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Les Thomas

Iola and Race Mathews
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Race Mathews Obituary

It is with great sadness that we at the Press pay tribute to the late Race Mathews (27 March 1935 – 5 May 2025), an MP, an academic and an author of great wisdom, interest and generosity.

Race began his career in the 1950s as a speech therapist in rural schools in Victoria, then graduated from degrees at Monash University, Melbourne University and the University of Divinity.

In 1960 he was elected Secretary of the Australian Fabian Society, joined the Australian Labor Party and became Principal Private Secretary to Gough Whitlam. He developed policies on education, health, gun control and more, was Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Arts, and developed the inaugural Spoleto International Festival of the Arts and the Melbourne Writers Festival.

While in parliament in the early 1990s, Mathews was part-time visiting fellow in the Public Sector Management Institute at Monash University. After leaving parliament he became senior research fellow in the Institute, then in the Graduate School of Government at Monash University, and a Senior Research Fellow in the International Centre for Management in Government at Monash.

The Co-operative Movement was one of Race’s passions, and in 2017 our press published his book Of Labour and Liberty: Distributism in Victoria, 1891–1966.

The author of many books, Race’s biography Race Mathews: A Life in Politics – begun by Race, then completed by his wife Iola in 2024, was launched by Monash University Publishing to acclaim.

Race was an avid reader, a collector of science-fiction books and a lover of classic movies. As Race’s good friend, the Hon Gareth Evans AC KC, said ‘If only we had more people in political and public life like Race Mathews: compassionate, hugely competent, intellectually and culturally curious, much more passionately committed to good policy than personal or factional political advantage, and indefatigable.’

Race will be sorely missed by us all, and we pass on our sorrow to Iola and family.

Read the Victorian Premier’s media statement here.

Jane Carey award
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Jane Carey wins 2025 Ernest Scott Prize for landmark history of women in Australian science

Taking to the Field, a groundbreaking history of women in Australian science by University of Wollongong historian and Monash University Publishing author Jane Carey, has been awarded the 2025 Ernest Scott Prize for History.

Presented annually by the University of Melbourne, the prize recognises the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand, or the history of colonisation. Dr Carey’s book challenges long-held assumptions about women’s place in scientific history and reshapes our understanding of the foundations of Australian science itself.

“I am deeply honoured that Taking to the Field has been awarded the 2025 Ernest Scott Prize,” said Dr Carey. “At a time when the humanities in general and history in particular seem to be under siege, having awards such as this that support historical scholarship on Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and histories of colonialism, has never been more vital.”

In a meticulously researched and wide-ranging account, Carey traces the long and often obscured history of Australian women’s involvement in science, dating back to the 1830s. From amateur botanists and natural historians to participants in scientific reform movements such as eugenics, and later, to professional scientists, Carey uncovers a rich and complex legacy. Her interviews and surveys with more than 300 women science graduates reveal both the depth of women’s contributions and the enduring structural barriers they faced — including limited employment opportunities and systemic discrimination, particularly after World War II.

When molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn became the first Australian woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009, she was celebrated as a trailblazer. Yet, as Taking to the Field reveals, Blackburn was part of a much longer lineage of women whose contributions were essential to the development of Australian science — even if they were largely overlooked in mainstream histories.

“This book is not simply a celebratory recovery of forgotten pioneers,” said Carey. “The impact of Western science has not been uniformly positive and women were certainly associated with some of its darker episodes. Holding these two things in productive tension provides, I hope, greater understanding and a firmer foundation for more women in science into the future.”

Dr Carey also acknowledged the support of Monash University Publishing and the women who shared their stories. “Many thanks to my publisher, Monash University Publishing, for all their support and the outstanding work they do in supporting scholarly publishing generally. To the more than 300 women who shared their experiences of studying and working in science with me, most of whom are no longer with us, I am profoundly grateful.”

Taking to the Field is a significant contribution not only to the history of science and women’s history, but also to broader understandings of colonialism and social change in Australia. It affirms the vital role of historical scholarship in shaping a more inclusive and accurate national story.

