Search results for ""Spinifex Press""

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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Carol Lefevre is an Adelaide-based writer whose book, The Happiness Glass, explores the imaginative terrain between essays and short fiction. The narrative takes us from remote NSW to New Zealand and England through a series of deeply affecting experiences of poverty, domestic violence, loneliness, infertility, adoption and grief. Her writing is sharp, moving, insightful and beautifully poetic. “Burning With Madame Bovary” records the tentative emergence of a writer, while the remaining essays explore the complex griefs of homesickness, inter-country adoption, and family estrangement. The fictional character Lily Brennan appears at points from childhood to old age, allowing the writer to navigate some of the problems of autobiographical writing, while adding layers of meaning to the unfolding life

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Cheryl Adam's Lillian's Eden takes the reader on a journey through rural post-war life in the midst of a family attempting to survive on a pittance. Lillian is confronted by her impecunious, philandering and violent husband but agrees to move from the farm that she has built up from scratch to the coastal town of Eden to look after Aunt Maggie. Aunt Maggie is a wonderfully drawn eccentric character but Lillian has to work out just how to make this relationship work. Cheryl Adam's novel reminds us of Ruth Park and Kylie Tennant with its raw richness.

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Ann Hannah was an ordinary, no-nonsense, practical woman. While a constant and caring presence in the life of her granddaughter Betty McLellan, she remained emotionally distant. In an effort to understand her grandmother, Betty has used Ann Hannah’s everyday expressions as a starting point to uncover the truth about her life. These words and phrases, heard countless times during Betty’s childhood, are the clues to a life that, like those of many working-class women in the early 1900s, was fraught with challenges and difficulties and ignored by historians. What did Ann Hannah mean when she said that she was forced to migrate to Australia from England in the 1920s? Why did she remember her husband as a ‘wickid’ man? How did she cope with the death of those close to her, including her own son? How did she manage to overcome the struggles and disappointments that punctuated her life? Written with a sharp feminist consciousness that displays both compassion and intellect, this astute psychological biography tells the story of a resilient woman who, when placed in circumstances beyond her control, managed to live a good life. It provides valuable insight into the lives of many (un)remarkable women whose lives may have gone unnoticed but whose experiences shed so much light on the realities faced by women throughout the 1900s.

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‘Misogyny Re-loaded’ is an explosive manifesto against the resurgent sexual fascism of the new world order. By exposing the casual acceptance of snuff pornography in ‘gore’ culture through to the framing of rape as slapstick, Abigail Bray links the celebration of sexual sadism to the rise of an authoritarian culture of militarised violence. Arguing that a meaningful collective resistance has been scattered by the mass destruction of genuine social and economic security for ordinary women, Misogyny Re-loaded presents a scathing critique of the political drool of mainstream billionaire-friendly feminism.

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Giti Thadani has been driving her jeep around India for fifteen years. Blessed with a rare historical sensibility, including an eye for architectural detail, she ventures off-road in search of lost temples, sculptures and cosmological sites from Madhya Pradesh to Kanyakumari to Gujarat. One thought, one reflection leads to another as she contemplates the cultures and mythologies that produced these marvels, and the more recent cultures and mythologies that have left them to neglect and desecration. Her inner and outer journeys unfold each other.

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Julie is getting her life back together after the tragedy that destroyed her family. She has a passion for surfing, and is making new friends and finally starting to feel like she belongs. But when her brother Toby wants to leave Sydney and return to the bush to live, and Aunt Jean becomes unwell, Julie fears she is losing what’s left of her family, and wonders if she is being punished for being happy. While Julie continues to be besieged with dramas, she also finds an inner strength, and vows to stop crying and make this her laughing year.

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Modewarre is the indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories - her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. It sweeps its subjects along in a flow of striking images and strong feelings, these buoyed by an intelligent sense of poetic structure and modulated by a sometimes ironic eye.

