Indra publishing

The Trembling Bridge, by Manfred Jurgensen, explores migration as a rite of passage. It tells the story of Mark, a story in two parts. Part 1 is his boyhood in southern Denmark and northern Germany toward the end of WWII. The second part is about his migration and settlement in Australia, the land of the “beautiful enemy”.

Mark is delicate as a child, who suffers the loss of his father in the war and the premature death of a friend. As the war ends he sees in the refugees who flood into his town, the horror of displacement, hunger, fear, defeat. Because of his ill-health, Mark has to stay for some time in a sanatorium, where he is fascinated and frightened by a very charismatic bigger boy, Sannes, who on one occasion, sexually assaults him. Sannes is the focus of the sequel novel to be published by Indra in late 2004, The Eyes of the Tiger.

From the Bonnegilla migrant camp, to the secondary school examinations board, Mark’s life gradually becomes more established. The story ends on a positive note, as if, after the often harrowing hard work of growing up and settling into a new country Mark feels he is about to set off into the independence of his maturity.

March 2004, 344 pp
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
ISBN 1 92078703 8
Fiction, 1st edition
RRP $aud 26-95
ISBN-13 9781920787035

The Author
Originally from Denmark, Manfred Jurgensen settled in Australia at the age of twenty-one, working as actor, playwright and reviewer. Manfred started publishing poetry in the early seventies and to date, he has produced thirteen collections.

He taught literature at Melbourne, Monash and Queensland University where he was appointed to a Personal Chair. From 1984 to 1996 he edited the influential journal of multicultural literature, Outrider. In 1988 he edited the bicentennial Penguin anthology, Australian Writing Now (co-editor Robert Adamson).

Over the last twenty years Manfred has published novels, plays, film scripts, diaries, essays, short stories, literary criticism and poetry. In addition to his writings in English, much of his literary and academic work appears in German. He is a prolific translator and advocate of contemporary Australian literature.

Manfred’s books published by Indra, are The Trembling Bridge and The Eyes of the Tiger.

Fiona Hindmarsh, a successful middle-aged economist, likes to live her life her way.

Beginning the love-of-her-life affair with the gorgeous Laine Macready, a girl who wears a Hardie Aimes shirt like no one else can, she is interrupted by a phone call. Her sister, Gillian, brings her the news that their mother, Muriel, had a heart attack at the top of a plum tree she was pruning and died. Irritably Fi sets off on a night-time drive home to help Gillian organise the funeral.

What precisely is home for Fi? Where her mother lived in Northern New South Wales, among the tea-drinking relatives who, as Gillian reminds her, made Fi what she is today? Is home the girl of the moment who happens to make her heart miss a beat? Or is home merely one of the houses Fi has bought in Australia or leased in Bali?

Fi is contrary, her head and her heart responding to different music. And as a child, Fi was sensitive to the ghostly spirits of the Bundjalung who inhabited the land the Hindmarshes and the Darks took over for dairy farms. How does she reconcile the mutterings and wailings and chantings she hears in her heart with the classic cinema sound booming in her head and the skin-smarting indignity of betrayal?

A novel combining a love story with a perspective on the farmers’ settlement history of the Far North Coast of New South Wales, that grew with new grass on old rainforest soil.

March 2003, 232 pp
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9578735 8 1
Literary fiction, 1st edition
RRP $aud 22-95
ISBN-13 9780957873582

The Author
Carolyn van Langenberg grew up in the rural hinterland of the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She has travelled in Southeast Asia and Europe. Carolyn’s books reflect her background in Australian and English literature, Asian history and creative writing. She lives with her husband in the Blue Mountains.

The fish lips trilogy, set in Malaysia and Australia from the 1940s to the 21st century, looks at three angles on love: heterosexual, homosexual and tortured.

In fish lips, Rose, Li-tsieng’s paramour, becomes a ghost when the Japanese bombed Penang in 1941. Was she ever real?

