alone in her childhood home, surrounded by mementoes of the past, she must face herself and her future in two critical days and nights of discovery and decision.
Horticultural Studies
- Waterwise Gardening by Kevin Walsh (Reed New Holland, 2004 third edition)
Our gardens are guzzling between one quarter and one half of all domestic water. With our very dry land, where fresh water is a relative trickle, we need to get waterwise... and fast! This book sets out the six vital principals by which we can have a beautiful garden and save water too. It describes over 200 drought-tolerant trees, shrubs, groundcovers, perenials and bulbs – most of which are illustrated – and discusses their needs and features.
Medicine / Nursing / Occupational Therapy / Physiotherapy / Psychology / Social Work
- There’s A Light At The End Of The Tunnel - Self-help and hope for sufferers of depression by Joan Zawatzky (Hybrid Publishers, 2002)
Written in simple, non technical language, this book offers sufferers of depression, their loved ones and those working with them, a comprehensive, self-help guide to recovery. It is a balanced, compassionate approach to help the total person.
In her own counselling practice, Joan uses structured, objective techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy together with the subjective methods of storytelling and metaphor. This has proved to be a positive recipe for overcoming depression and it is these successful strategies that form the cornerstone of the book which includes:
- Cognitive behavioral therapy that breaks down negativity and destructive thinking and helps to overcome depression.
- Case histories and explanations describing the many forms of depression, its causes, symptoms and the treatments available.
- Inspirational tales to bring hope and motivate recovery. - My Father, My Father by Bernard Marin with Ian Coller (Scribe, 2002)
This successful Jewish accountant was almost fifty when he was suddenly struck down by crippling headaches. The problem, however, was not just physical. Bernard’s distress was the result of years of denial over his poor relationship with his father, who had died fourteen years before. This book is the story of what happened next, as Bernard Marin almost fell apart, driven by an overwhelming compulsion to discover what had been kept from him. His journey led to this extraordinary tale of loss, discovery and redemption that includes glimpses of stretcher bearing in New Guinea in the Second World War and SP bookmaking in Melbourne in the 1950s. 
Peeling the Onion by Wendy Orr (Allen & Unwin)
Anna is used to being athletic, popular, ‘normal’. After a car accident leaving her with multiple fractures and probable long term difficulties, she feels the layers of her familiar self being peeled away. Can she pick up the pieces of her life?
It should be compulsory for all medical, nursing, other allied health professions students, to read this book for the special insight into the feelings of patients through the traumatic event, the recuperation in hospital and the long rehabilitation process, including the impact of the medical and allied professional staff on the protagonist.
Physical Education and Sport
- The Encyclopaedia of Exercise and Sport Health by Dr Peter Brukner, Dr Karim Khan and John Kron is a must for all students in this field. It is clearly illustrated and has non-jargon explanations for thousands of questions about the health and fitness related aspects of exercise and sport.
Poetry
- Reading the River: Selected Poems by Robert Adamson (June 2004, Bloodaxe)
Robert’s poetry has been translated into seven languages and won many awards. - Mulberry Leaves, New & Selected Poems 1970 - 2001, by Robert Adamson
This book brings together the very best of Adamson’s poetry from 1970 to 2001. This rich but discriminating selection consolidates his claim to being ‘the most unique poet of his generation’ (Dorothy Hewett) - a ‘key figure’ according to the Times Literary Supplement. - In the Constellation of the Crab by Doris Brett (Hale & Iremonger)
‘Here, with heightened intensity and greatly augmented range, are the strong themes which have already distinguished Doris Brett’s poetry: Flight, light, magic, and metamorphosis. Of especial power are her haunting lyrics about cancer and the all-too-real operating theatre; but her re-inventions of the old fairytales are also marvellous. Hers is the flashing, compacted, restless imagination which somehow always knows that “we are in the giant's kitchen”.’
~ Chris Wallace-Crabbe - Flame Tree: Selected Poems by Kevin Hart (Bloodaxe)
Hart’s poetry is dual in nature and inspiration, embracing the pain and passion of humanity at the same time as it evokes the immanence of God in the world. His double edged poetry is both radiant and grounded, sensuous and searching, casting both light and shadow on what can be named while tracing the borders, but respects their mystery and complexity.
Women’s Issues
- In the Constellation of the Crab by Doris Brett (Hale & Iremonger)
‘Here, with heightened intensity and greatly augmented range, are the strong themes which have already distinguished Doris Brett’s poetry: Flight, light, magic, and metamorphosis. Of especial power are her haunting lyrics about cancer and the all-too-real operating theatre; but her re-inventions of the old fairytales are also marvellous. Hers is the flashing, compacted, restless imagination which somehow always knows that “we are in the giant's kitchen”.’
~ Chris Wallace-Crabbe
World War II History
- Caged by David J Landau (Macmillan 2000)
What reviewers have said:
‘Caged is a testament to the bravery against the unimaginable evil and is one of better books I have read in a long time.’
~ Anna Punshon, Burnie Advocate
‘It is a worthy memorial to a brave man.’
~ John Vile, The Sunday Tasmanian 28th January 2001
‘David Landau, a Polish Jew, gives us a rare story of surviving the Holocaust. He was one of the few survivors who fought back against the Nazis. It is a story of a personal tragedy, but it’s also a tale of the resistance, courage and survival, told at a relentless pace... Amidst all the destruction, slaughter and misery, he was supported by the love of his childhood sweetheart, Luba... Their story is inspiring and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit’.
~ Abbey’s Bookshop
‘The story of a great hero from WWII has finally emerged from the shadows.’
~ Matt Condon, The Sunday Herald, Sydney 11th February 2001
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