Search results for ""Spinifex Press""

Surrogacy is heavily promoted by the stagnating IVF industry which seeks new markets for women over 40, and gay men who believe they have a ‘right’ to their own children and ‘family foundation’. Pro-surrogacy groups in rich countries such as Australia and Western Europe lobby for the shift to commercial surrogacy. Their capitalist neo-liberal argument is that a well-regulated fertility industry would avoid the exploitative practices of poor countries. Central to the project of transnational surrogacy is the ideology that legalised commercial surrogacy is a legitimate means to provide infertile couples and gay men with children who share all or part of their genes. Women, without whose bodies this project is not possible are reduced to incubators, to ovens, to suitcases. And the ‘product child’ is a tradable commodity who has never consented to being a ‘take away baby’: removed from their birth mother and given to strangers aka ‘intended parents’. Still, those in favour of this practice of reproductive slavery speak of ‘Fair Trade International Surrogacy’ and ‘responsible surrogacy’.

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An outstanding study of Aboriginal women's lives. Living in the community, developing friendships which spanned decades, Diane Bell shines a light on the importance of women's role in Australian Aboriginal desert culture. As maintainers of land, ritual and culture, indigenous women of central Australia share the patterns of their lives in this remarkable and enduring book. Diane Bell was controversial in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and remains so today. Not everyone agrees with her but she demands to be read.

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Feminists have long known that it’s all connected. The stories, the families, the country, the River. In this anthology, poets and short story writers create worlds with words. This book includes stories that draw on mythic traditions rewritten for our time. There are thieves, grandmothers, teenagers breaking out, dark caves to explore, and real estate to sell; there are mysteries from the grave, experiments that go wrong, road trips, a circus, an opera, families that break, and families that hold together; there are birds and animals and babies, and there is the pandemic. There is stillness and movement; closeness and distance. This eclectic range of authors brings their unique perspectives to storytelling as they each grapple to understand the past and meet the challenges ahead, daring to share their joy and pain, their fear and anger, their hopes and disappointments. These are women who dare to remember, to claim their own stories, and to wonder what may have been.

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The Wear of My Face is an assemblage of passing lives and landscapes, fractured worlds and realities. There is splintered text and image, memory and dream, newscast and conversation. Women wicker first light, old men make things that glow, poets are standing stones, frontlines merge with tourist lines. Lizz Murphy weaves these elements into the strangeness of suburbia, the intensity of waiting rooms, bush stillness, and hopes for a leap of faith as at times she leaves a poem as fragmented as a hectic day or a bombed street. What may sometimes seem like misdemeanours of the mind, to Lizz they are simply the distractions and disturbances of daily life somewhere. There is a rehomed greyhound, a breezy scientist, ancient malleefowl, beige union reps and people in all their conundrums. You might travel on a seagull’s wing or wing through the aerosphere.

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In the face of widespread discrimination against the disabled and a eugenic culture which pathologises disability and crushes diversity, comes a new book which radically challenges the status quo. Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics, tells the personal stories of women who have resisted medical eugenics - women who were told they shouldn't have babies because of perceived disability in themselves or because of some imperfection in the child. They have confronted the stigma of disability and in the face of silent disapproval and even open hostility, had their children anyway, in the belief that all life is valuable and that some are not more worthy of it than others.

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In the cold winter of 1875, two rebellious spirits travel from the pale sunlight of England to the raw heat of Australia. Harriet Rowell (age 22) and Alice Moon (age 18), were champion swimmers in a time when women didn’t go into the sea; they were athletic and strong in a time when women believed men who told them if they didn’t bind their bodies in whalebone corsets they would fall over or ruin their childbearing purpose; and they were in love in a time when many women were in love with each other but held such love secretly, for fear of retribution. In Australia, they will achieve their freedom and create a path for others to follow! With Alice’s wealth, they open a Women’s Gymnasium and begin to teach mothers and daughters how to be strong; daring them to throw off the shackles of fashion and social laws that bind their natural female bodies and minds. With courageous defiance and rebellious natures, Harriet and Alice take on the world at a dangerous time for women’s freedom of expression.

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In this major new book of poems, her seventh, Robin Morgan rewards us with the award-winning mastery we've come to expect from her poetry. Her gaze is unflinching, her craft sharp, her mature voice rich with wry wit, survived pain, and her signature chord: an indomitable celebration of life.

