Patsy Trench

What does a girl have to do to become a leading light on the London stage?Meredith has sacrificed everything - family and the comforts and security of home - to become an actress. She has done her time in the provinces, she's toured the country from tip to toe, she's set the West End alight with her ground-breaking performances. And yet here she is, in 1906, finding herself yet again facing a void of no work and no prospects.Could it be her haughty demeanour? Or her refusal to become a friendly company member? Could it even be - dreadful thought - that she has no talent?With the arrival in town of an emissary of the great Stanislavsky Meredith's professional and personal life is about to be turned upside-down. Will she ever find her feet again? And if she does, will she be able to stand on them in the same way?Sometimes disaster and upheaval can reap unexpected rewards. But it's a long and tough journey to a very surprising conclusion.

It is the 1890s and Violet Frogg is on the run.First from her stifling family home in a village near London, then from a marriage in a swanky house in Bloomsbury and a brief dally with suffragists, lastly from a fulfilling position working for Herbert Beerbohm Tree, renowned actor-manager, in the heart of London's West End.What is Violet running from? Or to?How many lives can a young woman inhabit before she finds one that fits?Or is real happiness too much for a young woman to ask for in turn-of-the-century England?

Did you know that at one point in New South Wales both men and women were ordered to wear skirts for sea bathing?What did famous writers such as Mark Twain and Anthony Trollope have to say about Australia?How did the miracle known as the Sydney Opera House ever see the light of day?What's the point of family history?These and other random stories arose out of the writer's researches into her family history in early colonial Australia. 'Australia And How To Find It' is a mixture of odds and sods about that weird, eccentric country that didn't make it into the author's previous books. It explains the background to some of the more bizarre rules and regulations that popped up in the country's development, and how the country looked to overseas visitors. How border disagreements led to passengers having to change trains because of the different railway gauges, and why murder defendants had to be tried twice. How Admiral Nelson was able to joke about only having one arm (and why he warrants inclusion in a book about Australia); the struggle of the Aboriginal people to wrest their artefacts back from the clutches of the British Museum; how Australian culture is a lot more diverse and innovative than given credit for by the rest of the world.Aimed at readers interested in the idiosyncrasies of this unique country and its inhabitants, old and new, as seen through the eyes of a Londoner and Australophile.

In the 19th century Australia went from a penal colony struggling to survive to a thriving, prosperous community with a glowing future.George Matcham Pitt's life spanned the best part of that century. A larger than life character with a booming voice and a fondness for quoting from classic poets, GM, as he was known, began as a working farmer on the Hawkesbury and went on to become an auctioneer, landowner and founder of one of Australia's first and best-known stock and station agents, Pitt, Son & Badgery. Friend to everyone bar politicians, GM had close family contacts with Aboriginal people and even closer connections with convicts.Now his great great granddaughter, a Pom based in London, sets out to tell the story of this remarkable man and the extraordinary country he lived in: a land of indigenous Australians, squatters and swagmen, convicts and free settlers, battlers, chancers, explorers and entrepreneurs. These were the men and women who transformed Australia from what had been considered by westerners the worst country in the world to a country to be reckoned with.