Chrystopher Spicer

Cultural historian Dr Chrystopher Spicer is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, engaged in research into the relationships between literature, culture, and place of the tropics. He has carried out heritage surveys of Australian historic buildings and cemeteries and is the co-author of Cemeteries our Heritage (Ed. Celestina Sagazio), 1992, Melbourne: National Trust of Australia (Victoria). He is also the author of several books on Australian and American cultural history, including Clark Gable: Biography (McFarland, 2002), Great Australian World Firsts (Allan & Unwin, 2012), and most recently, his pioneering exploration of the relationships between extreme tropical weather, such as cyclones, and people, place, and regional literature: Cyclone Country: The Language of Place and Disaster in Australian Literature (McFarland, 2020). He is currently involved in a major research project on the life and work of Australia’s internationally renowned writer of the South Pacific, Louis Becke, about whom he has written a number of papers, such as, “Louis Becke’s Modern Buccaneer: The transformation of William ‘Bully’ Hayes into the first modern literary pirate of the Pacific,” Journal of Australian, Canadian & Aotearoa New Zealand Studies (2021), 1:2, 73-108.