Fiona Hindmarsh in The Teetotaller’s Wake longs to be back with her new girlfriend during the family ceremonies that follow her mother’s death.

In Blue Moon, urban conservationist Badul Mukhapadai tries to save Penang, Malaysia, from developers and falls in love with the clean air of Byron Bay, Australia, where he consummates his passion for the prickly historian, Gillian Hindmarsh.

The Fish Lips Trilogy… by Carolyn van Langenberg
Fish Lips 2001 $aud22.95 ISBN: 0 95858059 6
The Teetotaller’s Wake 2003 $aud22.95 ISBN: 0 95787358 1
Blue Moon 2004$aud27.95ISBN: 1 92078710 0

The news of her sick father beckons Komala to return to Jakarta, leaving her husband and children behind in Melbourne, now her home city.

But the Jakarta she left nine years earlier has changed. The city has changed and the society is disturbingly foreign to her. Or has she changed? Komala’s is a poignant homecoming to a troubled land.

Komala’s return even to her family home is difficult, with live-in boarders and her hostile sister in law disturbing her smooth transition back to the place of her childhood.

Through one of her mother’s boaders, Komala learns of a vicious attack on a nightclub hostess, an acid attack which leaves the young woman blinded and horribly scarred. In her attempt to win some justice and compensation for the victim, Komala becomes aware of a wider world of corruption and exploitation, particularly of women.

This exploitation is made worse by the lack of solidarity among the women in Jakarta. The society is still one where man are supreme, and the women acquiese in this, allowing themselves to be dependent on a husband or lover, thereby allowing men to retain control.

The Root of All Evil is a novel as relevant today as when first released. The path for women’s liberation in many South East Asian countries still hinges very much on how women themselves view the woman who dares to declare her independence in the male-dominated society.

May 1987, 140pp
Paperback, 215 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9587718 0 4
Fiction, 1st edition
RRP $aud 16.95
ISBN-13 978

The Author
As a published writer of novels, short stories and essays, and an established role as a regional journalist, Dewi Anggraeni is well-known in both Australia and Indonesia, especially among those in both countries who maintain an interest in regional affairs.

Her major works have been published by Indra Publishing:
Who Did This To Our Bali?, 2003
Snake, 2003
Neighbourhood Tales: A Bilingual Collection, 200
1Journeys Through Shadows, 1998
Stories of Indian Pacific, 1992
Parallel Forces, 1988
The Root of all Evil, 1987

Dewi’s poetry, short stories and essays appear in anthologies from a range of publishers:
“Journey to My Cultural Home” in Weaving a Double Cloth; Stories of Asia Pacific Women in Australia (Ed. Myra Jean Bourke, Susanne Holzknecht and Annie Bartlett, Pandanus Books, 2002)
“Exposing Crimes Against Women” in The Last Days of President Suharto (Ed. Edward Aspinall, Herb Feith and Gerry van Klinken, Monash Asia Institute, 1999)
“Rejected by Ibu Pertiwi” in Motherlode (Ed. Stephanie Holt and Maryanne Lynch, Sybylla Feminist Press, 1997)
“From Indonesia to Australia and Back: Cultural Sensitivities” in Crossing Cultures: Essays on Literature & Culture of the Asia-Pacific (Ed.Bruce Bennett, Jeff Doyle, Satendra Nandan, Skoob Books, 1996)
“Illegal” in Our Heritage (Ed. Satyagraha Hoerip, Pustaka Binaman Pressindo, 1993)
“Irritations” in Striking Chords (Ed. Sneja Gunew and Kateryna O Longley, Allen & Unwin, 1992)
“Mal Tombé” in Beyond the Echo (Ed. Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin UQP, 1988)
“A Foreigner in East Gippsland” in Up From Below (Women’s Redress Press Inc., 1987)

The Real Desire is a collection of essays, written over the last ten years by Robyn Ferrell, who is now Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. This collection is for the general reader as well as the academic and student.

