It's 1953 and Barry has been sent to stay with Nan and Pop during the school holidays while his mum waits for the new baby. Barry is six-and-three-quarters and 22 Miller Street - the last house Pop built on the West Preston street - proves full of novel experiences: there's going shopping across the Hump at dawn with Nan Dickens ('good isn't it, height,' she says, advising him 'you can look at the stars for nothing'); keeping Pop company in the shed (where he goes for his smoko 'a yellow packet of Havelock was sticking out of his back pocket'); sharing a bed with great aunt Bess (whose Anzacs are 'an indestructible mixture of oats, molassess, wheatgerm and pure will'). Oh, and finding his way to Fairyland. 'It's time you got to know each other.' Nan reached up and took an old golf ball out of a baked-bean can nailed to the doorframe above the gully trap. 'All right,' she said, 'Now, West Preston fairies are nothing like the English ones. When you find them, do as they tell you. They'll never do you harm. And don't shout - they don't like that. They'll close up their ears if they hear a loud noise. Now, let's see where the ball lands. Ready, set, go!' But then Pop dies, and Barry and his Dad can't find the deed to the house. Developers Snaithe and Sharky are circling and Bracky Boy the Bodgie is threatening the whole neighbourhood.
In early 2008, Barry Dickins suffered from insomnia. He went to the doctor, who cited anxiety as the cause and, then, depression. Clinical and severe. He checked in to the Albert Road Clinic, where he was told that he would be there until the joy returned to him. But where was it? The joy eluded Barry for months, so he stayed in the clinic, alongside patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and other traumas, but depression was overriding. Depression that could fell you with a single blow. He took his medication and succumbed to the electroconvulsive therapy, which left him unable to grip a pen and riddled his memory with holes. The experience marked him for good, and is one that more people share than we might like to consider. Written with Barry's inimitable wit, humour and lyricism - and his ability to find the ridiculous and the jubilant amid the pain - Unparalleled Sorrow charts Barry's journey from the lows of the clinic to the small joys of a game of tennis with his young son. It follows the path to depression - via his salad days in St Kilda and the murder of his housemate - and the road out of it.
Lessons in Humility is the bizarre story of Barry Dickins' life as a teacher. He gained his Diploma Of Education at The Melbourne State College forty years ago although he failed Classroom Management. He has taught Drama and Creative Literature to cherubs at a primary school and prayer-composition at a secondary college. The recollection unfolds at the point of doom but cheerfully expands when the author experiences enlightenment when he is put in with Grade Ones forever. Barry Dickins' writing has been called 'The defeat of the desperate by the bizarre' which means of course that his stage characters are inevitably overcome by not themselves but their surroundings. Join the catastrophic but noble hunt for meaning as our indefatigable community-loving teacher collides with life head-on. Nietzsche once wrote that 'only with laughter do we slay' and never was that epithet truer for a willing servant of education who not only clashes with bureaucracies but can't comprehend society either. What he is brilliant at is never teaching but the forgotten art of listening. Children adore to be carefully heard and practising that fact is what gets him through Hell in one piece. The fantastic and fatal daily hurts and contradictions are faithfully recorded here by a writer who loves poor people so well he knows what lollies they've knocked off. Many essays have been composed and published upon teaching in the 200 years of the strap. Many are marvellous but this is true. You too will feel as you have held class at The Boil Street Special School in Sickening Road. The author learns the timely lesson in modesty at the rickety helm of teaching chaos. It's not that his kids are stupid but that he is arrogant. He teaches poorly because he listens worse. It is only when he surrenders his portrait of himself as an artist to the wheelie bin of life that he finally learns that teaching is to do with others and not vanity. Vanity is interesting but it will never get the soul a Roadworthy Certificate.
Celebrated children's writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad's Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family. To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dickens' household seem to live a life of unreachable bliss. But with his broken English, Andersen doesn't at first see the storms brewing within the family: undeclared passions, a son about to go to India, and a growing strangeness at the heart of Dickens' marriage. Andersen's English by Sebastian Barry premiered at the Theatre Royal, Bury, in February 2010 in a production by Out of Joint.
The ever-optimistic Mr Micawber bids a fond farewell to David Copperfield and takes his family to Australia, confident their lives will change for the better. However, more than florid language and optimism is needed to survive in this brash new world that is Melbourne in 1855. Visits from the bailiffs, rent arrears and his daughter Emma's betrothal to his landlord's son already complicate poor Micawber's life, but when his own son Wilkins introduces a young man - Godfrey McNeil - with an ambiguous past who also has designs on Emma, it becomes even more tangled. Micawber turns detective, but will the mystery he uncovers threaten even his optimism and integrity?
Ordinary Heroes is the result of a year on the road in a battered Kingswood, searching for memories of war. It records Barry Dickins's remarkably frank interviews with ordinary Australians who found themselves caught up in some of the most nightmarish events of the twentieth century. With them we go back to the trenches at Gallipoli, revisit the Burma–Thailand railway and experience the terror of being stranded in the jungles of Vietnam. These are tender stories from rather reluctant heroes who saw what they did as nothing more than duty.
Collection of writings by a novelist and playwright, first published in the 'Age'. Covers a variety of topics, including being a victim of police violence, walking his baby, writing and street children. Author writes for the 'Age', 'Herald Sun' and 'Melbourne Times'. His previous books include 'Ordinary Heroes' and 'Heart and Soul'.
