Indra publishing

Jill Blee’s second novel, Brigid, is at once a travel story and an historical novel set in modern Ireland, where Jill’s first visit to her ancestral homeland is hijacked by the very real presence of her long-dead great aunt, Brigid.
While Jill intends to acquaint herself with the country, the people and the history from which her great-grandparents had migrated, Aunt Brigid single-mindedly steers her back to the wind swept cliffs of County Clare, and the high Burren above the village of Ballyvaghan.
Brigid has some unfinished business which quickly becomes Jill’s main quest, through which she is brought into a much deeper experience of the great famine than her history books could ever give her.
As she follows her aunt’s story on the west coast and back to Dublin, Jill’s own travel story, complete with Lonely Planet Guide, Irish pubs and Norman ruins, is told with an intense imagery which presents Ireland in her beauty and her romance as clearly as could any cinematographer.

Jill Blee is first and foremost an historian, but one who uses fiction to illuminate the past. What Brigid does best is to cast light on what the experience of the famine in a small community, Ballyvaghan, meant in emotional terms for those experiencing it.

This is a compassionate novel, well-researched, a compelling read if one has an interest in what is quite recent history, a history which threatens to repeat itself in the modern world. Frances Devlin Glass

Nov 1999,
262ppPaperback, 216 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9585805 4 5
RRP $aud 21.95
ISBN-13 978

The Author, Jill Blee, has a BA and an MA in history from Macquarie University, an MA in writing from the University of Western Sydney, and a PhD in History from the University of Ballarat. Her interests are principally in Irish and Irish-Australian history and literature and both have featured in her own writing. Over many years her attention has been focussed on Ballarat and the Irish migrants who settled there during and after the goldrushes of the 1850s.

Jill’s three novels published by Indra all have an Irish flavour – The Pines Hold Their Secrets, Brigid and The Liberator’s Birthday. The first concerns an Irish convict wrongly banished to Norfolk Island; the second is set in Ireland during the Irish Potato Famine, and the third focuses on a day in the life of an Irish family on the Ballarat goldfields. Jill’s From the Murray to the Sea, Indra, 2004, is a comprehensive history of the Catholic education system in the Diocese of Ballarat, Australia

Black Ice is a novel set in China, a personal account of the turbulent years of Mao’s continuous revolution, including the social and political upheaval of the Cultural Revolution.

This is a Chinese story which brings to life the suffering, the adventure, the crushing losses, the unvanquished idealism of the otherwise anonymous heroes and heroines of China’s post-war period.

Black Ice tells the story of Mo Bing, from her under-cover work in Shanghai as a Communist Party cadre during the Civil War, through her denunciation and fall from grace during the Cultural Revolution to her rehabilitation and retirement in the early 1990s.

Significant parts of the story include the experience of Mo Bing’s husband as a soldier and prisoner of war during the Korean War. The Cultural Revolution, and the Red Guard movement feature strongly through Mo Bing and her son.

Life can never be exactly the same for Mo Bing and millions of her compatriots when Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s ‘closest comrade-in-arms’ flees after being accused of attempting to assassinate Mao.

Shaken by the Cultural Revolution, as were many of her generation, Mo Bing develops as a survivor, her survival based on faith in herself, her undying idealism and her personal integrity.

With Black Ice, Trevor Hay and Fang Xiangshu continue their collaboration, building onto their earlier introduction of a distinctly Chinese aesthetic style into Australian literature.

June 1997. 182pp
Paperback, 215 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9587718 6 3
RRP $aud 20.95

The AuthorsTrevor Hay is a senior lecturer in Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is a speaker of Mandarin Chinese and has lived and worked in China. He has continued to make regular return visits over more than twenty years.
Published works include Tartar City Woman, (Melbourne University Press, 1990), which won the Braille and Talking Book Library’s Audio Book of the Year Award in 1991.

Fang Xiangshu is a lecturer in Chinese at Deakin University. His doctoral thesis is on the Red Guard movement.
Originally from Shanghai, Fang is now an Australian citizen. He came to Australia as a visiting academic in 1984, staying until 1986. Upon his return to China, he found himself in trouble over ‘counter-revolutionary remarks’. Fang fled China and returned to Australia in 1987, where in 1990, he was granted permanent resident status on humanitarian grounds.

Trevor Hay and Fang Xiangshu wrote East Wind, West Wind (Penguin, 1992), which was well reviewed in a wide range of publications.

Set in the summer and autumn of 1938, Body and Soul is eighteen-year-old disabled Lilbet Marks’s very biased account of the love affair between Felix Goldfarb, a recent migrant to Melbourne, and Lilbet’s twin sister Ella. Lilbet adores Ella, but also envies her for being beautiful, for not being disabled and for her ability to dazzle men.

Lilbet’s father Simon Marks, her elder sister Julie, and all their friends are entranced by Felix Goldfarb’s winning blend of worldly sophistication and boyish charm. Only clever Lilbet suspects Felix might not be all that he seems. Also, it is imperative for her physical and psychological wellbeing that Ella remains at the family home, Adeline Terrace, in Caulfield. Lilbet is determined never to be parted from her twin.

Within a few months, Felix departs for Sydney, leaving behind gigantic gambling debts and a pregnant Ella. Though he subsequently sends for Ella, Lilbet manages through clever manipulation to keep her twin by her side.

As Lilbet records the day to day events at home, her newspaper cuttings and notes explore 1938 attitudes in general, the intolerance shown at the time towards the disabled, the ambivalence she feels towards her family, her insecurities, fear of loneliness and the double-edged sword of love and envy.

Though it is a young woman’s musings, the voice is appropriate to the times in which she lived. Among the press clippings, the unconfirmed reports coming out of Hitler’s Germany of anti-Jewish violence and disappearances of whole Jewish communities, and the increasing belligerence of Germany towards her neighbours add to the growing tension for this Jewish family in Melbourne of the 1930s.

September 2003
Fiction; First Edition
ISBN: 0 9578735 9 X
ISBN-13: 9780957873599
RRP $22-95, 240 pp
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm

The Author
Goldie Alexander was born in Melbourne and has lived there most of her life. She writes for adults, young adults and children of all ages, as well as taking workshops and seminars.

For adults
Unjust Desserts, 2002

For younger readers
Seawall, 2002
Killer Virus, 2002
Right and Wrong, 2002 (co-written with Hazel Edwards)
My Story: Surviving Sydney Cove, 2000 (Published in the UK as My Story: Transported, 2002)
Little Big School, 1998
6788, 1997
Email Murder Mystery, 1997 (co-written with Hazel Edwards)
Astronet, 1996