Search results for ""spinifex press""
Spinifex Press Face to Face
When a small community agency, the Preston Creative Living Centre embarked upon the risky and exciting venture of engaging local people in artistic programs, it became a thriving centre for performances of theatre, music, circus, dance, visual arts, weaving and the crossover between factory production and artwork. The authors aim to inspire the reader, and give practical support in the development and administration of exciting, viable and fruitful community art. Beginning with a philosophy that informs decision-making and confronting the nitty-gritty of daily practice. A powerful discussion of the value of community arts and guide to creating partnerships between organisations, artists and communities to create community-based art.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Parachute Silk: Friends, Food, Passion. A Novel in Letters
A novel in two voices, 'Parachute Silk' consists of letters between two women friends who discuss in depth their feelings and share their lives by corresponding. They send poems, letters and long explanations and stories of their lives. This is a beautifully written novel with a deft touch. The language sings, even as the women come to grips with issues around sexuality, children and the exigencies of an unplanned life.
£14.95
Spinifex Press A Girl's Best Friend
The best-selling book that started the series exploring the significance of animals in women’s lives. Eighty-six women and girls from all across the globe contributed to this beautiful collection of stories, letters, poems and photographs, sharing the funny, sad and amazing tales of their relationships with dogs. Readers will cry and laugh as they enjoy this homage to their best friends: dogs they’ve grown up with; dogs with incredible character; dogs who’ve changed – even saved – women’s lives.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Fedora Walks
In the nineteenth century Charles Dickens wrote his novels as serials; in the late twentieth century Merrilee Moss conjures up a new kind of serial fiction: of ghosts, of crime, of satire and of lesbian desire. When the ghostly Fedora interrupts Julie Barnard’s morning coffee in Brunswick Street, Julie’s life is set to change. An out-of-work PI, Julie is seduced by Fedora’s French accent and flamboyant hats, but soon discovers that wearing beautiful hats is a dangerous activity.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Thriller and Me
Angelica’s twelve – and no angel, as she says herself. But does she deserve this crazy situation? Why? Why?Why? she punches on the keys of the computer. Why has Dad gone? Why has Mum flipped her lid? And why does that dog howl every night? Doesn’t anyone care? In Thriller and Me, Angelica sets off with Beth and try-hard Max to find out the truth. She learns heaps: about the RSPCA, back lanes, computers, gays, writing. She realises that understanding is about as close to the truth as you can get. And that nobody’s an angel.
£9.95
Spinifex Press C-Word , The: A Story about the Effects of Cancer
The C-Word is an honest and forthright account of cancer. It deals with the loneliness the partner of a sufferer faces, the gruelling treatments of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and the terror and calm of facing death. A story of a powerful lesbian partnership, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of community.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Travelling Alone /Ruby Camp
Ruby Camp: A Snowy River Series follows the ridges and valleys of an extraordinary wilderness area, its life affected by humans. From the long habitations of Indigenous peoples, to the white settlers and this solitary woman exploring the depths of land and self. Travelling Alone Together: In the footsteps of Edward John Eyre is a meditation on three journeys across the Nullabor. Landscape and time are interwoven as Miriel Lenore explores our myths.
£11.95
Spinifex Press Love Upon the Chopping Board
Marou and Claire met at a bar in Tokyo. Separated by seventeen years in age, by their cultural origins and by the requirements of visas, they have managed to maintain their relationship through these vicissitudes. Autobiography, duography, love story, cross-cultural reflections and lesbian history, Love Upon the Chopping Board explores the personal and political dimension of lesbianism in Japan and Australia.