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Zest for Life draws on lesbians’ experiences of menopause to highlight how lesbians, particularly at midlife, are invisibilised in society at large. Many writers and researchers have critically analysed the medical construction of menopause, yet even they fail to ask whether the issues are the same for lesbians. Zest for Life includes the voices of lesbians who tell us that despite lesbian invisibility and homophobia, many are resisting current standards that exclude them. The experiences of these women challenge negative, stereotypical views of menopause and add a new positive dimension to the presently narrow and medicalised view of women at midlife. An important uplifting book both for lesbians and heterosexual women as well as health professionals which shows that menopause need not be a time of despair.

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Senior Detective Margot Gorman has been assigned to watch over a raving woman in an asylum. What could a madwoman know? And Peter, the sportsman, can he become a warrior in Vietnam? With a deft hand, the author challenges the traditional stereotypes of a crime novel with questions of politics, patriarchy, sanity and murder. First published in 1991, Still Murder was widely praised by reviewers for being a ‘cross-over’ novel, bringing together literary and crime styles of writing and narrative. This feminist classic edition has an introduction by Marion Campbell and an Afterword by the author.

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An illuminating story of motherhood, Fear of Food is Carol Bacchi's account of the first two years of her son's life. She battles his rejection of food, encounters dismissive health professionals, and struggles with sleep deprivation and the uncertainties of doing it alone.

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Poppy Sinclair is approaching fifty, and mostly loves her life; teaching young children, living in her Auckland home, intimately connected to family and friends. After a fairytale romance with Kate ends tragically, she reshapes her life to living alone. Still, you can't shut out love, and with the arrival of a surprise visitor, anything can happen. An evocative look like at life and love, Poppy's Progress is a delightful story of a woman coming to terms with loss and discovering that you can be surprised, even by those you are closest to.

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Rose Zwi’s stories embrace people from different countries and cultures drawn together by a common humanity. Her characters range from a political activist who is house-arrested, to the child of immigrant parents caught between two cultures; from a city-educated woman returning to the arid homeland of her tribal grandfather, to a Rabbi and his wife in an East European shtetl; from a solitary dingo in a small Australian town, pursued to its inevitable end to a farmer obsessed with returning his land to its natural state.

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Reading 'Body/Landscape Journals' is like falling through a fault-line, as we respond to poesis, both as poetry and as thought creation. From Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp and interactions with women across Australia, Margaret Somerville conjures up the landscape inhabited by both Indigenous and white women in the places they call home: the mountains, the desert, the tropics. A thoughtful challenge of all that we think, concluding with reflections on the architecture of love.

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Laurene Kelly’s first young adult novel introduces us to fourteen-year-old Julie, who is struggling with a terrible home life, but could never imagine the horror that is about to destroy her family forever. She dreams of a new life, away from her abusive father, but when her mother doesn’t arrive to meet Julie and her brother Toby after school as planned, her hopes are shattered. She is told there was an accident, but something more is wrong…

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When Josie is sent to Digger Town to conduct her doctoral research, she knows it is a strange place with a strange history. There, the people use no modern technologies, wear nineteenth-century clothing, drive nothing faster than a horse-and-cart, and hand-make all their goods. Even so, she is not prepared for what she finds. An intriguing tale of secrecy, politics and religious and racial intolerance.

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A moving photo-story of four-year-old Kadi, subjected to female genital mutilation in accordance with the traditions of her community.

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Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is based on the relationship between mind, body and emotions. Chinese Medicine for Women takes a common-sense approach to women's health based on these principles. A practitioner of shiatsu therapy, acupuncturist and TCM herbalist, Bronwyn Whitlocke outlines the practices and applications for women's health, including stress, diet and lifestyle. There are chapters on menstruation, pregnancy, menopause and infertility, as well as on migraines, colds, obesity and depression. Bronwyn Whitlocke is also the author of Shiatsu Therapy for Pregnancy.

