Showing results by narrator "Deidre Rubenstein" in All Categories

Jacques Lacan was one of the most important psychoanalysts ever to have lived. Building upon the work of Sigmund Freud, he sought to refine Freudian insights with the use of linguistics and mathematics, arguing that "the structure of unconscious is like a language." He is widely misunderstood and often unfairly dismissed as impenetrable. In this clear, wide-ranging primer, Lionel Bailly demonstrates how Lacan’s ideas are still vitally relevant to contemporary issues of mental health treatment.

For 44 years Stella Templeton has been a dutiful daughter and a good citizen living in Maidenville, population 2,800, a town where nothing happens. Until one hot summer afternoon...An ugly act has lifted the respectable skirts of Maidenville and mystery starts to surround the daughter of the local minister. Then the disappearance of a 16-year-old-boy adds to the neighbourhood's confusion. Does something sinister lurk behind the neatly trimmed hedges and white picket fences that divide this sleepy town?

As a teenage orphan in England in 1791, Mary Reibey was sentenced to death for stealing a horse. When police cornered her, she was dressed as a boy, and she maintained that disguise until she was unmasked at her trial. Due to her 'tender age', Reibey was spared the hangman's noose and sentenced to seven years' transportation to the colony of New South Wales. With the odds stacked against her, Reibey went on to become Australia's first female business tycoon and the richest woman in the colony, founding the Bank of New South Wales, now one of the nation's biggest financial institutions.

In 1909, a young Australian actress made headlines around the world when she took to the sky over London in an airship emblazoned with the slogan 'Votes for Women' and dropped leaflets over the city. Muriel Matters was dubbed 'that daring Australian girl', and the American media declared it to be the world's first aerial protest. Just months earlier, Muriel had become the first woman to make a speech in the British House of Commons, after chaining herself to a brass grille to protest against the segregation of women in the Parliament.

Dominic Rose, a bachelor and teacher, has an antiquated hobby. He studies physiognomy, the art of judging somebody's character by their facial features and expressions. Living in a cottage at the edge of the woods with his frail, bedridden mother, he has spent decades pining after Clara, the love of his life, who vanished while staying with her grandparents. When Kate Winston and her family move to North Yorkshire, it sets in motion a chain of events that will alter the lives of those involved forever.

Pru's husband has walked out, leaving her alone to contemplate her future. She's missing not so much him, but the life they once had - picnicking on the beach with small children, laughing together, nestling up like spoons in the cutlery drawer as they sleep. Now there's just a dip on one side of the bed and no one to fill it. In a daze, Pru goes off to a friend's funeral. Usual old hymns, words of praise and a eulogy but...it doesn't sound like the friend Pru knew. And it isn't. She's gone to the wrong service.

When Ned Kelly's mother, Ellen, arrived in Melbourne in 1841 aged nine, British convict ships were still dumping their unhappy cargo in what was then known as the colony of New South Wales. By the time she died aged 91 in 1923, having outlived seven of her 12 children, motor cars plied the highway near her bush home north of Melbourne, and Australia was a modern sovereign nation.

In six short stories Patrick White probes beneath the surface of events to expose a deeper, truer reality. These six short novels and stories achieve the majesty and power of the best of Patrick White’s great novels. They probe beneath the surface of events – a sexual lapse, the unaccustomed climate of a foreign country, interruptions in a cherished routine, a death, a toothache – to expose a deeper, truer reality.

An epic story of love, sacrifice and revenge swept along on the winds of war. Australian actress Samantha Lindsay is thrilled when she scores her first lead movie role in the Hollywood epic Torpedo Junction, playing a character based on World War II heroine 'Mamma Tack'. But as filming begins in Vanuatu, uncanny parallels between history and fiction emerge. Just who was the real Mamma Tack? And what mysterious forces are at play? The answers reveal not only bygone secrets but Sam's own destiny.

Hetty’s family was torn apart following the German invasion of the Netherlands. Rounded up by the Nazis and then separated from their parents, Hetty and her brothers were sent to the Children’s House, within Belsen concentration camp. As one of the eldest, Hetty became the ‘Little Mother’, helping to care for not only her siblings, but the other children as well.In a direct and powerful style, Hetty recalls one of the remarkable, largely untold stories of the Holocaust – the extraordinary struggle and survival of this group of children through those terrible years.

In August 1948, 545 passengers boarded an overcrowded, clapped-out vessel in Marseilles to face an uncertain future in Australia and New Zealand. They came from displaced persons camps in Germany, death camps in Poland, labour camps in Hungary, gulags in Siberia and stony Aegean islands. There were those who had been hunted by the Nazis and those who had welcomed them; those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled them.

What has gone wrong with political leadership in Australia? And are things likely to change with a change of leader or government? In this crisp and timely essay, Laura Tingle examines political leadership in general - some profiles in courage and cunning - as well as styles of leadership. She looks at Macron and Merkel, Keating and Obama.

At the very end of the Ladies’ Frocks Departments, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasn’t for everybody: that was the point. Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters Model Gowns. Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, Ladies in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow.

When Jenny Morrison fled Woody Creek for a new life in Melbourne she left behind a dysfunctional family, a town of small-minded gossips, and, most tragically, a newborn baby. Mustering all her strength, she resolved to put her past behind her, reclaim her identity, and pursue her dream of becoming a famous singer.... Yet just months later she is back - wiser and with an expensive new wardrobe - but with a second child growing in her belly.

Malinche was the Amerindian woman who translated for Hernan Cortès - from her lips came the words that triggered the fall of Moctezuma's Aztec empire to the Spanish in 1521. In Mexico Malinche's name is synonymous with "traitor". Yet folklore and legend still celebrate the mystique of this remarkable young woman. Malinche became a slave to strangers when just a girl, and was then passed on to Cortès as a concubine. She became his interpreter, indispensible to his campaigns, and mother to his son, only to be married off to another conquistador.

A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life. Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her family into the Lvov Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure her and Vera’s survival. With unsparing honesty and the blackest humour, she recalls a world where the desire to survive was everything.

Born in Australia in a Jewish enclave of Melbourne to Holocaust survivors, Dina left behind a childhood marred by misery and the tragedies of the past to build a new life for herself in the Promised Land. After starting a family of her own, she finds her life falling apart beneath the demands of her eccentric patients, a marriage starting to fray, the ever-present threat of terrorist attack and the ghost of her mother, haunting her with memories that Dina would prefer to leave on the other side of the world.

The wind is whispering in Woody Creek. Change is in the air. It's 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged kicking and screaming into the swinging '60s. Jenny's daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother's hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met. A mistake from Cara's teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white-wedding and happily-ever-after myth. Georgie has seen enough of marriage and motherhood. She plans to live her life as her grandmother did, independent of a man.

Jenny Morrison is bravely trying to move on with her life. Her husband missing amidst the turmoil of WWII she takes refuge with Ray King, a slightly sinister, stuttering boy who disappeared from Woody Creek as a teenager but has now reappeared. In return for regular 'wifely duties', Ray offers Jenny and her three children sanctuary at his house in Melbourne. For a time, she is happy.

>i>Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best - from the fascinating details of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary true story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.