£12.95
Spinifex Press Wee Girls: Women Writing from an Irish Persective
A moving and often amusing collection of fiction, poetry and autobiography by top-selling and award-winning authors. Tales of blood and bloodlines – Irish grandmothers, ma’s and da’s, the Famine and the Troubles. Whatever the form, these are the stories, the music, the whispering dreams and the voices that ache to be heard. There is wildness and daring in these voices. They call up legions out of the sea and set fires alight. They hang out over garden fences, move restlessly, are dotey, beaming, weeping, powerful.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Building Babel
Every retelling of a myth is a reworking of it. Every hearing or reading of a myth is a recreation of it. It is only when we engage with a myth that it resonates, becomes charged and recharged with meaning. And so it is in Building Babel, a book that re-engages with myth through the cyberworld, where worlds intersect and are transformed.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Body in Time / Nervous Arcs
Two poets known for delving into history and myth turn their attention to inner spaces, to time and the body's arcs. Jordie Albiston voices the unspoken languages of the body unearthing the complexity of memory, of desire and the art of the corporeal. Diane Fahey revisits the travelling body as it inhales memories of architecture and landscape. Scouring the body and the land for mines of trauma and of knowledge hard-won.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed
Since the 1960s radical feminists have worked to articulate a vision of the world in which all women are safe and are acknowledged as human beings in their own right. Their projects include Take Back the Night campaigns, establishing women’s refuges, rape crisis centres, health centres, organising against pornography and developing courses in Women’s Studies. The richness of the practice and the theory of radical feminism is often misrepresented or unknown. Radically Speaking tells this important story.
£19.99
Spinifex Press The Iron Mouth
The first problem is the return of the nightmare. Elena dreams of a white horse lying dead in a river; a mare with a huge pale wound in her side. She lies half out of the water, her wound washed clean and cold by the moving current. Elena attempts to call out the mare’s name but her throat is frozen with grief. Khryse is writing a film script based on The Iliad. As the script unfolds, some of the lives around her also unravel. Khryse notices the refracting Homeric world on the border between the modern city and its seafront. Narratives of death, betrayal and glory are entangled in lives disrupted by violence, love, sex and obsession.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Cowrie
Cowrie travels to Hawaii and as she circles the island in an old pick-up truck we discover the tokens of her heritage. Sensual and sexual language brings the earth to life, and Cowrie too as she tests the limits of her endurance and explores her erotic connection with the earth. Island life erupts through the descriptions and you can taste the tropical fruit, the fish cooked in banana leaves and coconut, and smell the sweet fresh ginger.
£14.95
Spinifex Press The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution
Other work by the author includes "Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution" and "The Spinster and Her Enemies".
£17.95
Spinifex Press Perverse Serenity
What happens when an Australian feminist falls in love with an Irish monk? Robyn Rowland travelled to Ireland hoping to delve into her family's history. She circles the country, driving its roads in search of something more. What she finds is risk, uncertainty, clarity and turbulence. Is this love wasted, dry and juiceless? Or is the tearing what love should be all about? In poems that soar and wreck themselves at the base of cliffs, Robyn Rowland takes us into a raw and exultant world.
