EXTRACT As we entered the 1960s, the pace of our flight to freedom or licentiousness in the real world quickened. British poet Philip Larkin told us that “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three.” More or less concurrently, our literary treatment of sex was transformed from a patient evolution into a virtual revolution. From hinting and teasing, our literary flirtation with the intimacies of sex now took us – and quite quickly - “all the way”. But the revolution still remained, except at the more extreme literary edges, somewhat shy and fearful. It gathered pace as the second half of the 20th century brought a wholesale revolution in our every day – and overnight – attitudes to sexual behaviour. This real-life revolution accepted not only heterosexual frolics using a variety of positions, techniques, sex-toys and the rest, but also homosexual relationships between two men or lesbian love between two women. A variety of other activities also received a high d...

This sweeping essay pans across obscenity trials and looks with some amazement at the rapid evolution from prudishness to a point where words once unmentionable are now in dictionaries. Sex and the Short Story serves as a stand alone piece, and draws directly on the experiences of the author in publishing numerous stories which once pushed the boundaries of what would be considered polite. His books include Dirty Weekend and The Hedonist . Dirty Weekend suggests that both men and women should enjoy "the rich variety of wickedness of which they may so pleasurably partake". The Hedonist  tells a story of sex and diplomacy in the lives of two dedicated pleasure-seekers who traverse a largely joyous and self-indulgent world, journeying together from Africa via New York and Mexico,   James Cumes worked his way up the Australian Foreign Affairs Department and subsequently became a distinguished Australian A mbassador to the European Union after holding diplomatic po...

Choosing a single book either for yourself or for a friend or loved one is always difficult. Assume an interest in the wider world. The Rosenberg Gift Pack provides four exceptional books for the single price of $160 plus postage. The books in the set are: Stephen Martin’s A History of the Antarctica, Kevin Baker’s War in Afghanistan and Ian Burnet’s Spice Islands and The West Indies. A History of the Antarctica utilises material from books, diaries and letters, and from Stephen Martin’s experience spanning 20 years to illuminate the main themes of Antarctic history. The author lives in Sydney .and has travelled to Antarctica many times as a lecturer, tourist and sailor. He worked for several years with major collections of Antarctic sources, including those of the State Library of New South Wales and ACE collection of Kerry Stokes. Using personal stories and images of the men and women who explored, worked and lived in the frozen and remote continent, Ma...

FROM THE NEW BOOK JOURNAL: http://newbookjournal.com/2013/10/hunting-the-famous-by-john-stapleton/ “Hunting the Famous” by John Stapleton “Hunting the Famous” is a meditation on journalism by veteran news reporter John Stapleton. Hunting the Famous by John Stapleton Hunting the Famous, by veteran news reporter John Stapleton, is a meditation on journalism and writing which spans the decades from the late 1960s to 2009. The book covers everything from the writer and journalist’s early years, saddled with a compulsion to write and not much else, to his years as a general news reporter on two of Australia’s best newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. Prior to becoming a staff reporter Stapleton’s unlikely promise to himself as a young man to live or die by the typewriter led to years of struggle as a freelance journalist. But what had at first seemed like a frustrating treadmill churning out pieces for music and lifestyle magazines allowe...

Paint it black. That's what Combat Tours Unlimited does - takes out gray postmodern, postmortem, post-history, post-ethic, post-Toasties world and paints it black. From the Book of Job to the banks of a stinking jungle river in the south of Thailand, or what used to be Thailand, this novella takes you through a guided tour both of a post-apocalyptic war and of postmodern hypocrisy on sex, death and spirit. Set largely on the battlefields of Thailand's troubled southern provinces in the year 2016, Combat Tours is a lyrically written novella, dripping with religious iconography and depicting an amoral, blood stained world of violence, lust and personal compromise. It is a short and demented piece of lyricism. Combat Tours Unlimited showed up on numerous websites, from Croatia to Japan. Where to purchase: http://www.amazon.com/Combat-Tours-Unlimited-Shawn-Smith-ebook/dp/B00FIS0LNU https://itunes.apple.com/au/book/combat-tours-unlimited/id717872836?mt=11 http://bo...

SPEECH FROM JOHN STAPLETON FOR LAUNCH BY ITA BUTTROSE OF TRAVELS WITH MY HAT, HELD AT GLEEBOOKS SYDNEY ON 28 MARCH 2014. I would like to welcome everybody here, and thank you for all for coming on such a cold, wet night; in particular our special guest Ita Buttrose, and of course, the author and photojournalist Christine Osborne. And I would like to thank Gleebooks for hosting this event. A Sense of Place Publishing is proud to be associated with Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road , which is both a lovely work to read and a significant personal achievement. This is Christine’s 16 th book, many of which, including works on Thailand, Malaysia, Oman, the Seychelles, Pakistan and Morocco, were done through the distinguished London publishers Longman. The author spent most of her life overseas, using London as a base, and is perhaps not as well known here as she should be. The culmination of a life’s work, Christine Osborne’s Travels wit...

The culmination of a life’s work,  Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road by photojournalist Christine Osborne begins in the 1950s in the tiny Australian gold mining town of Temora. Osborne’s classmates laughed at her when she declared she wanted to see the world. But in the decades to follow that’s exactly what she did, becoming an accomplished international travel writer and photographer whose many adventures include encounters with the Queens of England and Jordan, and Sheikha Fatima, the desert queen of Abu Dhabi. While an award winning travel writer in her own country of Australia, when photojournalist Christine Osborne first settled in London in 1974 she was told: “We don’t know who you are. To get a name here, you need to write a book.” Which is precisely what she did, choosing the then largely unexplored subject of the developing Arab oil states.  It was ground breaking work. In the Middle East of the time, Osborne often found h...

THE HERALD AND WEEKLY TIMES cwww.weeklytimesnow.com.au/country-living/christine-osborne-turns-a-love-of-travel-into-a-lifetime-career/story-fnkeragy-1226864764315 COUNTRY LIVING Christine Osborne turns a love of travel into a lifetime career JOHANNA LEGGATT THE WEEKLY TIMES MARCH 26, 2014   12:00AM BE THE FIRST TO RESPOND Life in pictures: Christine with her mother in Termora during a recent trip home.   Source:  Supplied < Prev Next > • • Facing it: Christine Osborne getting her face painted by the Masai, Kenya 1976.   Source: Supplied LONG before TripAdvisor, free hotel internet and Facebook status updates, Christine Osborne was a travel journalist at the farthest reaches of the earth. Often called upon to write guide guidebooks and freelance stories on the most of exotic of locations — Morocco, Pakistan, Iraq, Ethiopia and Egypt among them — the young woman ...