Louis Nowra

After an extensive period of writing for film, Lewis Nowra returns to the stage with The Boyce Trilogy, an epic saga about the Boyce family, a family made wealthy through property development.

Palu: History, Culture, Administrative and Social Structure Introduction The most important stage that has been crowned by the victory in the long journey of the humanity in the history is the start of the settlements. What has made the humanity be endowed with high humanitarian values and address of the life giving divine message has been all but result of the settled life style. The humanity has been able to fully demonstrate the mighty power divinely remitted to it only after starting the settled life style. It is the consequence of this that the humanity has made valuable habitations over the land they have habituated. As it is, the fate of the habitations has always been intimately tied with the fate of the habitants. However, the habitations, at times, has been demolished and turned into ruins by the ill choice of the habitants themselves. These are often the situations that the humanity looks back and painfully regret. This is especially true when the habitations have registered themselves in the history and have had their existence been written down in the civilisation registry files. However, as the life continues regardless, the necessity brought by the reality of evolution due to progressive thoughts keeps the humanity between the burning desire for the new and the regretting emotions for the lost in the past. It is in this situation that, Hamdi Tanpinar, in his monumental work, Five Cities, writes: “The principle theme of Five Cities are the sadness after the things lost from our lives and burning desires against the new. These two feelings that seem to be contradicting in the first instance can be united in the word of compassion. The cities that this compassion has chosen as its frame are the coincidences of my life.” “Caravans on the roads to Halep was yours Reputations of Silk Road was yours ……….. Seventy five thousand houses of residences were yours Three hundred and sixty piece villages were yours” A poet saying these verses presents an elegy to Palu living a tragedy of turning from a prosperous habitation into a ruin. Today Palu neither has caravans on the roads to Halep, nor Silk Road, nor seventy five thousand houses of residences, nor three hundred and sixty piece villages. The old Palu that has embraced many civilisations in the past does not exist anymore. Palu that once has been the capital city of Urartians, principality centre of Cubukogullari, Artuklular, Akkoyunlular, autonomous state of Ottomans… “As though has revolted your head Is that possible can fit into history your tears? ……. Civilisations lay in your bosom So many histories lay in your bosom.” Palu castle, which has been described once by these verses, as if has now bowed her head deeply sunk into her history. What has reached to us from Palu, now living in memories, are just few photos and ruined historical remains. Palu is a town with 4000 years of history. But this town is now tired. She has become tired, worn-out, and almost diminished with her streets, houses, temples, and castle. We even have lost our memories of Palu once as she was. We have lost our accent, lullabies that our mothers used sing, our ancestors’ migration stories and mobilisation memories, our huge effort requiring intricate embroideries. We abandoned all of them in a great rush. We abandoned our neighbours, bazaars, mosques, khans, bridge and castle, manufactures, and life long friends. We diminished the colours of our Palu. But in fact it was us that we diminished; we abandoned ourselves; we made ourselves tired and wounded; we created a new life that is far from being wholesome. It may be late but we finally realised this. Towns can become civilised by only their self-values that has created them. The place where countries find themselves in the race of civilisation and development can not be valued by just scientific and technological superiority and success in industrialisation. One of the most important determinants for those civilised ones is for the countries to care for their cultural values and make them to meet the universal values. The individuals and institutions who care for their own culture, historical values, places where they live, and show respect to thoughts and values of different cultures will be our most important guaranties in the protection and nurturing of our democracy. Finally we realised that, if we do not posses a local identity, we have loneliness and chaos. There will not be even a democracy. And importantly, if Palu ceases to exist we will not be able to bring up “civilised humans”, participating countryman, sensitive citizens. With this modest study we do not turn backward, but, in contrary we look forward. We can take an aging town forward only to a degree that we can rescue her from neglected past. In this study we try to revitalise our historic Palu with her beauties, history, culture, and people.

"Inside the island, set in a farming district of western N.S.W. in 1912, demonstrates how a matriarchal imitation of English society is destroyed by an outbreak of 'holy fire', madness from a wheat fungus. In The Precious woman, the child-like Su-Ling, wife of a warrior governor in the China of the 20s, ... learns there is no place for compassion in the execution of social change"--Back cover.

A novel of hauntings, love, longing, memory and loss told with audacity and breathtaking imaginative power from one of Australia's most acclaimed writers.You have possessed me, let me go.An iceberg is towed through the Heads to the astonishment of colonial Sydney. As it melts, the iceberg is revealed as a tomb to the perfectly preserved body of a young sailor, who died forty years before.A man lost in gried for his wife is haunted by his memories of her. His life becomes a memorial to her, in the hope of defeating the oblivion of death.Ice tells the story of Malcolm McEacharn, the man who brings joy to early Sydney in the form of an iceberg and who later pioneers the first successful refrigerated voyage from Australia to London. He is a brilliant businessman who will later bring electricity to Melbourne, become its Lord Mayor and be one step away from becoming Prime Minister - but he is driven by an obsession that threatens to destroy him and his world.Ice also tells a parallel story, set in contemporary Sydney, of a young biography who lies in a coma, and her bereft husband's desperate attempts to resurrect her by unearthing the truth about her subject McEacharn.Both stories are redolent with longing, suffused by regret, illuminated by extraordinary imagery, hypnotic language and the sceptre of suspended life in the 'mythical country of ice'. From the frozen, desolate Antarctic to bustling Victorian London, from the Yorkshire moors to colonial tropical Cairns, to Imperial Japan and the gritty streets of modern-day Kings Cross, Ice walks the line between life and death, fact and fantasy, grief and madness. It is a book about the power of love, told with audacity and breathtaking imaginative power. It will never let you go.

Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work. The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even appending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise.

Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of Mars. For this is not our solar system, but one drawn from classic science fiction in which all the planets are inhabited and we travel through space on beautiful rockets. Severin is a realist in a fantastic universe. But her latest film, which investigates the disappearance of a diving colony on a watery Venus populated by island-sized alien creatures, will be her last. Though her crew limps home to earth and her story is preserved by the colony's last survivor, Severin will never return.

Two girls survive a terrible flood in the Tasmanian bush and are rescued by a pair of Tasmanian tigers who raise them in the wild. Their story of survival is remarkable, as they adapt to the life of the tiger, learning to hunt and to communicate without the use of human language. When they are discovered and returned to civilization, neither can adapt to being fully human after their extraordinary experience. Two girls survive a terrible flood in the Tasmanian bush and are rescued by a pair of Tasmanian tigers that raise them in the wild. When they are discovered and returned to civilization, neither can adapt to being fully human after their experience.

Mary and her young brother Peter are the only survivors of an aircrash in the middle of the Australian desert. Facing death from exhaustion and starvation, they meet an aboriginal boy who helps them to survive, and guides them along their long journey. But a terrible misunderstanding results in a tragedy that neither Mary nor Peter will ever forget...