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Lin Van Hek writes about the poetry of aunties in a novel that is at once thrilling and filled with the memories of wilful women. When Eadie Wilt disappears during the flood, everyone thinks she has drowned. But Siddy Church's granddaughter has more life to live in a household filled with stories and larger-than-life characters.

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Lesbians are often told that we have no culture, that we have no history, and yet lesbians are always rediscovering hidden histories, literary traditions, codes and behaviours that have been obscured, obliterated or proclaimed irrelevant. Sybil: The Glide of Her Tongue challenges that version of history. Gillian Hanscombe has written an exhilarating and richly textured collection of poems.

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‘You can never be too thin or too rich,’ said Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. But Francesca Miles, independent feminist detective, disagrees. When one of the richest men in Sydney is found dead in his penthouse, she teams up with Inspector Joe Barnaby in a mystery that follows the trials and tribulations of a family that should have everything that money can buy. A thoroughly riveting read.

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For too long the global sex industry and its vested interests have dominated the prostitution debate repeating the same old line that ‘sex work’ is just like any job. In large sections of the media, academia, public policy, government and the law, the sex industry has had its way. Prostitution Narratives refutes the lies and debunks the myths spread by the industry through the lived experiences of women who have survived prostitution. These disturbing stories give voice to formerly prostituted women who explain why they entered the sex trade. They bravely and courageously recount their intimate experiences of harm and humiliation at the hands of sex buyers, pimps and traffickers and reveal their escape and emergence as survivors. . Essential reading for Women’s Studies.

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Sydney, Milsons Point, 1926. Entire streets are being demolished for the building of the Harbour Bridge. Ellis Gilbey, landlady by day, gardening writer by night, is set to lose everything. Only the faith in the book she’s writing, and hopes for a garden of her own, stave off despair. As the tight-knit community splinters and her familiar world crumbles, Ellis relives her escape to the city at sixteen, landing in the unlikely care of self-styled theosophist Minerva Stranks. When artist Rennie Howarth knocks on her door seeking refuge from a stifling upper-class life and an abusive husband, Ellis glimpses a chance to fulfil her dreams. The future looms uncertain while the past stays uncannily in pursuit.

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1920, deep in the New Zealand bush, a settlement of Christian fundamentalists live a life of austerity and isolation. It is a place where there is little space for compassion, particularly for the women who can never rid themselves of Eve’s original sin. The elders rule over the women, children and young men, meting out punishments for transgressions as ordinary as self-reflection. Sisters Juno and Hannah have grown up in the community, but when a stranger washes up on the river bank and Hannah goes to his aid, she finds herself accused of necromancy. The girls flee but are quickly forced to accept help. Hannah, unsure who is friend or foe, finds herself dependent upon and attracted to the man into whose lips she breathed life. Juno and Hannah is a remarkable novella. The vivid New Zealand landscape reflects the journey of the sisters with its bounty of beauty and resources but also with its scars, wrought during the early days of colonisation.

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They call them ‘women of love,’ but the lyrical beauty of the term has a hidden dark side: a workforce of very young girls tasked with feeding their families by offering up their bodies for sale. The girls belong to the Nat which includes some of India’s very poorest. For centuries, the Nat men have sent their daughters, sisters, and wives into sex trafficking. Baby girls are welcome arrivals in these towns of love—everyone knows that one day, they will be the breadwinners. As a Nat, you are untouchable, despised by Indian society. How would anyone dare break free of this legacy of prostitution, when it also would mean being shunned by your entire family?

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When two women and a dog set off on a holiday they have no inkling of what’s to come. They wake to find the river has crept up silently during the night. Trapped by floodwater, they devise escape routes only to be faced with more obstacles at every turn. Only the dog remains calm. This novella grips you with its language, its pace, its anxieties.