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‘Very few collections bring home so powerfully the vulnerability of individuals in the face of history’ writes Lisa Gorton of Robyn Rowland’s powerful poems recording the experiences of soldiers, nurses and doctors, women munitions workers, wives, mothers, composers, painters and poets during the Gallipolli War, 1915. It began with the Battle of Çanakkale and the defeat of the British navy. The land battle was hand-to-hand killing, the physical closeness of its soldiers unmasking the depersonalisation of the propaganda of war. Importantly, the book finishes with a poem on women’s friendship 100 years after the war, and the healing nature of love.

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Remember The Tarantella is a remarkable work. It's learned and frivolous, female not feminine, silly and serious. Written in several strands of narrative, the many characters create a space as if reading were a dance party. Story is not the main objective. Private conversations and thoughts are always within earshot of the rhythm of others, like the stamping of feet and the beat of the music. This is concerto-like poetry; many instruments of different tones assist the reader to know who is who.

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Unmasking the lies behind the selling of porn as ‘just a bit of fun’ Big Porn Inc reveals the shocking truths of an industry that trades in violence, crime and degradation. This fearless book will change the way you think about pornography.

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Sheila Jeffreys explodes the distinction between “forced” and “free” prostitution, and documents the expanding international traffic in women. She examines the claims of the prostitutes’ rights movement and the sex industry, while supporting prostituted women. Her argument is threefold: the sex of prostitution is not just sex; the work of prostitution is not ordinary work; and prostitution is a ‘choice’ not for the prostituted women, but for the men who abuse them.

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“Sex, silence and sin”, this is what newly appointed professor, Dee P. Scrutari, writes in her notebook as she turns her anthropological gaze on the tribe of “non-reproducing males” who dominate St Jude's, a prestigious Catholic liberal arts college. Evil is in the air. Something is awry. What happened to the previous occupant of her newly-painted office? Professor Scrutari's fieldwork begins. Her notebooks fill. And the mystery mounts: disturbing odours that no air cleanser will disperse, turbulent faculty meetings, tenure politics, intrigue around women's bodies, and a strange ginger cat. The mix is complicated by secret student alliances, predatory priests, the end of a marriage and new love, an imperious college president, a lumbering dean, a faction-ridden Religious Studies Department, a radical mass and a dissident feminist liturgy.

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The butterfly effect is a concept from physics in which it is surmised that small actions can have enormous consequences, and that the flutter of a butterfly's wing on one side of the world can cause devastating storms on the other side. Susan Hawthorne explores the impact of the love between lesbians. The butterfly effect is a force that can destroy families and bring down governments, but also a force full of vitality and world changing creativity.

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In this book, Mary Lucille Sullivan asks whether the concept of sex work as ‘a job like any other’ matches the reality. Discussing the practicalities of brothels as regular businesses, the author unearths astounding facts about both the legal and illegal sectors. Covering issues such as violence, organised crime, women’s health, and mainstream businesses’ involvement in the sex trade.

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Not since Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton has anyone written so candidly about madness. Sandy Jeffs' poetry has a stark dignity, capable of conveying "shudders of intense fear". Yet in the midst of her rigours, she can access a voice both wild and funny. Sandy Jeffs' leavening sense of humour peoples her darkness with the sirens of the supermarket, a tinsel paradise and high-tech technicolour Armageddon. After all, God is only a word and angels, although mad, sing the wanderer into paradise.

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The poignant story behind the Lort Smith Animal Hospital, and the women who were its driving force. Based on a desire to alleviate the suffering of animals irrespective of profits, this group of society women established the Animal Welfare League of Victoria, and then the Lort Smith Animal Hospital. Staging fundraisers, fighting battles, and dealing with the intricacies of human relationships along the way, these inspiring women – supported by the kindness of strangers – ensured that the plight of animals was not forgotten during the struggling years of the Depression.

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A vivid desert odyssey; the falling woman travels through a haunting landscape of memory, myth and mental maps. Told in three voices – Stella, Estella and Estelle – this is an inspiring story drawn from childhood memories, imagined worlds and the pressing realities of daily life. The Falling Woman charts one woman’s journey into the heartland. It is a journey taken across the desert, into the heart of memory, and into the mythic heart, that place to which we return in times of crisis.

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Growing up in a rural working-class home, Maureen Craig rebels against her angry mother, the privileges of her favoured brother and the relentless conformity of 1950s Australia. University promises a new world both terrifying and exhilarating in its challenges. She explores her sexuality and sets out to make a place for herself in the world. Passionate, funny and heartbreaking, this remarkable novel traces a young woman’s turbulent coming of age.