£10.95
Spinifex Press Nattering on The Net
Is it true that women use technology, but that men fall in love with it? What are the effects of electronic networks, of cyber-relationships on class, race and gender boundaries? Dale Spender reveals that men are writing the road rules for the superhighway and subjecting women to new forms of harassment, virtual violence and data rape. But she also conveys her sheer delight in these new technologies arguing that it is creating unimaginable opportunities in education and authoring.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Adoption Deception: A personal and professional journey
What is it like to be adopted, have your identity changed and never feel quite at home in your new family, despite being loved? What is it like to become a social worker and be faced with the challenges and consequences of other adoptions every day? What is it like to hear the moving National Apology for Forced Adoptions by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2013 only to be faced a few months later by a new prime minister intent on forgetting all the lessons learnt and championing a deregulated parent-centred market-driven adoption industry? Penny Mackieson takes us on her journey with the unique perspective of both the adopted person and a professional who worked in intercountry adoption for over a decade. She unravels the complexity, debunks the myths, analyses the policies and raises important questions about the ethical and human rights dilemmas in adoption.Adoption Deception: A personal and professional journey is a passionate, heart-wrenching and unflinchingly honest account of one woman’s life as an adopted person and her campaign for change. The author presents a compelling argument for Permanent Care instead of adoption for vulnerable children unable to be raised by their families.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Surviving Peace: A Political Memoir
How do you pick up the pieces after your life is shattered by war? How do you continue living when your country no longer exists, your language is no longer spoken and your family is divided, not just by distance but by politics too? What happens when your old identity is taken from you and a new one imposed, one that you never asked for? When Olivera Simić was seven years old, President Tito died. Old divisions re-emerged as bitter ethnic conflicts unfolded. War arrived in 1992. People were no longer Yugoslavs but Serbs, Croatians, Bosniaks. Old friends became enemies overnight. In this heartfelt account of life before, during and after the Bosnian War and the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Simić talks of her transition from peace to war and back again. She shows how she found the determination to build a new life when the old one was irretrievable.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution
The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is remembered as a time of great freedom for women. But did the sexual revolution have the same goals as the Women’s Liberation Movement? Was it truly liberation for women or just another insidious form of oppression? In this provocative book, Sheila Jeffreys argues that sexual freedom sometimes directly opposed actual freedom for women. Anticlimax traces sexual mores and attitudes from the 1950s to the 1990s, exploring the nature of both straight and gay relationships and offering original and compelling commentary on Lolita, Naked Lunch, The Joy of Sex, the Masters/Johnson report, and other representations in the literature on sexuality. At the root of sexual liberation, Sheila Jeffreys finds an increasing eroticisation of power differences within heterosexual, lesbian and gay communities. Her alternative vision of sexual relations based on equality is a major statement in the debates over sex and violence, that remain relevant in discussions over SlutWalk, sexualisation of girls and the pervasiveness of porn culture.
£17.95
Spinifex Press A Handwritten Modern Classic
In the tradition of Gertrude Stein, Finola Moorhead set about writing A Handwritten Modern Classic in 1977. The result is musings and criticisms on protestors clashing with police over freeways, political change, conservatism, Malcolm Fraser, what love can do for you, and whether the old hate the young. With discussions on the politics of suicide and unshaven armpits, one of Australia’s most intriguing experimental writers has set her thoughts to writing.
£14.95
Spinifex Press From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology
If the human being is allowed to be genetically manipulated and made by artificial means in the laboratory in an unstoppable crescendo of experimentation, what will be left to defend? This book is a radical critique of gender ideology and transhuman design. Silvia Guerini shows how the TQ+ rights agenda is being pushed by eugenicist capitalist technocrats at the top of Big Business, Big Philanthropy, Big Tech and Big Pharma companies. She argues that dissociation from our sexed bodies leads to dissociation from reality, with the human body transformed into a permanent construction site besieged by synthetic and artificial interventions. Erasure of the material dimension of bodies and sexual difference is an erasure of women. She explains how fundamental struggles such as the fight against genetic engineering and the fight against artificial reproduction can only advance in conjunction with an opposition to gender ideology. By linking ‘gender identity’ to the genetic modification of bodies, she warns that humanity itself is at risk of becoming a synthetic life form with synthetic emotions within a virtual, fluid, deconstructed metaverse. Today, being revolutionary means preserving everything that makes us human. It means defending the living world and nature as entities to be respected, not as parts that can be broken down and redesigned in a laboratory world. The idea of the ‘neutral’ body and body modification pave the way for the construction of the post-human cyborg and the genetic engineering of bodies. Is the last bioethical barrier about to be breached to give way to transhumanist demands? And at what cost?