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From fishing villages in India to the tropics of North Queensland, the Adani company is building coal mines at the very time that people are demanding action on climate change. Why? Adani is planning to build Australia’s largest coal mine and the world’s largest coal terminal. Why, asks Lindsay Simpson, would an Australian Prime Minister, a State Premier and a handful of regional mayors back such a project, risking the future of the Great Barrier Reef and the vast underground water reservoirs in the Galilee Basin? Lindsay Simpson’s personal story reveals the truth behind this controversy. As a tourist operator in the Whitsunday Islands, she is determined to expose the contribution of coal mines to global warming, which is threatening the world’s largest living organism – the Great Barrier Reef – with extinction. With other activists, she travels from Adani’s Indian headquarters to Parliament House in Canberra to lobby politicians, demand answers, and question motivations.She investigates the power of the social movement, Stop Adani, which has captured the public imagination, and sheds light on the workings of the coal industry and its alliances with government. In this astute analysis Lindsay Simpson argues that while Adani might have gained the political will to build the mine, it has never gained the social will of the people. So will the people win this battle over a coal mine?

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Fish-Hair Woman is a novel of many rooms running between love and war. In 1987 the Philippine government fights a total war against communist insurgency. The village of Iraya is militarised. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped. With her twelve-metre hair, Estrella the Fish-Hair Woman trawls the corpses from the water, which now tastes of lemongrass. She falls in love with the visiting Australian writer Tony McIntyre who disappears in the conflict.

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In 1998, Sweden passed ground-breaking legislation criminalizing the purchase of sexual services which sought to curb demand and support women exiting the sex industry. Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution—and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain—Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the ‘sex work’ scenario. Trade unions aren’t trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented from a woman’s point of view. The men who buy sex are left out. Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called child trafficking?

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An award-winner when first published, this book has become a classic text for health activists and feminists interested in the complexities of how drugs are developed, marketed and sold to women around the world. In this book the authors review the unusual history of the French abortion pill, RU 486 (mifepristone). They scrutinize the science and politics from inception through to its use on women.

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Valence. Considering war through poetry and theory is a powerful rage against the brutality and greed of war; against the particular suffering of women in war; against our indifference but more importantly, our sense of powerless in the face of wars most of us neither support nor would ever instigate. Here is a poet of moral conscience in the fine tradition of Adrienne Rich; a poet writing across boundaries; striving with each form to elucidate, illuminate, change.

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Maria Mies’ achievements include developing groundbreaking praxis and theory around the concept of “housewifisation”, the violence of colonisation and profound writings about ecofeminism. She fights the Multilateral Agreement of Investment, she fights the General Agreement on Trade in Services, she fights against the patenting of life and tackles reproductive and genetic engineering as well as food security, but she never gives up hope that there is an alternative to present day injustice and exploitation; that “the good life” is possible.

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Janice Raymond offers a vision of female friendship that is as exhilarating as it is controversial. In this feminist classic, she explores the many manifestations of friendship between women including the Greek hetairai, the sisterhood of medieval nuns and the marriage resisters of China. Thousands of women have created their own communities and destinies through friendship. She also examines the contemporary women's movement and its networks and friendships – as well as the forces operating against friendship between women. A tough and clear-sighted analysis, and a book to read again and again.

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Indigenous women from across the Pacific - Hawai'i, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Marianas, Guam, Belau, Fiji, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Te Ao Maohi/Tahiti Polynesia - have a voice in this book. For most of the world, the tiny island nations of the Pacific are barely known, but the events that have taken place in those nations during the twentieth century have global consequences. Without understanding that history, the world will be doomed to repeat those mistakes.

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The first anthology of Australian women’s speculative fiction, magic realism and fantasy A pregnant spaceman. A witch. A knight-errant princess. The nuns of St Mary Magdalene. A time-traveller. Love and lyrebirds. Dreams and poetry. Philosophy. The creation of the universe. Two very different angels. Were-marsupials...

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Robin Morgan’s latest collection is a tour-de force: poetry that thrills the intellect and stirs the emotions. Robin shares her joys and intimacies which take centre stage and laments ‘the ringmaster’s desertion’ as death hovers in the wings and aging unfolds, while "laughing at the pain / through the gridlocked traffic in my brain". Light and shadow, sleep and wakefulness, holding tight and letting go, regret and contentment, order and chaos, battle it out simultaneously through the interplanetary and domestic worlds.

