Sandstone gothic

Softcover Book Condition: Very good Pages slightly browning with age. Page 1 has previous owner's name and date. Winner, Fellowship of Australian Writers Christina Stead Award, National Literary Awards 1998. This uniquely personal account begins in 1954 when a 'reffo' boy first walked along Sydney University's imposing drive. It takes him from the lecture rooms of the university with their black-gowned lecturers expounding the glories of Miss Austen and Lord Byron to the reading room of the British Museum and the trials and tribulations of the post-graduate student in 1960s London. From that vantage point he observed the social, cultural and even sexual rituals of an England markedly different from the land of hope and glory celebrated by his sentimental education in the Australia of the late 1940s. Returning to Sydney in 1963 Andrew Riemer was pitched headlong into the great scandal of the university's English Department which he relates with wry humour and a number of stories told for the first time. Besides its intimate first-hand account of those remarkable times Sandstone Gothic reminisces widely across many of Riemer's friends and contemporaries - Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Jill Ker Conway and many others - who achieved fame and renown far beyond the walls of the university's splendid buildings. As well as being a wide ranging and perceptive story of academic life Sandstone Gothic is a chronicle of a changing world which has left its mark on the lives of many Australians.…