The late Peter Ryan will be familiar to many readers of
The Age for his long-running column As I Please. But there was a lot more to Ryanâs life and works, as this compact biography demonstrates. He was once described as a âuniversal manâ â and that sounds about right.
As a man of action he spent a truly frightening time behind the lines in occupied New Guinea at 18 â an experience that bequeathed him military decorations and a lifetime of malaria. His classic
Fear Drive My Feet was based on this.
As a man of letters he was an author, newspaper columnist and director of publishing for 26 years at Melbourne University Press â where he published Manning Clarkâs six-volume
Book reviews: My Daughter s Wedding; The Hands of Pianists; The Breaking; Still Alive; Grimmish; Ryan s Luck; A Decade of Drift; One Italian Summer
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Friday essay: truth telling, Return to Uluru and reckoning with the sins of fathers
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A journey into the territory of justice and forgetting
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By Declan Fry
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Luke Stegemann
In Death by Water 2, poet David Musgrave describes how, “Seven generations ago, having shot his load/ of rum and sperm in Sydney Cove,/ Stephen Tuckerman, Captain of the USS Carolina disappeared off the coast of Chile with all his crew”. The poem’s narrative of oblivion and forgetting, traversing Latin America and Australia, concludes: “the past spreads out beyond the present/carrying into life its drifting dead”.
Luke Stegemann appreciates that amnesty is easier among small communities than at the level of the nation.
A journey into the territory of justice and forgetting
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