CONRAD, PETER — Down Home Revisiting Tasmania

UK, Chatto & Windus. 1988. Hardcover with dust jacket, 24 Cm. Book, Down Home - Revisiting Tasmania, by Peter Conrad, published by Chatto and Windus (London) in 1988, is an evocative and beautifully written autobiography. Every generation since 1804 has produced autobiographical accounts from literati, travellers, artists, politicians, convicts, sailors, scientists, and many others of their experience as emigre, transportee, or "native-born" to Tasmania. In recent decades, one publication in particular, created world-wide interest: Peter Conrad's Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania (Chatto & Windus 1988) which was republished in the United States with the title Behind The Mountain: Return to Tasmania (Poseidon 1989). Hal Porter's The Tilted Cross and Peter Conrad's Down Home both portray Tasmania as a hellish outpost at the end of the earth, a cursed and morally tainted place from which those who can escape do so as quickly as possible. While one is a convict novel set in the 1840s and the other is an autobiography set in the 1950s and 60s, both contribute to the long tradition of condemning Tasmania in a fulsome and rhetorically extravagant manner. 230 clean well bound pp , Very Good/Good.