Primary Research Resources

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Archive primary research resources related to Flinders University projects or which were/will be created with some involvement of Flinders staff.

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Browsing Primary Research Resources by Author "Armstrong, Judith"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Festival Days.
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-03) Armstrong, Judith
    'What do women want?' Even if Sigmund Freud didn't have writers' festivals in mind when he framed his famous question, it is apt enough in the context of the many pleasant-faced, intelligent-looking, female ticket-holders at these celebrations of readerly jouissance. Mingling with them during the first three days of the Western Australian Writers' Festival - one of the activities of the cutely named PIAF, or Perth International Arts Festival - what Armstrong wanted was to find out why they were there, other than to hear celebrity speakers such as Michael Palin (Booked Out).
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    In Retrospect. "Black Mirror" by Gail Jones. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-02) Armstrong, Judith
    This is an alluring example of the retrospective novel, one that uses the device of a biographer's interviews with her subject to prod the reconstruction of memories. It is retrospective not simply because it ranges over the greater part of the twentieth century, but because it consists almost exclusively of two long backward looks. The subject, Victoria, is urged by Anna, the biographer, to recall her childhood in a gold-mining town in Western Australia (Kalgoorlie?) and her flight in the 1930s, as a young artist, to Paris, where she finds herself caught up in a surrealist circle of painters and writers (Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Max Ernst, even Salvador Dalí). Anna herself is impelled by both Victoria and the challenges of biography to recall her own youth in the same town, sixty years later.
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    Not Helping the Cause. "The Snow Queen" by Mardi McConnochie. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-05) Armstrong, Judith
    When Armstrong was about ten, she used to devour the books of an English children's author named Noel Streatfield. The most famous was called "Ballet Shoes", which took young antipodeans onto the stage and into the wings of another world, the London theatre scene. Galina Koslova, a Russian-born émigrée to South Australia and the heroine of "The Snow Queen", gives "Ballet Shoes" to a step-granddaughter, correctly designating it a classic. Armstrong wonders whether Mardi McConnochie’s novel was designed to fill the gap left on adult bookshelves by long-abandoned copies of "Ballet Shoes", even if our reading requirements have matured.
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    Romanov Capers. "Anastasia: A Novel" by Colin Falconer. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2004-04) Armstrong, Judith
    Readers who are so pedantic as to be irritated by details beyond plot, such as sloppy writing or a lack of subtlety in the characterisation, may find the racy twists and turns an inadequate compensation. This novel’s dramatic action and arresting locales may while away a plane trip, but the life-after-death of the real Anastasia was better served by the 1956 film that starred Ingrid Bergman.