Pix: the magazine that told Australia's story

In the 1950s and 1960s I can remember my father sometimes bringing home copies of the magazine Pix. I often enjoyed flipping through the pages to look at the wide variety of photographs. I therefore borrowed a copy of this book from the library as soon as the book was published.

Pix: the magazine that told Australia's story is a large book containing full scale photographs as they would have appeared in the magazine. The State Library of New South Wales has digitised many of the images (available on Trove) and recently held an exhibition showing a selection of the photos that portray everyday Australia in the past.

The first edition of Pix was  published in January 1938 and publication of the magazine continued until 1972. The book contains short essays on the publication of the magazine and making the exhibition but it is the images themselves that are the main feature of the book. Exploring the large sample of black and white images in this book is a great way of exploring life in part of the twentieth century.

First Love

The third book examined in the How to Read a Novel course was First Love by Gwendoline Riley.

This book is about relationships - the relationship between Neve and her husband, Edwyn, with her parents, with people in general.

Neve is a writer, normally working from home though she has had jobs in bars etc in the past. She is married to a much older man, Edwyn, who, as he keeps telling her, works full time and is not well. Edwyn keeps stressing that Neve comes from a working class background and constantly refers to her as being inferior. Edwyn is one of those people who can never forget a mistake made in the past by someone and keeps bringing up one off past events as reoccurring incidents. You really rather wonder why they married or stayed married.

The book consists of flashbacks to other periods in Neve's life where we learn of her parent's broken marriage and Neve's fractured relationship with her father. We meet her mother who left her second husband and is trying to start life again in new area. We learn of Neve's previous relationships and how she lived in a friend's apartment for two years before moving to Glasgow. We also learn about the early days of the relationship between Neve and Edwyn with contrast to the present.

Neve is the narrator so the story is told from her viewpoint, however there are large sections of dialogue where we learn much of the other characters in the novel, as well as about Neve as she questions her reactions to people, especially her husband.

 This book was short listed for the James Tait Black Award for 2017.