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As a young unmarried mother in the 1960s, Maureen faces stifling disapproval and condemnation from mainstream society. Desperate to create a new life for herself and her baby, she rekindles an old romance and moves to South Africa under Apartheid. But her precarious journey to Africa’s Eden is not the paradise she anticipated. Cultures smash against each other, family relationships are strained, there is death and despair, violence and injustice. But there is also humour, fun, family and friendship, as Maureen has to decide where her future lies. Is it in Africa or back home in distant Eden, in her Australian homeland?

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Many feminists are concerned about the way transgender ideology naturalizes patriarchal views of sex stereotypes, and encourages transition as a way of attempting to escape misogyny. In this brave and thoughtful book, Max Robinson goes beyond the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the transition she underwent and takes us through the processes that led her, first, to transition in an attempt to get relief from her distress, and then to detransition, as she discovered feminist thought and community. The author makes a case for a world in which all medical interventions for the purpose of assimilation are open to criticism. This book is a far-reaching discussion of women’s struggles to survive under patriarchy, which draws upon a legacy of radical and lesbian feminist ideas to arrive at conclusions. Robinson’s bold discussion of both transition and detransition is meant to provoke a much-needed conversation about who benefits from transgender medicine and who has to bear the hidden cost of these interventions.

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How did we move so far from love that a mother's grief became the vehicle with which to punish her? Losing a baby during childbirth is one of the most heartbreaking things imaginable. But to then be accused of causing that death is nothing short of soul-destroying. Janet Fraser's story shows what happens when private grief is turned into a public accusation against a woman who dared to exercise choice about how and were she gave birth. This sobering book demonstrates the penalties dished out to women who dare to question medical orthodoxy and to make decisions for themselves about their own bodies. When things go wrong in a hospital, it is seen as unavoidable, and no one is to blame, as the medical institutions are seen as the arbiters of decision-making. The layers of bureaucracy protect insiders. Yet if a baby dies in a home birth, the full weight of the law comes down upon the woman who dared to give birth outside a hospital. Janet Fraser is that woman and this is her story of injustice, loss and grief. This painful yet enlightening book shows that the patriarchy still wrestles for the control of women and their bodies -and punishes them with every tool in the legal handbook when they dare to contest the view that their bodies are public property.

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A memoir and an examination of the politics of disability. Fiona Place describes the pressure from medical institutions to undergo screening during pregnancy and the traumatic nature and assumptions that a child with Trisomy 21 should not live, even though people with Down syndrome do live rich and productive lives. Fiona's son, Fraser, has become an artist and his prize-winning paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Sydney and Canberra. How does a mother get from the grieving silence of the birthing room through the horrified comments of other mothers to the applause at gallery openings? This is a story of courage, love and commitment to the idea that all people, including those who are 'less than perfect', have a right to be welcomed into this increasingly imperfect world.

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In a dawn raid, Kate is arrested. She is imprisoned, beaten, kept awake and tortured. She has no idea what has happened to her partner, Mercedes. The uncertainty plagues her. It is as if she has no history. Trying to retain her sense of self in a swirling psychic state, she invents stories. And she remembers stories of her mother, her grandmothers and aunts, the rich mythic traditions of Greece. She rearranges them and writes poems in her head. After Kate’s death, her niece, Desi, is going through boxes of papers, trying to make sense of her aunt’s life. Desi travels to South America and unlocks the history of Mercedes' family: a history of political torture, disappearance and escape. Susan Hawthorne’s dark story uncovers the hidden histories of organised violence against lesbians. She traces fear and uncertainty, and finds a narrative of resilience created through the writing of poems. The author asks: how do we pass on stories hidden by both shame and resistance to shame? A novel that is poetic and terrifying.

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