£19.17
Spinifex Press Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
In this blisteringly persuasive and piercingly intelligent book, Sheila Jeffreys argues that women live under penile imperialism, a regime in which men are assumed to have a ‘sex right’ of access to the bodies of women and girls. She reasons that the ‘sexual revolution’ that began in the 1960s unleashed an explicit male sexual liberation and that even now, under current laws and cultural mores, women do not have the right to self-determination in relation to their bodies. Sheila Jeffreys argues that the exercise of the male sex right has mainstreamed misogynist attitudes and so-called sexual freedom has meant the freedom of men to use women and children with impunity. The power dynamics of sex, rather than being eliminated, has been eroticised, supported by state regulations and structures that have further entrenched male domination. And while men’s sexual fetishisms such as BDSM and transvestism have been normalised, women now have to fight as their spaces are being erased and their voices silenced in a faux inclusivity that has ‘naturalised’ sexual harassment. Sheila Jeffreys contends that women’s human rights are profoundly harmed and sexual violence is used more than ever to enforce social control of women. This is a sobering and brilliant analysis of the modern predicament of women that is impossible to ignore.
£20.66
Spinifex Press On the Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Woman
A new definition of woman has taken hold in Western societies. Instead of a matter of biology and material reality, we are told it is an identity. Anyone who declares herself to be a woman is a woman; the body has henceforth become irrelevant. Gender, we are told, is a spectrum, and it resides in the mind. In countries such as Norway, Canada, Argentina, and Australia, laws have been enacted that give anyone the right to change his or her legal sex, irrespective of whether the person has had a medical procedure. At the same time, the industry for gender reassignment surgery is growing at an unprecedented pace. Seven out of 10 teenagers who seek treatment are now girls. The new definition of sex has been hailed as progressive. But is it really? And is it new? In this groundbreaking book, Swedish feminist and Marxist author Kajsa Ekis Ekman traces the ideological roots of this new definition.
£20.66
Spinifex Press The Kindness of Birds
An oriole sings to a dying father. A bleeding-heart dove saves the day. A crow wakes a woman’s resolve. Owls help a boy endure isolation. Cockatoos attend the laying of the dead. Always there are birds in these linked stories that pay homage to kindness amidst loss, grief, discord and displacement, from Australia to the Philippines, across cultures and species. When we encounter that snag in the breath, that shadow of a wing, we hope to remember kindness. Kindness cannot self-isolate. It moves both ways and all ways, like breath.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Listen To Ngarrindjeri Women Speaking: Kungun Ngarrindjeri Miminar Yunnan
When the Ngarrindjeri women of South Australia asked Diane Bell if she would work with them in the running of some workshops to develop a booklet about culture and governance, none of them realised quite where it would take them. This book is the result. It has developed from a booklet to a book that outlines their visions for the future. A future in which their culture is respected, their stories heard, their laws carried out.
£17.95
Spinifex Press The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: Stories from Around the World
Around the world, people looked to the skies to tell them when to sow and harvest their crops, and when the rains would come. The ‘sailing stars’ have guided explorers and endless migrations of people. In Old Europe, among the Ainu of Japan and in Indigenous Australia the Pleiades were associated with water and birds. They become Oceanids, Ice Maidens, Water Girls and the Subaru. The Parthenon in Athens, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and the Mayan Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, are all said to be aligned with the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades will amaze and awe you, and above all will remind you that all of humanity shares the night skies.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Trauma Trails: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia
In this ground-breaking book, Judy Atkinson skilfully and sensitively takes readers into the depths of sadness and despair and, at the same time, raises us to the heights of celebration and hope. She presents a disturbing account of the trauma suffered by Australia's Indigenous people and the resultant geographic and generational 'trauma trails' spread throughout the Country. Then, through the use of a culturally appropriate research approach called Dadirri: Listening to one another, Judy presents and analyses the stories of a number of Indigenous people. From her analysis of these 'stories of pain, stories of healing', she is able to point both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous readers in the direction of change and healing.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Zelda
Our house was a single-fronted cottage in the slum area of Carlton. There were no distinctive features to differentiate it from most of the small cottages ... Zelda D'Aprano, a working-class woman at the forefront of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia, shows in her autobiography the same raw spirit she evidenced when chaining herself to the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne to protest unequal pay on 21 October 1969. The life of a remarkable woman who often battled alone for what women today take for granted. Zelda is a moving, down-to-earth recounting of the past, an insightful criticism of how society is structured and reminds us of the exuberance of the Women's Liberation Movement.