Verge 2025: Blue
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Call for Submissions: Verge 2025 – Blue

Maggie Nelson opens her luminous work of prose-poetry Bluets with the following provocation: ‘Suppose I were to say I had fallen in love with a color’. Blue, for Nelson, is the colour that ravishes her senses, signifying the beginning of love and the end of life. Goethe writes: ‘We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances us, but because it draws us after it’.

Verge 2025 is looking for new writing that responds in some way to the colour blue.

Share with us poetry that alights the senses with blue; narratives infused with shades of cobalt, indigo and cerulean; any and all writing tinged with this most mysterious and evocative colour.

Guidelines:

We welcome submissions from all writers in Australia. We seek short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, experimental or hybrid works, and artworks. Artworks will be published in greyscale.

You may submit up to three works in one document. Fiction and non-fiction should be no more than 3,000 words in length. There is no line limit for poetry, and submission in A5 document size is encouraged. Please only submit previously unpublished work. Simultaneous submissions will be considered but please let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

There will be prize money on offer for best overall and best student submission, with the amount to be confirmed closer to the submission closure date. All contributors will receive one copy of the print book. The book will also be published online.

Submissions close 9 February 2025,11:59 pm AEDT.

Please send your submission to verge.monash@gmail.com. In your email, please include your name, contact details, and a brief author bio (no more than 50 words).

If you are a student at Monash University, please indicate in your email whether you are undergraduate or postgraduate.

The Cubbies Book Launch report and photos

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At the book launch on Sunday the CEO of Play Australia Robyn Monro Miller awarded a Lifetime Achievement award to Joan Healey, and announced a new scholarship for playworkers in Adventure Playgrounds, in her name, for Playwork training.

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ANZSI Indexing Awards and ANZSI John Simkin Medal 2024

Do you know of an excellent index?

 Have you written or published one yourself?

Nominations are now open for the ANZSI Indexing Awards and ANZSI John Simkin Medal 2024. The ANZSI John Simkin Medal recognises an outstanding book index or periodical index compiled in Australia or New Zealand. ‘Highly Commended’ certificates may also be awarded.

Indexes may be nominated by authors, editors, indexers, publishers or readers.

The index nominated must be commercially available and have an imprint date of 2020 or later. The index must have been compiled in Australia or New Zealand, even though the text to which it refers may have been published elsewhere; and the index must be entirely the indexer’s own work. The index should be substantial in size; the subject matter complex; and the language, form and structure should demonstrate the indexer’s expertise in serving the needs of the text and the reader.

The Judging Panel comprises experienced indexers, editors, librarians and/or publishers. The judging process is confidential and nominated indexer names are known only to the Receiving Officer.

A completed nomination form together with a print copy of the book, or a link to the digital file of both book and index, is required. Print books will be returned after judging.

Nomination forms, assessment criteria and lists of previous winners are available at https://www.anzsi.org/about-us/awards/the-john-simkin-medal/

Nominations must be received no later than 5pm AEST, Wednesday 31 July 2024 at GPO Box 2069, Canberra ACT 2601 Australia or (in the case of digital books) by email to the Receiving Officer at receivingofficer@anzsi.org

Nominators who have posted books must advise the Receiving Officer by email that they have done so. All nominations received will be acknowledged by email.

 ANZSI Receiving Officer, receivingofficer@anzsi.org

ABIA 2024 Awards Shortlist
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Australian Book Industry Awards 2024 nomination: Small Publisher of the Year

Monash University Publishing is thrilled to announce we have been nominated for the Small Publisher of the Year in the 2024 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) alongside University of Queensland Press, Pantera Press, Magabala Books, Fremantle Press and Rockpool. We were previously nominated in the same category in 2023.
According to the ABIA website “This is an award for the Australian publisher with a turnover of less than $10 million whose publishing programme (including sales, promotion, editorial and production) demonstrated excellence, commensurate with the publisher’s size, in the preceding calendar year, and which has contributed to the overall success of the industry.”
We look forward to the results when the Awards Ceremony takes place on Thursday 9 May at Zinc Fed Square in Melbourne.
In the meantime we’re crossing our fingers and working on delivering a strong range of titles through the year. Find out more about the awards on the official website.

