Fear Drive My Feet

2015-06-24
Biography & Autobiography

Author: Peter Ryan

Publisher: Text Publishing

ISBN: 1925095878

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 336

View: 2581


Fear Drive My Feet is Peter Ryan’s enduring account of his time patrolling isolated regions of New Guinea during World War II. Far from his fellow Australians and with Japanese forces closing in around him, the eighteen-year-old Ryan endures the hardships of the jungle, overcoming loneliness, fatigue and fear with quiet courage. He finds beauty in the rugged mountain landscapes of New Guinea, and admires the charm and resourcefulness of its people. Rarely out of print in the past four decades, Fear Drive My Feet is a classic memoir of the war in the Pacific, a major work of Australian war literature. For the work he describes in this book, Peter Ryan was awarded the Military Medal and mentioned in dispatches. Peter Ryan has been a newspaper columnist, the director of Melbourne University Press and an officer of the Victorian Supreme Court. He was an intelligence operative behind enemy lines in New Guinea in World War II. He lives in Melbourne. ‘Outstanding.’ Peter Pierce ‘A moving account of a young man’s lonely heroism.’ Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop

When Memory Speaks

2011-06-08
Literary Criticism

Author: Jill Ker Conway

Publisher: Vintage

ISBN: 0307797236

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 224

View: 6848


J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives. In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham--the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves. Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wilderness, into self-made men overcoming economic obstacles to create an invention or a fortune--or, more recently, into a quest for meaning, for an understandable past, for an ethnic identity. In contrast, she sees the designs that women commonly employ for their memoirs as evolving from the writings of the mystics--such as Dame Julian of Norwich or St. Teresa of Avila--about their relationship with an all-powerful God. As against the male autobiographer's expectation of power over his fate, we see the woman memoirist again and again believing that she lacks command of her destiny, and tending to censor her own story. Throughout, Conway underlines the memoir's magic quality of allowing us to enter another human being's life and mind--and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives.

Ryan's Luck

2020-11

Author: John Tidey

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: 9781922454096

Category:

Page: N.A

View: 1121


Peter Allen Ryan (1923-2015) was a talented, brave and complex man; in some quarters an Australian institution. As a 19-year-old soldier in World War Two he won the Military Medal and was Mentioned in Dispatches. Fear Drive My Feet, the book he wrote when he returned home from New Guinea, is recognised as perhaps Australia's finest war memoir. In another life - and he had several - Ryan was Director of Melbourne University Press for 26 years. As a writer - his first and greatest interest - Ryan's extraordinary output included nine books and some two million words, most of them produced by hand. His essays and columns were often controversial (as intended) but written with style, grace and wicked wit. It was said of Peter Ryan that he was incapable of writing an ugly sentence.

Ryan's Luck

2020
Journalists

Author: John Newton Tidey

Publisher: Arcadia, the general books

ISBN: 9781922454089

Category: Journalists

Page: 136

View: 4819


Annotation. |b Peter Allen Ryan (1923-2015) was a talented, brave and complex man; in some quarters an Australian institution. As a 19-year-old soldier in World War Two he won the Military Medal and was Mentioned in Dispatches. Fear Drive My Feet, the book he wrote when he returned home from New Guinea, is recognised as perhaps Australia's finest war memoir. In another life - and he had several - Ryan was Director of Melbourne University Press for 26 years. As a writer - his first and greatest interest - Ryan's extraordinary output included nine books and some two million words, most of them produced by hand. His essays and columns were often controversial (as intended) but written with style, grace and wicked wit. It was said of Peter Ryan that he was incapable of writing an ugly sentence.

The Third Force

2003
Australia

Author: Alan Powell

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

ISBN: N.A

Category: Australia

Page: 344

View: 7076


Provides a unique history of Australia's Papa New Guinean interaction with Australian and American Armed Forces in the Second World War; provides a political and military history of New Guinea's war record and colonial administration, as well.

Walkabout

1961
Australia

Author: N.A

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Australia

Page: 618

View: 2063


War by Stealth

1996
History

Author: Alan Powell

Publisher: Melbourne University

ISBN: N.A

Category: History

Page: 472

View: 5336


The intriguing and daring story of the Australian coast-watchers in New Britain and the Solomon Islands during World War II is fairly well known, but they were part of a wider organisation. The Allied Intelligence Bureau was General MacArthur's intelligence, special operations and field propaganda unit in the Pacific War, 1942-45. The AIB was unique in its multinational composition. Under American leadership, it included British, Dutch, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian members, although many of the leaders and most of the field operatives were Australian. Its area of operations stretched from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands and from Indonesia, including Borneo, to the Asian mainland. Using much newly released, formerly secret archival material from Britain, the USA and Australia, this new full-scale study of the AIB examines for the first time relations between operatives and native peoples - a relationship critical for the success or failure of missions that were often appallingly dangerous. It also lays bare the power struggles within the organisation itself - conflicts over national, military and personal interests that were constant and intense - heightened by the conduct of war at a time that was, without doubt, the most desperate in Australian history.
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