In The Real Desire, the lenses of art, philosophy, sensuality, and the dreamscape invite us to explore the many guises of desire. A childhood interwoven with Aboriginal history, the banalities of buying real estate, discussion of lingerie, writers and writing, and feminist analysis of some of the great philosophers of the past.

Robyn Ferrell has brought together in one volume essays of discovery – “Pinjarra 1970”; rites of passage – “Kingdom of God” and “Feminine Arts”; disillusionment – “Paris Does Not Exist”; and critical analysis – “Hemingway’s Typewriter” and “Real Desire”.

Robyn combines the clarity of journalistic prose with the rigor of academic analysis. These essays are written for general interest as well as academic investigation.

Before he offered, it had not occurred to me that he could want what I wanted. Or, rather, that he could give this shape to what I wanted; an erotic definition. Because philosophy tutorials had been such a cerebral pleasure, like the cold light of stars. His skin, too, was cool and he continued to have a sylvan quality, only now under the influence of passion he had become a satyr or minor forest deity. from Feminine Arts

In Europe, the place of art in things becomes suddenly much clearer. There, one can see the old power under the new, like the original timber beneath the paint. In the grand architecture, the very place, that overbearing grandeur makes it not possible to avoid consciousness of the necessity of art in a world of an ancien régime; the consolation and subversion, the reflection art provides. from Paris Does Not Exist

They say that a dream of water refers to deep feeling. Aesthetics is that branch of philosophy which considers feeling. It deals with beauty, art, sensibility, passion. It would deal, if it could, with love. It is a quixotic enterprise, like reclaiming land from the sea. The tides of feeling are governed by a force we do not get to command; but we must make some effort for fear of being drowned in it. from Interpretation of Dreams

Paperback, 210 x 138 mm, 196 pp
Literary essays, 1st edition
ISBN: 1 92078701 1
RRP $aud 27-95
ISBN-13 9781920787011
Short-listed NSW Premier’s Prize

The Author
Robyn Ferrell worked as a journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald before doing her doctorate in philosophy at the University of New South Wales. Now she is the Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. As well as her books, Robyn is the author of numerous academic and journalistic articles.

Robyn is drawn to the creative breadth of essays, which can be didactic or elliptical, erudite or impassioned, and in which you can tell stories, gossip, advance speculations and explore feelings. Robyn has been a student of desire for as long as she has been a writer. The two have always accompanied each other – feeling and analysis, theory and expression, world view and personal opinion.

Robyn’s earlier books
Genres of Philosophy (Ashgate 2002)
Passion In Theory (Routledge 1996)
The Weather and Other Gods (Frances Allen 1990)
Co-editor, Cartographies: Post-structuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (Allen & Unwin 1991)

NOT AVAILABLE:   OUT OF PRINT

Who is he? How does he know my name? What does he want of me?These questions mixed with her fascination for a stranger preoccupy Elise Cartwright as she and her family try to make a home in the Norfolk Island penal settlement in the mid-nineteenth century. The settlement is for them as much as for the convicts, a place of exile, a place of punishment.

The Pines Hold Their Secrets is an historical novel set in the notorious penal settlement of Norfolk Island in the 1850s. Elise Cartwright, the daughter of the superintendant of agriculture at the settlement is strangely drawn to an Irish convict who called her by name, requesting her help.

Elise is forced to confront her mother’s bigotry and her society’s smugness in their position of authority and privilege. The Irish priest introduces Elise to his world of American literature while the convict servants introduce her to their world of land-loss, exploitation and famine. Slowly, she learns who ‘her convict’ is, as her family’s fate becomes ever more tightly enmeshed with his.

The novel is based on the historical reality of the Irish famine, the 19th century Young Ireland movement and the notoriety of Norfolk Island as the worst of the colonial Australian penal settlements.

July 1998, 283pp
Paperback, 215 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9587718 8 X
Fiction, 1st edition
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.

The newspaper headline of July 29th 1980, ‘Yellow Peril to go’, said it all.