By News

Vanessa Berry reflects on The Shelf Life of Zora Cross

In November 2019, I had the honour of launching The Shelf Life of Zora Cross to a full house in the Gallery Room of the State Library of NSW. Since then, the book has firmly established its position as a landmark work of Australian literary biography. In my address that night I celebrated Cathy’s huge achievement in rendering the complex literary and personal life of Zora Cross, and also reflected on how Zora’s life and work resonates into the present. The Shelf Life of Zora Cross continues to resonate, with its continued successes and enthusiastic readership, and now the publication of the second edition this month. I am excited to present my launch speech from 2019, as I congratulate Cathy on the continued life of her brilliant biography, with the publication of the new edition.

The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, by the esteemed writer, researcher and editor Cathy Perkins, brings Zora Cross – the woman, the writer – to us with immediacy and complexity. The book is not only a significant addition to Australian literary history, but also one that makes strong connections to contemporary life and literary culture. There are many details that strike me about Zora Cross from Perkins’s evocative portrayal of her in Shelf Life: her drive, ambition and appetite for life; her courage and her vigour; her strong sense of vocation – that she lived to write, and that she worked hard to secure the ability to do so. Money, time and space remain crucial, and often hard-won, necessities for writers today, especially women. There was a particular moment early in the book where Zora leapt from the page for me – a description of an encounter with a journalist in Brisbane in 1915, when Zora was working concurrently as a writer, a teacher, an actor and the editor of arts and social newspaper the Bohemian. This life of moving between roles and projects is a familiar scenario for contemporary writers. Then, as now, this way of working requires strong reserves of energy and focus:

One day in 1915, Zora is rushing from a rehearsal at the Tivoli Theatre in central Brisbane to the office of the Bohemian to pick up her editor’s salary when she meets a journalist who will later write a profile on her for the Australian Woman’s Mirror. She is ‘slight and pale and terrific with energy’ and covered in red printer’s ink from the paper’s scarlet masthead, which looks like blood on her white dress.

This image of the young Zora, her dress stained with ink, was so startling it was as if I was meeting her in person: I could feel her energy radiate from the page across time, a testament to Perkins’s skill in drawing from her research the resonant moments of Zora’s life that give the reader a sense of intimacy and direct connection. There were other points where I felt Zora similarly close, such as a much quieter moment from later in her life, at Glenbrook, when she was working on the Roman novel that was her final literary work:

Zora was ‘literally bogged down in Rome’ in the years that followed, April remembers. She would have a 2000-years-away look on her face when the girls came home from school. She might be slightly annoyed that they had pulled her back to the present, but she forgave them when they made her a cup of tea. At the end of each day when the house was quiet, she would pour dried peas or beans into a bowl to soak overnight for the next day’s dinner. Then she would settle down to her typewriter, listening for the stationmaster’s footsteps as he walked the length of the platform to keep himself awake. And she would write.

Again I felt an immediacy, as if I was quietly there in the room too, watching Zora concentrating at her typewriter, older now, but writing with the same intensity of focus and dedication that Perkins presents vividly as Zora’s mode of living and working.

This interweaving of writing and life is at the heart of literary biography. Writers exist in multiple: their written work, their identities as public figures and their private lives. Many readers will discover Zora, who has been a neglected figure in Australian literary history, for the first time in reading Shelf Life. The book’s inventive structure, focusing on the story of Zora’s life and work through the relationships that sustained, drove and influenced her, show how strongly she was enmeshed in Australian cultural and literary life, even if her name is not widely known today.

With Shelf Life, Perkins has brought Zora Cross to new generations of readers, and taken us into not only Zora’s life and literary works, but also into the archives, locations and personal connections that preserve her traces. This, to me, was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book – following the paper trail of Zora’s life through newspapers, letters and manuscripts, entering the archives with Perkins as she pieces Zora’s life story together.

