The Daisy was, by her own description, "passionate". She was also hard-headed, a woman without means or prospects in a man's world. Edwin, as well as being handsome and gallant, had the whiff of a pedigree and prospects of a remittance.
Their...
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Also by Les MurrayRelated VideoBack IssuesNavigationLinksProm dresses | Drought Essay: Recognising the Derision as FearLes MurrayDeath gets into the suburbs, but sleek turnover highrise keeps it out of mind
and wilderness, wrapped in its own deaths, scarcely points us at ours,
but furred rusty machines, and grey boards unglazed for heritage or holiday –
you can’t truck in enough bricks. Settled country is the land of the dead,
there you are taught love as mourning, you shop in boarded-up places.
It’s great to follow car-dust out towards the Mistake,
way past a working people’s farm, long widowed, standing in space. |
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University of Sydney
Historical EncountersThey were new chums, fresh off the boat. Daisy May O'Dwyer was 20, the porcelain-skinned daughter of a drunkard doctor from Cashel. Edwin Henry Murrant, a year younger, was English and claimed to be the illegitimate son of an Admiral. For each, Australia was a blank slate, a chance to invent themselves.
The Daisy was, by her own description, "passionate". She was also hard-headed, a woman without means or prospects in a man's world. Edwin, as well as being handsome and gallant, had the whiff of a pedigree and prospects of a remittance. Their... Monthly books
AC Grayling's 'Liberty in the Age of Terror'
Vladimir Nabokov's 'The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments'
Frederick Seidel's 'Ooga-Booga and Poems: 1959-2009'
Monthly musicMonthly film
Jacques Audiard's 'A Prophet' and John Hillcoat's 'The Road'
In A Prophet, a dazzling new film about innocence and power from Jacques Audiard (director of The Beat My Heart Skipped, 2005), 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) is about to embark on a six-year prison sentence for assaulting a cop. Polite and deferential, Malik is hard to read at first. The little we glean about his life is framed in terms of negatives: he has no contacts, no relatives; he didn’t grow up with his parents, but in juvenile centres. If he’s experiencing fear as he enters the chaos of the prison at Brécourt, he doesn’t show it. He’... Random reading
From the archive
'Secrets of the Jury Room' by Malcolm Knox
August 2005
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