Ferreting out the truth
Cheeky: Confessions of a Ferret Salesman
By Bob Cheek
Published by Pipeclay Publishing
Paperback, 398pp, illustrated
ISBN 0 9758303 0 9
rrp $29.95
Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement, is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician.
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (1875)
When I decided to migrate from Sydney to Tasmania ten years ago, people questioned my sanity. “You’ll freeze,” they said. “They’re all throwbacks down there,” they warned. “But it’d be a nice place if it had an economy.”
Weary of big-city journalism and the pressures of living with four million go-getters, I wanted to be free of the clamour of the chattering classes and the endless knockabout of politics. I made the move anyway, and for the last decade I’ve paid little attention to what passes for political life on this self-absorbed island, being too preoccupied with doing the best I can, a very overcrowded profession in these parts.
Continued …
The Literary Lunch
The Literary Lunch
Selected stories
By Geoffrey Dean
Published by Roaring Forties Press
ISBN 0 9756797 0 8
Geoffrey Dean is a Tasmanian who has been in print for five decades — ever since his first short story ‘The Last Page’ won a short-story competition run by The Mercury and made Dean the richer by a couple of pounds.
He was overseas at the time, doing what was becoming a pilgrimage in post-WWII years for young Australians, working their way around Europe and Canada. His brother Graeme had found the story and entered it without Dean knowing.
Continued …
Mary: Crown Princess of Denmark
Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark
By Karin Palshoj & Gitte Redder,
translated by Zanne Jappe Mallett
Published in Australia by Allen & Unwin
ISBN 1 74114 749 2
By LIA VAUGHN | Once upon a time, in a land far away … This pleasant book, written by two Danes and translated by a third, doesn’t quite start that way. However, it does begin with the birth in Hobart, Tasmania, of Mary Donaldson on February 5, 1972.
On the same day, the writers point out, it was at freezing point in Denmark, 16,202 kilometres away to be exact, and three-year-old Frederik was yet to learn what it was like to have a mother who was a queen, as Margrethe II had succeeded to the throne just three weeks earlier.
That Frederik and Mary would meet in a Sydney pub 32 years later and fall in love is usually called a fairytale. Fairytale, of course not, but greatly against the odds and so very romantic — which is where the hype and media hysteria began.
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