£11.95
Spinifex Press Accidents of Composition
The eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry. After four novels, Merlinda offers seventy-six poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But in between, the poet hopes: ‘there could be accidents / of kindness here.’
£13.95
Spinifex Press In In Defence of Separatism
In Defence of Separatism is a timely book. When it was first written in 1976, although it was an important subject of conversation among many feminists it was not welcomed by academics or publishers. When a political group wants to strategise so that its members can arrive at agreed-on political tactics and ideas, they call for, and create, separate spaces. These might be in coffee shops, in community centres, in one another's homes or in semi-public spaces such as workers clubs, even cinemas. When the proletariat was rebelling, they did not ask the capitalists and aristocracy to join them (even if a few did); when the civil rights movement started it was not thanks to the ideas and politics of white people (even though some whites joined to support the cause); when the women's liberation movement sprang into life, it was women joining together to fight against their oppression. The difference is that women are supposed to love men. Through careful argument, Susan Hawthorne takes us through the ideas which are central to her argument. She analyses the nature of power, oppression, domination and institutions and applies these to heterosexuality, rape and romantic love. She concludes with a call for women, all women no matter their sexuality, to have separate spaces so they can work together to change the world and end patriarchy. This 2019 edition includes a Preface, Afterword and additional commentary in italicised footnotes that bring the reader up to date on changes, developments and controversies in feminist theory.
£12.95
Spinifex Press Truth Abandoned
£17.95
Spinifex Press Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined
In Not Sacred, Not Squaws, Cherry Smiley analyses colonization and proposes a decolonized feminism enlivened by Indigenous feminist theory. Building on the work of grassroots radical feminist theorists, Cherry Smiley outlines a female-centered theory of colonization and describes the historical and contemporary landscape in which male violence against Indigenous women in Canada and New Zealand is the norm. She calls out ‘sex work’ as a patriarchal colonizing practice and a form of male violence against women. Questioning her own uncritical acceptance of the historical social and political status of Indigenous women in Canada – which she now recognizes as male-centred Indigenous theorizing – she examines the roles of culture and tradition in the oppression of Indigenous women and constructs an alternative decolonizing feminist methodology. This book is a refreshing feminist contemporary challenge to the patriarchal ideology that governs our world and a vigorous and irreverent defence against the attempts to silence Indigenous radical feminists.
£20.66
Spinifex Press Body Shell Girl
Body Shell Girl is a memoir in verse about the first two years of a decade that Rose Hunter spent in the sex industry in Canada. When Rose walked into a massage parlour in Toronto in 1997, she was looking for a temporary fix to pay rent and avoid having to go back to her home country of Australia. Awkward, shy and looking for a place to belong, she found herself in a strange world she understood little about, other than here she could make more than rent. She planned to use her earnings to buy herself an education that would secure the career of her dreams. Naively believing she could do only what was required of her, without trauma or side effects and leave the industry on her own terms, she was shattered by what unfolded. This is her story. It is also a searing portrayal of this dehumanising industry in all its destructive power.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood
In this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women’s bodies can ever be about the ‘choices’ women make. Yoshie Yanagihara shows how feminist ideas have been twisted to extend men’s freedom and their rights to access surrogacy. Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, “slicing and dicing biological motherhood” into egg donor, ‘gestational’ mother and adoptive mother. Melissa Farley debunks the myth of ‘choice’ in surrogacy, arguing that in a male-dominated and racist system, the exploitative sale of women in surrogacy, like in prostitution, is inherently harmful —rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes. Other contributors to this book, which is published in conjunction with the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood, are Gena Corea, Renate Klein, Gary Powell, Rita Banerji, Marie-Josèphe Devillers, Laura Isabel Gómez García, Alexandra Clément-Saby, Taina Bien-Aimé, Silvia Guerini, Laura Nuño Gómez and Eva Maria Bachinger.
