Adrian Mitchell – August 18 2019

Adrian taught and published in Australian literature at the universities of Adelaide and Sydney and post-retirement, remains an honorary research associate in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. Adrian’s books are stories of people and communities that should be better known than they are. His interest is in retrieving the stories of those who have been passed over or forgotten, and in finding new ways of re-presenting them, beginning with Drawing the Crow, a book of memoirs about Adelaide. His other books include The Profilist, in which the imagined voice of artist Samuel Thomas Gillwhich paints a picture of Australia’s early colonial years; From Corner to Corner: The line of Henry Colless, about Henry Colless who as a teenager helped his father and brother establish the legendary Come-by-Chance; and Plein Airs and Graces: The life and times of George Collingridge, which examines the extraordinary life of George Collingridge de Tourcey, late 19th-century landscape painter and author of Discovery of Australia (1895), in which on the evidence of ancient maps he argued controversially for Portuguese and Hispanic pre-discovery of Australia.

Dampier’s Monkey: The south seas voyages of William Dampier
Wakefield Press, 2010; ISBN 9781862549197t
Dampier’s Monkey examines the late-17th century ways of comprehending an expanding world by re-evaluating the travel narratives of the buccaneer William Dampier. Included in this book is Dampier’s journal of his voyage in the South Seas from 1681 to 1691, complete with his annotations and illustrations, published here for the first time. William Dampier, the ‘devil’s mariner’ as he has been called, a far voyager and traveller extraordinaire, lived in an era when, more truly than in other periods of history, the past was being put behind the present, and everything was new – a new world discovered by the first stirrings of the new science, under a new political and economic formation.

The Beachcomber’s Wife
Wakefield Press, 2016; ISBN 9781743054550
It should have been a paradise, but paradise is what you lose, it is what you might have had. An elderly woman who has lived for many years on a tropical island off the Queensland coast with her beachcomber husband waits for help from the mainland. For three harrowing days, alone. He has died, his body lies in their cabin just up from the beach, and while she awaits help, she reviews her reclusive life there, of nearly 25 years with him. She is a woman with a glint in her mind’s eye. The Beachcomber’s Wife draws upon the published writings of E.J. Banfield, who lived an isolated life with his wife Bertha on Dunk Island through the first decades of the 20th century. He made very little reference to her in his work (Confessions of a Beachcomber and others). This account imagines what it might have been like from her point of view. It follows Banfield’s practice, of fact cemented with fiction.