Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in a Polish-speaking part of the Russian Empire, Joseph Conrad went to sea in 1874, and drew on his experiences as a merchant seaman for his fiction. In his memoir The Mirror of the Sea, he looks back on the Sydney of the 1870s: These towns of the Antipodes, not […]
Biography
In a series of 2015 television interviews, veteran ABC journalist Kerry O’Brien probed former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating – who had always insisted he would never write an autobiography – on what made him and how he governed. Born in Darlinghurst in 1944 and growing up in Bankstown, he left school at 14 and […]
In his 2015 interviews with Kerry O’Brien, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating describes being approached by Canadian newspaperman Conrad Black, who told him in 1992 that Kerry Packer had acquired 23.5 per cent of the Fairfax Media organisation, owners of the Sydney Morning Herald, despite being restricted by media ownership rules to 14.9 per […]
US-born former TV journalist and news producer Gerald Stone in his biography of Sydney advertising man John Singleton describes Singleton’s seemingly unlikely friendship with the Reverend Bill Crews: ‘John hates to admit it but in a funny way, he is quite religious,’ Crews smiles. ‘He reminds me a lot of King David. We’re told David […]
Journalist and social critic Donald Horne writes about his father going into Callan Park Mental Hospital in 1937, when Horne was sixteen: For several days after he was “certified” we were not allowed to see him. I tried to imagine him in the Reception House, but I could not. Then we took the tram out […]