£17.95
Spinifex Press An Embroidery of Old Maps and New: 2021
I can see how I carry Yiayia’s war in the ample dunes of my belly, the moment she smelt the guns, she pinched the candle’s wick, gathered the startled shadows of her children, flung my baby-mother onto her back and sprinted towards the neutral moon— Migration and the memories of women’s traditions are woven throughout these poems. Angela Costi brings the world of Cyprus to Australia. Her mother encounters animosity on Melbourne’s trams as Angela learns to thread words in ways that echo her grandmother’s embroidery. Here are poems that sing their way across the seas and map histories.
£14.95
Spinifex Press I Will Not Bear You Sons: 2021
Usha Akella pays tribute to the lives of women from cultures across continents, while reflecting on her own life. Her poems are the medium for women who refuse to be silenced. She condenses a calm rage into ferocious words of precision and celebrates the women who have triumphed. All the while a subversive dusting of humour runs through the collection. This is poetry that cannot be ignored. "Rage has no caste, needs no algorithm, light a pyre with it of chopped thumbs and scripted dreams"
£14.95
Spinifex Press Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life
I am in the very fortunate position of having been able to contribute to two waves of feminism: The Women’s Liberation Movement and the new wave that is taking place now. Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life is both an engaging autobiography and a fascinating account of feminist history. From the heady days of the Women’s Liberation Movement through to the backlash against radical feminism as neoliberal laissez-faire attitudes took hold. Fast forward to the current re-examination of feminism in light of the #MeToo movement and an emerging new wave of radical feminism. Sheila Jeffreys' bold account makes it clear that the feminism and lesbianism she has championed for decades is needed more than ever. With honesty and frankness, she tells of victories and setbacks in her unrelenting commitment to women’s freedom from men’s violence, especially the violence inherent in pornography and prostitution. We also learn what her steadfastness has cost her in terms of personal and professional rewards. Trigger Warning places radical feminism within a cultural, social and intellectual context while also taking us on a personal journey. Sheila Jeffreys has tirelessly crossed the globe to advance radical feminist theory and practice and we are invited to share in the intellectual and political crossroads she has encountered during her life. Accessible yet detailed and rigorous, this landmark volume is essential reading for everyone who has ever wondered what radical feminism really is.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Out of Eden
Pregnant, abandoned and homeless, Maureen battles to survive a Swedish winter until help arrives in the form of a mysterious woman with a veiled past. With the prospect of being deported, Maureen learns who her real friends are, especially when she faces investigations due to her links to a suspected criminal. Meanwhile in Australia, Maureen’s family is scrambling to support her when the health of her unscrupulous father declines and he depends on the clever intervention of his estranged family members to salvage both his dignity and finances. In this engaging, rollicking yet poignant sequel to Lillian’s Eden, we see Maureen’s ambition to explore the world encounter its harsh realities, and her mother Lillian using her resourcefulness and intelligence to tackle the ongoing family dramas at home. This is a novel about women in the world in the 1960s, both in Australia and abroad, and their resilience and capacity to manage their lives at a time when others want to take that independence and decision-making from them.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Karu: Growing Up Gurindji
Gurindji country is located in the southern Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. Gurindji people became well known in the 1960s and 1970s due to their influence on Australian politics and the Indigenous land rights movement. They were instrumental in gaining equal wages for Aboriginal cattle station employees and they were also the first Aboriginal group to recover control of their traditional lands. In Karu, Gurindji women describe their child-rearing practices. Some have a spiritual basis, while others are highly practical in nature, such as the use of bush medicines. Many Gurindji ways of raising children contrast with non-Indigenous practices because they are deeply embedded in an understanding of country and family connections. This book celebrates children growing up Gurindji and honours those Gurindji mothers, grandmothers, assistant teachers and health workers who dedicate their lives to making that possible.