After barely three months of holding centre stage in Melbourne’s new City Square amidst a barrage of abuse, the bright yellow sculpture was carted off to be re-erected at Batman Park in a rather neglected corner of the city. Here Vault, as the sculpture was eventually named by its creator, Ron Robertson-Swann, remained until …

Peril in the Square follows the highs and lows of Vault, Ron Robertson-Swann’s bright yellow abstract sculpture dubbed by its detractors as the ‘Yellow Peril’. Vault was the catalyst for the most furious debate over the rights and wrongs of art in public places ever witnessed in Australia.

Richly illustrated with nearly 100 photographs, most of them in colour, ‘Peril in the Square’ will give readers the full story of Melbourne’s best-known public art work, from its beginnings as a maquette that shocked the city council in the late 1970s, all the way to its present ‘resurrection’ at Southbank.

May 2004, 152pp
Paperback 260 x 210 mm
Non-Fiction – Arts history and criticism
1st edition
ISBN: 1 92078700 3
RRP $aud 49-95
ISBN-13 9781920787004
Beautifully illustrated in colour

The Author
With formal qualifications in fine arts and teaching, Geoffrey Wallis has been a lecturer in Art History and Theory since 1971. He has recently retired from the Arts Academy, University of Ballarat.

He has curated and written essays for numerous exhibitions including:
Just Sculpture Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
UnPeeled Art Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
Outside Art Inside Ballarat Fine Art Gallery (Travelling exhibition)
Street Art Swan Hill, Regional Art Gallery, Loris Button Ararat Gallery, Ken Searle Ballarat Fine Art Gallery

Geoffrey has also exhibited work in group exhibitions in a number of galleries.

A crime fiction novel set in a remote river town in outback Australia. A mail order bride has gone missing. Her husband says she has run off with a stranger. Her parents in Sri Lanka know this could not be true.

The so-called “mail-order bride” phenomenon developed to fill the needs of lonely men, particularly in regional Australia. But the marriages did not always work out.Nilanthi was such a bride. The youngest of five daughters in a family where status was higher than income, her parents had difficulty providing a dowry large enough to attract a suitably well-to-do husband for her. Believing all westerners were rich, she chose to take her chances with an unknown suitor, a farmer in far-away Australia.

When Nilanthi goes missing, her parents in Sri Lanka ask Laura, a Sydney history teacher, for help in finding their daughter. To find the young woman, Laura has to travel a thousand kilometres inland and fifty years back into her own family’s tragic past.

March 2004, 248pp
Fiction, 1st edition
ISBN 1 92078702 X
Paperback, 210 x 138 mm
RRP $aud 23.95
ISBN-13 9781920787025

The Author see also: Worm in the Bud

June Duncan Owen’s training and experience in history (MA from Sydney University), social work (University of Adelaide), teaching and farming inform her writing. Her later book, Worm in the Bud, was well received by readers throughout Australia.

June’s published works include
The Missing Wife, Indra Publishing 2004
Mixed Matches: Interracial Marriage in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, 2002
Writing and Selling Articles (Australian/New Zealand Guide), Hale & Iremonger, 1997
How to Write and Sell Articles, Penguin Books, 1992
The Heart of the City, Kangaroo Press, 1987.

NOT AVAILABLE:   OUT OF PRINT

The Irish community who came seeking gold brought their old-world conflict with them to the new land of Australia. The Orange and the Green focussed their antagonism on neighbourhood pubs in 1875, at a time of waning profits and underemployment on the famous Ballarat goldfields.
The mines and mining tragedies loom large in the background as the Catholic community in Ballarat celebrated the centenary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, known as the Liberator because he won a degree of emancipation for the Catholic majority of Ireland. The mounting pressures of this special day in the life of the Globe Hotel bring young Tommy Farrell to a newfound strength and resolve, breaking free of the bonds of his youth, to claim his own liberation – freedom to believe, freedom to grow and freedom to love.
This novel is down to earth and compelling, but well-crafted and finely balanced. The vernacular of the Irish settlers and their Australian-born children which adds to the flavour of the novel, is authenticated by Jill’s grasp of Irish usage, and her working knowledge of the Irish language.
An interesting insight into early development of the Catholic Church in Australia is presented, not as an interruption to the narrative, but as an integral part of this special day in the life of the Irish in Ballarat.