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The Edinburgh Festival brings together artists from all over the world, and Cowrie is among them, telling stories and giving readings. But even Cowrie can’t anticipate the chemistry that will begin when a group of traditional storytellers sets off to the Orkney Islands with Ellen, to stay at her coastal family cottages. For Ellen turns out to be Morrigan, and Morrigan is a selkie, living in the sea and on land. As an ancient mystery unravels, Cowrie and Sasha must turn detective to discover the truth behind Morrigan and the song of the selkies.

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The poems in this collection are an evocative documentation of the harrowing experiences of a child living in a hostile and unhappy home. The reader is shown the pain, the bitterness and the mixed emotions that accompany the experiences of growing up in a family torn apart by domestic violence and alcoholism.

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Thirteen-year-old Avis confronts the limitations imposed on her at school. She has epilepsy and some of the teachers want to stop her participating in the sport she loves most. Susan Hawthorne captures the voice and longings of a child at the edge of self-realisation. This collection draws on the experience of epilepsy mixed with imagination, mythic consciousness and an intense realisation of life.

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To love in a language prised from my wishbone. To sing a landscape where village girls once burst the moon with giggles. To dance through the fattest eye of a rice-grain. To do all these in peace and war is the wish embodied in Merlinda Bobis’ poetry. From her epic poem Cantata of the Warrior Woman: Daragang Magayon to lyric reflections on longing, and finally to an erotic dance-drama, Bobis traces the cartography of desire and its intimacy with death.

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Cowrie boards a ship bound for Moruroa Atoll during the French nuclear tests. She is in for a rough ride. As international attention is focused on the Pacific and the environment, the stakes rise. She is joined by Sahara, a young peace activist from England and Marie-Louise, a French nuclear physicist. But can they be trusted? Can anyone be trusted? With sensuous writing and a deep knowledge of the traditions, the reader can feel the rock of the sea, taste the food, and fear the attacks on the peace flotilla as it approaches Moruroa Atoll. Dive into a luscious feast of language and imagery.

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When Margot Gorman finds a body in the women's toilets a tangle of mysteries opens up. Margot Gorman, ex-cop, is now a free agent, a triathlete and has the equivalent of perfect pitch in the sense of smell and, naturally, is a connoisseur of good wine. From murder and kidnap, drug dealing and gay bashing, to illegal mining and an underground network of cyberfeminists - the Solanacites - there are many skeins to be unravelled. A complex and intriguing novel that deals with the selfhood of women, it ranges from musings on the Amazons to a self-sufficient community in Australia's womenslands. There is mystery and philosophical enquiry in money, madness, motherhood and much more.

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The Silicon Tongue is centred on the life of London-born Alice who was brought to New Zealand as a servant in the 1930s. Tricked by the authorities into believing she was an orphan, Alice tells her story into the tape recorder of a mysterious oral historian and discloses family secrets of rape and adoption. She discovers a kinship with a teenage nethead called Pixel and learns that old women can fly in cyberspace along with the young. Meanwhile, Alice’s daughter Joy finds out that when it comes to family stories there is always more than one version of the truth.

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Molly Rose Moon dreamt of worms the night before she married Jimmy Brown in Tooting Bec. The young couple were on their way to Australia. When Molly agrees to go on a journey across hemispheres she’s looking for an escape from home. Once there she meets Marj. Fat Marj. Imago is a story of love and obsession, of seduction and transformations. The threading together of skins, of bodies. It’s a story of metamorphosis, taking and eating, larvae and pupae, the risks of stagnation. Possibilities of death.

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Set against the escalating violence of the last years of the Apartheid regime, Safe Houses tells the story of three families – the Sibiyas, the Singers, the Sterns – who are inextricably bound by love and hate, hope and betrayal. Ruth and Lola are drawn into the struggle against Apartheid, but feel marginal: it is difficult to find solutions when one is part of the problem. Can love and hope survive an evil political system that indiscriminately devours both the guilty and the innocent?

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I remember how you were, not how you are. We were we until we became you and I. Midori and u Cô are international university students tasting freedom from family for the first time. They discover Melbourne and each other. All is well until the tsunami that swamps their world...

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In a globalised world, megacorp publishing is all about numbers, about sameness, about following a formula based on the latest megasuccess. Each book is expected to pay for itself and all the externalities of publishing such as offices and CEO salaries. It means that books which take off slowly but have long lives, the books that change social norms, are less likely to be published. Independent publishers are seeking another way. A way of engagement with society and methods that reflect something important about the locale or the niche they inhabit. Independent and small publishers are like rare plants that pop up among the larger growth but add something different, perhaps they feed the soil, bring colour or scent into the world.