£17.95
Spinifex Press between wind and water
between wind and water, is to be in a vulnerable place, the place where people and planet are. When industrial wind arrives in the neighbourhood, some locals find that living with their new neighbour has brought a whirlwind of troubles. Their health and that of the community take a nosedive. Their complaints are filed into obscurity, their stories dismissed and their voices disparaged. What sort of world do we want? We ask how can we have a better world if people and planet are not equally respected? These poems speak the stories of people who have been denied a voice.
£15.95
Spinifex Press Earth's Breath
Cyclonic storms inform the still eye of Earth's Breath. It's an eye that radiates out from the personal to the communal, tracking its subject matter through the lenses of history and myth. Susan Hawthorne's poetry shifts with seismic intensity, from tranquility to roar, bureaucratic inertia to survival, and the slow recovery from destruction to regeneration.
£14.95
Spinifex Press HELP! I'm Living with a (Man) Boy
Are you tired of finding towels on the bathroom floor? Have you ever walked through a supermarket with a thirty-five-year-old child who wants only the most expensive things on the shelves? How do you go about making men understand the difference between helping out with the housework and doing it? And what about violence? Help! I'm Living with a Man Boy has forty-one practical scenarios that many women will identify with immediately, plus suggestions for dealing with these situations.Others, she admits, have a long way to go.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Enough
As I stepped over smashed crockery, broken glass, pools of milk, juice and water in my kitchen, I felt a surge of anger and recalled the pain of the many black eyes, cut lips, and broken bones that Michael had inflicted on me, and I thought, ENOUGH. So many of us ask, How can this be happening? How did love turn into abuse and violence? These are the questions that Patricia Hughes, renowned author of Daughters of Nazareth, continually asked herself. Like so many women, she stayed in an abusive relationship. Convinced that she somehow was responsible. She writes powerfully of being pulled into the cycle of fear, abuse, giving in, forgiving. Enough is a story rarely told, and she tells it without self-pity, sentimentality or blind anger. Overcoming huge hurdles Patricia Hughes provides the reader with an honest account of all the ups and downs she encountered.Enough is both an inspirational story and a first hand guide for any woman in an abusive relationship.
£14.95
Spinifex Press Juggling Truths
Unity Dow’s third novel, Juggling Truths portrays the childhood of Monei Ntuka in the Botswanan village of Mochudi in Africa. Go to the past with me, so you can take the past to the future, asks her Nkoko. Nei takes us on an extraordinary journey through the many truths that shape her life; the truths of the colonisers and their churches and of her own people. We travel with her through dreams and share the wisdom of her grandmother as she lets the never-ending stories weave their own reality in face of a universe of conflicting truths. Unity Dow recreates with telling insight and gentle humour a world where the truths of the missionaries and the witchdoctors jostle with those of the generations of women.
£14.95
Spinifex Press The Crowded Beach
Julie's youthful concerns are swept aside by a tragedy that splits her family. She begins a new life in a city that is sometimes exciting, often overwhelming, always different to the only home she has ever known. At first, it seems the turmoil will never cease. And then, just as Julie begins to make some sense of what has happened, there are further surprising developments.
£8.95
Spinifex Press The Wounded Breast: Intimate Journeys through Cancer
A moving journey through the experience of breast cancer, and the many different approaches and treatments. Evelyne Accad presents a rare insight into cross-cultural understandings of illness. Multi-layered and in many voices, it is as important a book for medical practitioners as it is for people touched by cancer.
£17.95
Spinifex Press Two Lips Went Shopping
This is a book for anyone who has ever shopped – or worked in shops. But whether you find yourself wincing or laughing could depend on which side of the shop counter you’re on at the time. Find out what it’s like to be a young shopgirl, vent your frustrations with today’s supermarket society and the advertising and media industries, take a nostalgic trip back to the days of the corner shop. Using consumerism as a platform, Two Lips Went Shopping follows the thread down laneways where the baby trade and Female Genital Mutilation flourish passing protests of women against war and violence.
£11.95