In one of the early chapters the phrase ‘material legacy’ stood out to me. It’s used in reference to the collection of letters received from authors by critic and editor Bertram Stevens: Zora’s letters to him, as Perkins describes, are intimate outpourings and have the effect of a diary as much as correspondence:

They’re not business letters, nor are they love letters; often they read more like a diary. Because many are undated, the order in the volume is mixed up, so the sense of intimacy begins on the first page. These outpourings chart Zora’s progress from a teacher who writes in the evenings, to a touring actress who writes on trains and mountain tops, to a recognised author who writes all the time. They are ‘notorious and shocking’, she admits, because she writes with a lack of inhibition caused by youth, grief and distance.

I thought about Zora writing these letters – the intensity of her communication, most likely without thought of the words ever being read by anyone beyond the recipient. Those who have done archival research involving personal letters will know the odd, otherworldly feeling of reading them. It is like listening in on a private conversation, but also listening back through time. In Shelf Life, Perkins draws on the energy and intimacy of these letters, and in doing so she brings these qualities to our reading.

While reading Shelf Life, I thought of a line from Beverley Farmer, who wrote in 1987, reflecting on her reading of The Persimmon Tree by Marjorie Barnard, ‘It means very much to me, the invisible network of women reading each other’s work and cherishing it.’ The idea of the ‘invisible network’ has stuck with me, and came up when I was reading Shelf Life, which is very much about visibility, about networks and about women writers, including the kinds of relationships that come about between women who write. I thought particularly of Zora and Perkins here, and the relationship they have across time. Here there is a relationship between a biographer and her subject, but also a relationship between women and between writers.

In Shelf Life, we are also led to consider how Zora’s memory and legacy have both persisted and become hidden. I’m sure all of us have wondered, at some point in our lives, what of us might remain into the future, after we have passed away. How might we persist in social or cultural memory? One way is through our families: our children and their descendants. Zora lives on in her family – her grandchildren and their children. Another way that our legacy persists is through our work: the books we might write, trees we might plant, students we might teach, ideas we might shape, decisions we might make that go on to impact the future.

Writers are given to wondering what of their words might live on into the future – some more than others, as we see in Shelf Life (I love the image of the 97-year-old Dame Mary Gilmore at the very end of her life, asking her niece, ‘Has everything gone to the Mitchell?’) As a writer who has manuscripts in the State Library collection I sometimes wonder who might, potentially, in a century’s time request to look at them, and the books and artworks that I have made. The thought of these works living on after I am gone, having captured something of life in Sydney in the early twenty-first century, reminds me of the power of writing to connect us across time, and that writing can be a way of speaking to the future.

As we gather here in the library tonight we might cast our imaginations back 100 years, to think of Zora Cross in the Mitchell Library reading room, researching her lectures on Australian literature for Sydney Teacher’s College. Or the student Zora, coming to the library in the evenings to read and study. We might think of Zora’s books and her letters in boxes in the stacks. Then returning to the present, we celebrate Cathy Perkins’s The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, which has allowed us to enter so richly into the life of this prolific and inspiring writer.

Dr Vanessa Berry, writer, artist and lecturer, University of Sydney

 

Authors 2024
By News

See our authors at a festival near you

  • Adelaide Writers’ Week (2-7 March) Richard King, Richard Denniss and John Lyons 
  • Manly Writers’ Festival (14-16 March): Kim Cornish, Maggie Kirkman, Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang, Lachlan Strahan
  • Clunes Booktown (23-24 March): Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo with Jeff Sparrow and Boris Frankel
  • Sorrento Writers’ Festival 2024 (26-29 April): confirmed authors: Richard King, Lucinda Holdforth, Dave Witty, Inala Cooper, John Lyons, Michael Gawenda
  • Brisbane Writers’ Festival (30 May-2 June): Richard King, Ian Lowe, Lucinda Holdforth, Dave Witty, Satyajit Das
  • Words in Winter (29 June): Sandra GoldBloom Zurbo