| Description |
xxi, 321 pages ; 24 cm |
| Summary |
The collection is impressively eclectic. There are letters from explorers, convicts, politicians, journalists, scientists, judges, painters, and musicians. The anthology represents those who made no special mark on history but whose letters illuminate a particular aspect of the national experience. Among these are letters from pioneers, expressing their sense of dislocation. One notable group of letters comes from men and women at war - and from wives and mothers back in Australia. The editors have also represented indigenous Australians whose lives were so abruptly changed by European settlement. The term Australian has been interpreted broadly to represent letters with a strong Australian connection, such as those from Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, D. H. Lawrence, and Joyce Grenfell |
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The editors have in effect provided an oblique personal history of the nation. Fittingly, this absorbing anthology ends with an exchange of e-mail messages. If the form of the letter is changing, these new modes of conversation offer a generation unused to letter-writing many of the delights and consolations so memorably found in The Oxford Book of Australian Letters |
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Like the novel, the letter is sometimes presumed to be an endangered form. Displaced by the telephone, it is now being challenged by faxes and e-mail. However, from the first days of European settlement Australians have relied on letters for news and companionship. Brenda Niall and John Thompson have discovered a vast body of letters of the highest quality: intense, witty, political, elegiac, satirical. Chronologically arranged, the anthology contains two hundred letters, many of them published for the first time |
| Analysis |
Letters (Correspondence) |
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Reference works |
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Writing |
| Notes |
Includes index |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-315) |
| Notes |
Also issued online |
| Subject |
Roberts, Tom, 1856-1931. Australian native (Portrait of a lady)
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Australian letters.
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English letters -- Australia.
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| SUBJECT |
Australia -- Biography http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008114302 -- Sources.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2002012010
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Australia -- Social conditions. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008114311
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Australia -- Social life and customs http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008114315 -- Sources. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2002012010
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| Author |
Niall, Brenda.
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Thompson, John (John Robert), 1947-
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| LC no. |
98198961 |
| ISBN |
0195539850 |
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