A dozen things you didn’t know about Melbourne

James Boyce is the author of the new release 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia.

Here he shares with us a dozen things you may not have known about the founding of Melbourne:

#1 Melbourne’s mother island was not Britain but the notorious penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land.

#2 Melbourne was founded by unauthorised boat arrivals (or to use the contemporary term, ‘illegals’) who were breaking British law.

#3 The founding fathers (sadly there were few founding mothers) of Melbourne were not the cashed up squatters but their former convict workers. Very few of the famous Port Phillip Association members who sent sheep and shepherds across the strait were permanently resident in the Port Phillip District during the first year.

#4 The emancipist workers were experienced and environmentally attuned bushmen.

Our pets

In honour of Take Your Dog To Work Day, we are celebrating all of our pets. Get to know the dogs and cats behind Black Inc!

Alfie
Belongs to: General Manager
Likes: Snoozing, swimming in Merri Creek
Dislikes: Being referred to as "the dog", forced cuddle time

Interview with Benjamin Law

To celebrate the release of the new format of The Family Law, we talk to author Benjamin Law.

Can you tell us a little bit about the experience of having your first book published?

Getting a book out into the world is a very wonderful—albeit consistently odd—experience. During promotion, you find yourself in places you never imagined, like saying hello to Mel and Kochie in Channel 7’s studios, or drinking wine with Jenny Kee and Waleed Aly in the headquarters of SBS. Complete strangers come up to you, saying they’ve read your book and tell me how much they love my mother.

Interview with author Sonia Faleiro

We interview writer and journalist Sonia Faleiro about her fascinating new book Beautiful Thing: Portrait of a Bombay Bar Dancer.

Can you tell us a little about your book Beautiful Thing?

Beautiful Thing is a work of non-fiction. It’s the story of a young girl called Leela who runs away from home after being prostituted by her father and reaches Bombay determined to build a new life for herself. She’s only thirteen when she gets a job as a bar dancer but because of her beauty and vivacity very quickly becomes popular, earning plenty of money and living the lifestyle of her dreams. When I met Leela in 2005, she was nineteen and hopeful that her affair with her boss, a man who was already married and had children, would turn into something more permanent. But very soon after, the government cracked down on dance bars, banning them on the grounds that they encouraged immorality, corrupted the youth and encouraged crime, essentially forcing Leela and about 75,000 young women like her out of work and onto the streets.

Kate Jennings on writing Snake

Kate Jennings

I wrote my novel Snake through two long winters at the beginning of the nineties out on Long Island. Low grey skies, the angry Atlantic. No distractions from re-imagining life on an Australian farm in the fifties.

When I began, I remember thinking “The world doesn’t need another dysfunctional family or coming-of age novel.” But most of those books were from the perspective of one person: the self-justifying writer-as-child. It was important for me to be even-handed, to present this family from the point of view of all the protagonists. It was also important to me not to write a feminist tract – this was a time when feminists were presenting mothers as nurturing and women in general as somehow innately morally superior. Arrant nonsense, of course. Some mothers are good, some middling, some appalling.