Manning Clark

Professor Brian Matthews is the acclaimed author of Louisa (McPhee Gribble,1987) and more recently of his idiosyncratic memoir, A Fine and Private Place (Pan Mac, 2000)...Peter Craven wrote of him in the Sydney Morning Herald:..'Brian Matthews has been a powerful presence on the Australian literary scene at least since the late 1980s, when he published Louisa, his factional life of Henry Lawson's mother ... As a literary career, Matthews's presents the spectacle of an English professor in mid-life retreat from the confining orbit of the academic. Louisa was a grand and crazy maverick of a book and the fiction (some serious, some joshing) that followed, together with the shaggy-dog journalism and the short whip round the subject of Federation in his recently published book of the same name, testify to the canniness and craftsmanship of a natural writer.'