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This collection of imagist poems combines mythology, archaeology and translation. Susan Hawthorne draws on the history and prehistory of Rome and its neighbours to explore how the past is remembered. Under the guidance of Curatrix, Director of the Musæum Matricum, and Latin poet, Sulpicia, travellers Diana and Agnese are led through the mythic archives about wolves and sheep before attending an epoch-breaking party to which they are invited by Empress Livia.

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The book documents the fight that was put up by a group of poets, artists and ecologists to save the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling. It's a remarkable story being re-published in the midst of another attack on the Reef as oil tankers and an increasing number of coal freighters are plying its waters in the newly-built super ports.

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Transgenderism in the twenty-first century is patriarchy emblazoned in imperial form. At a time when supposedly enlightened attitudes are championed by the mainstream, philosopher and activist Heather Brunskell-Evans shows how, in plain view under the guise of liberalism, a regressive men’s rights movement is posing a massive threat to the human rights of women and children everywhere. This movement is transgender politics which, while spouting platitudes about equality, is in reality colonising and erasing the bodies, agency and autonomy of women and children, while asserting men’s rights to bodily intrusion into every social and personal space. The transgender agenda redefines diversity and inclusion utilising the language of victimhood. In a complete reversal of feminist gender critical analyses, sex and gender are redefined: identity is now called ‘innate’ (a ‘feeling’ located somewhere in the body) and biological sex is said to be socially constructed (and hence changeable). This ensures a lifetime of drug dependency for transitioners, thereby delivering vast profits for Big Pharma in a capitalist dream. Everyone, including every trans person, has the right to live freely without discrimination. But the transgender movement has been hijacked by misogynists who are appropriating and inverting the struggles of feminism to deliver an agenda devoid of feminist principles. In a chilling twist, when feminists critique the patriarchal status quo it is now they who are alleged to be extremists for not allowing men’s interests to control the political narrative. Institutions whose purpose is to defend human rights now interpret truth speech as hate speech, and endorse the no-platforming of women as ethical. This brave, truthful and eye-opening book does not shirk from the challenge of meeting the politics of liberalism and transgender rights head on. Everyone who cares about the future of women’s and children’s rights must read it.

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Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. Only a poet could make us hear the thundering whisper of insanity, the endless circling of the revolving door, the sheer practicality of whatever gets you through the night. Here are portraits of other people in wards filled with restless wanderers. In the end, it is humour, a thesaurus of monickers that enable the reader to emerge sadder, wiser, but not hopeless.

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After September 11, feminists around the world spoke out, wrote for newspapers, for email lists and for the Internet. But in the male-dominated mass media, it was hard to find feminist perspectives. This collection brings together women who discuss the connections between war, terrorism, fundamentalism, racism, global capitalism and male violence. From the USA to Afghanistan, from Pakistan to Palestine, from Australia to Europe they have deconstructed this story and retold it from a feminist perspective in a powerful indictment of current global politics. Contributors include Barbara Kingsolver and Ani DiFranco, Naomi Klein.

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The Lace Makers of Narsapur is a sensitive and groundbreaking study of women at the beginning of the process of globalisation. Maria Mies examines the way in which women are used to produce luxury goods for the Western market and simultaneously not counted as workers or producers in their fragmented workplaces. Instead they are defined as ‘non-working housewives’ and their work as ‘leisure-time activity’. The rates of pay are far below acceptable levels resulting in accelerating pauperisation and a rapid deterioration in their position in Indian society. The latest ‘economic boom’ in India was preceded by dispossession of farmers through the ‘green revolution’ and, alongside it, the dispossession of women, the lace makers of Narsapur in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

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Widowed after a long marriage, Dorelia MacCraith swaps the family home for a house with a tower, and there, raised above the run of daily life, sets out to rewrite the stories of old women poorly treated by literature. Throughout this winding story, Dorelia and the elderly artist Elizabeth Bunting are sustained by a friendship that reaches back to their years at art school, and bonded by the secrets of a six-month period when they painted together in France. The loneliness of not belonging, of being cut adrift by grief, betrayal, or old age, binds these twelve connected stories into a dazzling composite novel. Within its complex crossings and connections, young and old inhabit separate yet overlapping firmaments; grown children, though loved and loving, cannot imagine their parents’ young lives. For most, the past is not past, but exerts a magnetic pull, while future happiness hinges on retreat, or escape.