248pp Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
Fiction, 1st edition
ISBN: 0 9578735 3 0
RRP $aud 23-95
ISBN-13 9780957873539

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

The Eyes of the Tiger is a novel of friendship, love and corruption. Set in Brisbane during the disastrous 1974 flood, two very different men, the immunologist Mark and the charismatic ‘Prince of Spice’ Sannes, struggle for the affection of the high-spirited, fiercely independent lawyer Jessica. In a highly charged, profoundly disturbing relationship, betrayal of friendship and violation of love interact and collide with the ever-increasing moral deterioration of ‘the Moonlight State’.

Jurgensen’s new novel depicts evil as a seductively demonic power of rampant decomposition, generating from the realm of personal intimacy to the corruption of civilised society. Its narrative of power and passion takes the reader on a frightening journey, culminating in apparitions of a predatory god.

March 2004, 400pp
Paperback, 234 x 153 mm
Literary fiction, 1st edition
ISBN 1 92078711 9
RRP $aud 27.95
ISBN-13 9781920787111

The Author
Originally from Denmark, Manfred Jurgensen settled in Australia at the age of twenty-one, working as actor, playwright and reviewer. Manfred started publishing poetry in the early seventies and to date, he has produced thirteen collections.

He taught literature at Melbourne, Monash and Queensland University where he was appointed to a Personal Chair. From 1984 to 1996 he edited the influential journal of multicultural literature, Outrider. In 1988 he edited the bicentennial Penguin anthology, Australian Writing Now (co-editor Robert Adamson).

Over the last twenty years Manfred has published novels, plays, film scripts, diaries, essays, short stories, literary criticism and poetry. In addition to his writings in English, much of his literary and academic work appears in German. He is a prolific translator and advocate of contemporary Australian literature.

Manfred’s books published by Indra, are The Trembling Bridge and The Eyes of the Tiger.

Henry Ditassio is a repressed clerk living a claustrophobic life. His repetitive compulsive existence at A.G. Muir’s office has left no room for prospect until he meets bored narcissistic manipulative Arb Ginghus whose obsession with Henry can only explode in a kind of madness.

In this story of mad imagination & taut relationships Kirwan puts popular wisdom and our concepts of time on its head. As Arb Ginghus says, “If there is one thing I despise it is common sense for it will teach you nothing that is worth knowing; it is the obscure, the impractical, the impulsive which tells you what is what.”

Kirwan’s mordant wit takes us on a journey where recollection and perception become confused, strangely echoing our own lives.

A beautifully crafted, disarming novel.

For readers who like psychological thrillers, dark fantasy, a surrealist take on life.

December 2004, 160 pp
Paperback, 210 x 138 mm
ISBN 1 92078706 2
Literary fiction, 1st edition
RRP $aud 23-95
ISBN-13 978

The Author
For twenty years since the mid-seventies, Valerie Kirwan was something of a legend in Melbourne theatre, writing, directing and performing plays which challenged and enchanted her audiences.

More recently, Valerie is writing novellas and short stories in which she tests her characters against the subconscious stresses that exist below the surface of our outwardly normal, everyday world. Through intrigue, suspense, and more than a little sardonic humour, Valerie challenges us to join in her psychological dramas.

Valerie’s published books
Taking A Fool to Paradise (Indra 2004)
Lovers and Losers of the Last Century (Indra 2001)
The Disease of the Silkworm (Hornets Nest 2000)
The Moon is Bloodshot (Hornets Nest 1999)
The Will to Fall (Penguin 1984)