Confessions of a Homegrown Alien - Jan Smith
| Автор: | Jan Smith |
| Издательство: | Ingram |
| Серия: | |
| Жанр произведения: | Биографии и Мемуары |
| Год издания: | 0 |
| isbn: | 9781925416282 |
Jan Smith's Confessions… is finally out! Self-acknowledged victim of too many books and too much liveliness, this is an almost intergalactic memoir where small town life at Eumundi, Queensland meets the political changes of war-time Australia, Catholics and Protestants hold an uneasy truce, and Irish black humour abounds: By English standards there wasn't a Right in Australia, just men who'd stopped being Left. We visit Brisbane and Longreach in less-than-fashionable 50s, then the urban thrall of Sydney and Woman magazine. Marriage, motherhood and the enigmas of the Bulletin. Separation, independence, even editor of Forum magazine, topped off with a home birth at 40…<br /> <br /><i>But with city nights there was no question of mysterious and marvellous changes, boiled tongue in the press becoming jelled by morning, sick animals healing or dying, a hundred chickens doubled in size under their aluminium tent. The Pleiades and Orion's Belt struggled for attention in a petulant sky which ached to be properly black, even the moon you had to be quick about before it disappeared too, like the Russian Sputnik with the whimpering dog inside.</i><br /> <br />Jan Smith is the author of two novels, An Ornament of Grace (Sun Books, 1966) and The Worshipful Company (Cassell, 1969), and co-author, with Dr William Vayda, of Health for Life: Are You Allergic to the Twentieth Century? (Sphere Books 1981)<br /> <br />After dropping out of the University of Queensland and working as a cadet journalist on The Courier Mail Jan went to Sydney and joined Woman's Day magazine. After three years on Woman's Day, she was forced to resign because she had married a staff member, and for the next fifty years survived by freelancing, notably for The Bulletin and Pol magazine, apart from a year on Forum UK, the sex magazine, and Australian Business.<br /> <br />She now lives happily in King's Cross, Sydney, with her cat, doing what she'd have rather done all along.