PhotoBooks Australia

Peter Conrad is one of the most gifted writers of our time. Whether exploring the history of opera (A Song of Love and Death), the essence of a movie director (The Hitchcock Murders), or the twentieth-century relationship between art and life (Modern Times, Modern Places), he has dazzled audiences for nearly thirty-five years since he left his native Australia for a life spent mainly in Oxford, London, Lisbon, and New York. In this new book, Conrad tells the story of what Australia—the people, the bush, the desert, the cities—used to be like, and what it has now become. He uses all his special gifts of making us feel that the particular, in this case a country far from the horizons of most of us, is nevertheless of intense personal concern.

The settlement of Australia coincided with the invention of photography, and Conrad's brilliant word-pictures of the hot, aromatic, cicada-loud landscape are woven around 200 images. The camera recorded the clearance of the bush and the construction of huts for homesteaders, documented the exploration of the uninhabitable outback, and accompanied the building of new cities, bravely determined to look European despite their geographical position. This many-layered story depicts the making and remaking of Australia: a social history extending from the trials of the frontier to the hedonistic urban society of the present day; a psychological history describing how the mob gradually permitted individuals to challenge the country's inherited values; and a cultural history that begins with the harsh, arid earth and shows how stark reality is transformed into art. It is a book about memory of home and our lifelong homesickness, about the way we construct fictions, license lies, make room for Utopia, or express and suppress desire and hostility about our family albums of self and nation. 200 illustrations.

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This book offers an insider's look to the home of the next Olympic games. When Captain Cook first sighted Sydney's harbor in 1770, he named it Port Jackson. But, inhabitants were scarce until the arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip, 18 years later. At that time, the name "Sydney", was bestowed upon the port, inspired by Lord Sydney, the British home secretary in 1788. With nearly 1/5 the population of Australia, Sydney boasts one of the world's most magnificent bridges, the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Combining customary Australian living, including Aborigine quarters with its' up and coming cosmopolitan status, all eyes will be on this beautiful city in the years to come.

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More than 80 percent of Australia's population is clustered in and around cities on the coastal fringe, and yet the lives of Australians on the land still capture our collective imagination. For over 200 years the pioneering spirit of Australia's ruralpeople has enabled them to meet the challenges presented by a difficult climate in a fragile land. Today, that same spirit of resourcefulness helps farmers embrace the changes required to compete successfully in a globalized world market. "The Spirit of Rural Australia" acknowledges the foundations of the past and celebrates a future built upon a resiliant country spirit. Evocative images and text combine to create a picture of rural life that will appeal to readers everywhere, but in particular, those Australians who have lived through the changes being explored. The book begins with an introductory essay surveying the rapid transformation of rural Australia from the early days of European settlement to the prs! ent. Five thematic sections follow, looking at critical elements of country life - Land, Work, Town, Communication and Home. Each section gives the reader an overview of how rural people across Australia come together to ceate a special sense of community and belonging. Character sketches interspersed throughout the book are drawn from particular images of people, place and landscape. Elements of story, anecdote, memoir and biography reanimate the lives of country people from a passing era, investing contempoarary rural Australia with a healthy sense of place. There is a strong focus on work practices, lifestyles, and the daily routines of country people engaged in the activities that have halped shape the identity of rural communities over the last hundred years or so.

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Immense, haunting, unique in geology and life forms, the outback looms to the north and west of Australia's urbanized southeast coast. For two years, photojournalist Bill Bachman recorded both this forbidding landscape and the people who dwell--and even thrive--in it, compiling the images for his remarkable book, Australian Colors. Deftly avoiding all the usual clichés--there is not a single kangaroo shot--Australian Colors mixes stunning vistas of twisted cliffs and sweeping plains with more intimate portraits of outback culture. Here are the jackaroos and jillaroos (cowboys and cowgirls) who work the vast outback ranches, the sunken-jawed fishers of isolated creeks and shoals, the well-lubricated celebrants at a bush horse race. Bachman's striking photographs are well matched by his lengthy, colorful captions, which go far beyond typical coffee-table book text. In addition, each of the book's winningly titled 19 sections ("Trees as Men Walking," "Dogs? They Run the Country") begins with a short essay by award-winning Australian novelist Tim Winton, whose evocative, often humorous prose perfectly complements Bachman's images. There is one question that has to be asked, however: why are Australia's aborigines--the outback's original inhabitants--so underrepresented in Australian Colors? By revealing so little of them, perhaps Bachman reveals more of outback culture than he intends. --Rebecca Gleason

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Here is a photographic portrait of Australia's premier city that illustrates why Sydney Is the country's capital in everything but name. Whether he's photographing a landmark such as the Sydney Opera House, the spectacular sweep of Sydney Harbor, or street scenes that reveal the devil-may-care urbanity of Sydney's residents, Billington's pictures exude the energy and vitality of this metropolis down under.

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