Readers who are interested in Australian writers and their books can click on Ozlit and scroll down to the bottom where you will find that the second collection of essays (Truthful Fictions) is now complete. The new essays are:

15. Style: often mentioned, less commonly analysed
16. A place too big: Australia as a collection of regions
17. Tirra Lirra by the River
18. The goddess allows herself to be seen
But not forever; Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980)
An afterword

Several new face sheets designed by Vane Lindesay for essays in this second series have now been added.

I have begun a new series of opera librettos, with no overall title as yet. Only one has been completed so far. It’s called A Mob of Galahs, and was inspired by a visit to the Benedictine monastery at New Norcia in Western Australia in April 2009. To read this libretto, click on the title, above. I am also planning a second Beethoven libretto, as a sequel to ‘The Linden Tree’; the first of this pair, as I hope it will become, made reference to the composer’s 9th symphony. The second will, I trust, do something similar for the Missa Solemnis, a work written concurrently with the last of the symphonies.