Rachael Weaver

Think fast is what my fourteen-year-old son says when he pelts a lemon straight at me from across the room. Left-Handed Lemon is a game I invented decades ago. The rules are not that complicated: you throw the lemon with your left hand and your challenger catches it with their left hand. Throw hard and don’t drop it – again and again – that’s how to win.

‘Archipelago of Souls is Gregory Day’s fourth novel since his prize-winning debut, The Patron Saint of Eels, first appeared in 2005. But despite this significant output in fiction, various short-listings and awards, and Day’s regular contributions as a reviewer in the mainstream press, his writing seems to have been largely overlooked by contemporary Australian literary criticism.’

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka not only succeeds in bringing women’s presence on the Australian goldfields vividly into focus, but it also considers the instrumental role they played in transforming power relations within the fluid and often turbulent social and political formations of the goldfields community, which reached boiling point in the Eureka uprising.