Search results for ""spinifex press""

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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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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Mapping inter-cultural relationships as they are played out in a remote Aboriginal settlement in Western Australia's Great Sandy Desert, this book challenges White Australians to reconsider their relationship with Indigenous peoples. Unpacking White cultural practices, it explores the extraordinary difficulties which Indigenous women face when they attempt to maintain and pass their cultural knowledge, customs and skills on to their children and youth.

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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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In Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin, Diane Bell invites her readers into the complex and contested world of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Ngarrindjeri of South Australia; teases out the meanings and misreadings of the written sources; traces changes and continuities in oral accounts; challenges assumptions about what Ngarrindjeri women know, how they know it, and how outsiders may know what is to be known. Wurruwarrin: knowing and believing. In 1995, a South Australian Royal Commission found Ngarrindjeri women to have “fabricated” their beliefs to stop the building of a bridge from Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island. By 2001, in federal court, the women were vindicated as truth-tellers. In 2009, the site was registered, but scars remain of that shameful moment.In the Preface to the New Edition, Diane Bell looks to the world that “will be”, where talented, committed Ngarrindjeri leaders are building the infrastructure for future generations of the Ngarrindjeri nation and challenging the very foundation of the State of South Australia.

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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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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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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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