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Little Scrooge is an extremely creative, kid-friendly adaptation of the Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol. When an adolescent boy, Eben Scrooge, strikes it rich and makes a million dollars by inventing a popular phone app called Where's Fluffy?, which can help a person find a lost pet, he loses sight of what really matters in life. Eben's own life is taken over by greed. Worse, he actually stole the idea from his best friend, Bobbie Cratchitt, who now works for Eben, trying to raise money to buy the medicine that will help heal her little brother Tiny Tim's crippled legs. The show is loaded with lots of Christmas songs, sung a cappella, that will put smiles on the faces of everyone in the audience and enchant them. There is even a talking mirror to jolt Eben into seeing the reflection of the way his life will be if he doesn't change. The Ghost of Christmas Past (a surfer dude), the Ghost of Christmas Present (a beautiful spirit with an attitude) and the Ghost of Christmas Future (an eerie figure in white) help Eben to discover the true meaning of Christmas. Suitable for touring and kids of all ages, Little Scrooge is guaranteed to delight the entire family. It's the perfect holiday outing"--
Celebrated children's writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad's Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family. To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dickens' household seem to live a life of unreachable bliss. But with his broken English, Andersen doesn't at first see the storms brewing within the family: undeclared passions, a son about to go to India, and a growing strangeness at the heart of Dickens' marriage. Andersen's English by Sebastian Barry premiered at the Theatre Royal, Bury, in February 2010 in a production by Out of Joint.
This thematic rather than theorist centred approach is an essential guide to the way in which the environment and social theory relate to one another including examinations of the works of the key theorists including Marx, Mill, Habermas and Adorno.
Not long ago, a colleague chided me for using the term "the biological revolution. " Like many others, I have employed it as an umbrella term to refer to the seemingly vast, rapidly-moving, and fre quently bewildering developments of contemporary biomedicine: psy chosurgery, genetic counseling and engineering, artificial heart-lung machines, organ transplants-and on and on. The real "biological revo lution," he pointed out, began back in the nineteenth century in Europe. For it was then that death rates and infant mortality began to decline, the germ theory of disease was firmly established, Darwin took his famous trip on the Beagle, and Gregor Mendel stumbled on to some fundamental principles of heredity. My friend, I think, was both right and wrong. The biological revolution did have its roots in the nineteenth century; that is when it first began to unfold. Yet, like many intellectual and scientific upheav als, its force was not felt for decades. Indeed, it seems fair to say that it was not until after the Second World War that the full force of the earlier discoveries in biology and medicine began to have a major impact, an impact that was all the more heightened by the rapid bi omedical developments after the war.
Jones, Barry Owen (1932– ). Australian politician, writer and lawyer, born in Geelong. Educated at Melbourne High School and Melbourne University, he was a public servant, high school teacher, television and radio performer, university lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor MP in the Victorian Parliament 1972–77 and the Australian House of Representatives 1977–98. He took a leading role in reviving the Australian film industry and abolishing the death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public awareness of global warming, the ‘post‑industrial’ society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise of ‘the Third Age’ and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the *Hawke Government, he was Minister for Science 1983–90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987, Small Business 1987–90 and Customs 1988–90. He became a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, Paris 1991–95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party 1992–2000, 2005–06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention 1998. His books include Decades of Decision 1860– (1965), Joseph II (1968) and Age of Apocalypse (1975), and he edited The Penalty Is Death (1968, revised and expanded 2022). Sleepers, Wake! Technology and the Future of Work was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, became a bestseller and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille. The fourth edition was published in 1995. Knowledge Courage Leadership: Insights & Reflections, a collection of speeches and essays, appeared in 2016. He received a DSc in 1988 for his services to science and a DLitt in 1993 for his work on information theory. Elected FTSE (1992), FAHA (1993), FAA (1996) and FASSA (2003), he is the only person to have become a Fellow of four of Australia’s five learned Academies. Awarded an AO in 1993, named as one of Australia’s 100 ‘living national treasures’ in 1997, he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1999. His autobiography, A Thinking Reed, was published in 2006 and The Shock of Recognition, about music and literature, in 2016. In 2014 he received an AC for services ‘as a leading intellectual in Australian public life’. What Is to Be Done was published by Scribe in 2020.
Banana Bender: farce in comic-strip style about a religious fanatic living on a camping site with his mother. Death of Minnie: about a Polish immigrant who decides to commit suicide on her 40th birthday (1 act, 1 man, 1 woman; 1 act, 1 woman).
This book examines the attempts of four great Victorians to write what amounted to latter-day 'Pilgrim's Progresses'. Writing in and for an age whose spiritual needs and assumptions differed utterly from those of Bunyan, they produced very different kinds of books from his - but books which still owed as much to the puritan tradition of Pilgrim's Progress and Quarles Emblems, of spiritual biography and the typological reading of scripture, as to the secular redefinition of that tradition in the early nineteenth century. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus represents the closest convergence-point of these two sources. In its effort to combine traditional religious language and later Romantic ideas within the doctrine of 'natural supernaturalism', it may be seen as the prototypical Victorian novel - a Pilgrim's Progress whose hero must write his own guidebook, his own book of life. Professor Qualls uses Carlyle as a context for studying the thematic concerns and narrative activities of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot.
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is considered one of the most important English prose writers of the early-19th century. This is the final part of a 21-volume set presenting De Quincey's work, also including previously unpublished material.
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