An Imperial Affair: Portrait of an Australian Marriage

Description

Award-winning author John Rickard takes us into the marriage of an Australian couple during a time when private lives were properly private but divorce a scandal. It shines a light on the family values and sexual dynamics of this period, conditioned as they were by the imperial relationship and cultural dependence on the mother country, which inevitably helped shape hopes, fear and desires. This is also the beautifully told story of the writers sensitive and courageous quest to understand his parents Philip and Pearl, and the world he came from and grew up in, its fragile reality filtered through the prism of memory. Part biography, part autobiography, part social history, "An Imperial Affair" is also a complex, quintessentially Australian meditation on the nature of love.

John Rickard is the author of H B Higgins: The Rebel as Judge (Age non-fiction Book of the Year 1984), Australia: A Cultural History (1988, 1996, new edition in preparation) and A Family Romance: The Deakins at Home (1996) and has published widely on Australian cultural history and biography. In 1997-8 he was the visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University and in 2007 the Monash Visiting Fellow of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He is currently an adjunct professor at Monash University. In his youth John Rickard worked as an actor and singer.

This is a fine, moving book. The love, compassion and delicacy, evident throughout, offers its reader a deepened and more sympathetic understanding of the values that defined times to which we are now inclined to condescend. -- Raimond Gaita