Showing results by narrator "Beverley Dunn" in All Categories

It's been 10 months since Jack died, and Sandra, a tightly wound academic, copes with her grief by immersing herself in the history of textiles. When she and Martha, a gifted knitter, meet over an unconscious body on the footpath, the unlikely threads of their lives tangle into each other. Sandra invites Martha to join her in a professional collaboration, but what begins as a working relationship becomes something deeply personal.

In 1942 a group of 65 Australian Army nursing sisters was evacuated from Malaya a few days before the fall of Singapore. Two days later their ship was bombed and sunk by the Japanese. Of the 53 survivors who scrambled ashore, 21 were murdered and the remaining 32 taken prisoner. White Coolies is the engrossing record kept by one of the sisters, Betty Jeffrey, during the more than three gruelling years of imprisonment that followed.

In 1943, when Grace and Leo Waterhouse married in Australia, they were part of a young generation ready to sacrifice themselves to win the war, while being confident they would survive. Sixty years on, as Grace recounts what happened to her doomed hero, she can say what she suspected then: that for many men, bravery is its own end.

In the 1890s, when a woman's role was seen as marrying well and raising a family, Daisy Bates reinvented herself from humble governess to heiress-traveller and 'woman of science'. She would become one of the best-known and most controversial ethnologists in history, and one of the first people to put Aboriginal culture on the map.

In her flat above Drylands' newsagency, Janet Deakin is writing a book for the world's last reader. Little has changed her in 50 years, except for the coming of cable TV. Loneliness is almost a religion, and still everyone knows your business. But the town is being outmanoeuvered by drought and begins to empty, pouring itself out like water into sand.

Facing not onlt the astounding courage they displayed amid death and chaos but also on the triumphs and pain of their personal lives, Susanna reveals how these 11 Australian women were as influential and heroic in civil life as they were in war.

Olga Master's debut novel - immediately hailed for her powerful and original fiction. Loving Daughters is a brilliant, unsentimental portrait of two sisters - one artistic and restless, the other houseproud, her father's favourite. The entry of an eligible young man into their lives creates a disturbing triangle of desire and rivalry.

At 18 Liz is separated from her first true love. Across the miles she dreams of the day he will return to marry her, but fate has other plans and love is lost. Thirty-seven years later, she picks up the telephone to hear a voice from the past that still has the power to stop her in her tracks. This is an extraordinary, true story of love lost, and love found. Crossing the continents and decades it is a testament to the power of the passion and the triumph of the heart.

Sunburnt Country is an outstanding selection of autobiographical stories and short fiction about Australia and Australians. From childhood, through adolescence, work and marriage, to old age, these stories provide a lively, at times moving, sometimes funny, glimpse into many aspects of life in Australia.