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From racialised police brutality to climate change, #MeToo, ‘trans rights,’ COVID-19, the prospect of nuclear war, and the prevalence of trauma—we are constantly bombarded with high stakes problems that we are expected to speak out about and act on. On closer inspection, the popular solutions to each of these problems aren’t easy to reconcile. Black Lives Matter activists demand prison abolition, while #MeToo feminists want rapists in jail—and while our objections to war and police brutality make us suspicious of state institutions in general, our responses to climate change and COVID-19 reinforce our dependency on them. Out of the Fog cuts through the confusion. RenÉe Gerlich suggests that readers move beyond feeling overwhelmed and emotionally manipulated.

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What was it like to live in Melbourne during the 2020-2021 lockdowns? Capturing the day-to-day struggles of lockdown, the daily news, Dan Andrews’ 11am morning press conferences, the tensions between Victorians and the rest of Australia, Trump’s chaotic America, the conspiracy theories that circulated and battling her own mental health, Sandy Jeffs takes us through the whirlwind of events in imaginative haiku poems. These became her sanity while the world spiralled into madness. First wave fear is back. Before an end was in sight now there is no end. Trying to make sense of an unravelling world that is downright mad. This is not only a book about the pandemic but also about political wins and political failures. From Dan Andrews to Donald Trump. Each day brings news that creates despair or joy: the pandemic numbers and the voting numbers side by side. And as the world is in the grip of COVID madness, sanity is found in poetry.

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What was it like to participate in the Women’s Liberation Movement? What made millions of women step forward from the 1960s onwards and join it in different ways? Many of the 56 women in this book were there. They describe how they have contributed in multitudinous ways across politics, the arts, health, education, environmentalism, economics and science and created wonderfully rebellious activism. And how they continue this activism today with determined grittiness. Here are women – all over 70 years of age – still railing against the patriarchal systemic oppression of women, still fighting back. “Don’t Call Me Sweetie,” “Never Waste a Good Crisis” and “Still Here, Still Clear and Still Lesbian” is some of what they want us to know. The contributors to Not Dead Yet have created new analyses with new language and new kinds of organisations always aware of the ways in which the system is stacked against us, particularly against radical feminists. But we persist. We share the revolutionary zest we have carried with us over many decades. There is history, there is subversion and there are many extraordinary acts of courage. The language is full of irony and wit – as well as deadly serious. The Women’s Liberation Movement has had a profound effect on the lives of millions of women and in turn those women have changed our world. But the struggle continues. May these riveting tales by the foremothers of the movement inspire young women readers. #NotDeadYet

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For the first time since he'd left the island he thought of the starlings massed at dusk in the winter trees behind the children's home. He remembered the rustle of their wings when they twisted in skeins over the fields, or swelled and contracted high above the cliffs, dark wave after dark wave, lifting and falling in a kind of dance. Sister Lucy had said it was a murmuration. He was still quite young, and he had thought the birds were showing him a sign, that there was something written in their fluid patterns. Lives merge and diverge; they soar and plunge, or come to rest in impenetrable silence. Erris Cleary's absence haunts the pages of this exquisite novella, a woman who complicates other lives yet confers unexpected blessings. Fly far, be free, urges Erris. Who can know why she smashes mirrors? Who can say why she does not heed her own advice? Among the sudden shifts and swings, the swerving flight paths taken, something hidden must be uncovered, something dark and rotten, even evil, which has masqueraded as normality. In the end it will be a writer's task to reclaim Erris, to bear witness, to sound in fiction the one true note that will crack the silence.

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the Muses have been sacked their role in the pantheon sold up for some new real estate venture When the Muses are sacked, what are we to do? The Muses who inspire poetry, astronomy, history and daily living bring their song and dance into present-day political struggles. These Muses are for rebellion. Susan Hawthorne’s poems span millennia of resistance by women. The earth itself is implicated. She writes about women's bodies, how they are used, abused and celebrated in birthing, in sexual pleasure, in grief, in imagining. She draws on stories from ancient and contemporary India, from Greece and Rome, through language, storytelling and translation. we embrace our double lives like actors and their alter egos some say śleṣa is unnatural I've heard the same said about us

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Parallax is a luscious story that enfolds you and demands immediate rereading the moment you finish, a story that surprises you and invites you to play with the patterns inside its paradoxes, a story whose characters will accompany you for the rest of your life.

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