More ›

A Bright And Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers Of The Nineteenth Century

Debra Adelaide

From the first novel published in mainland Australia in 1838, women have been writing it for themselves. Among them are poets, prolific novelists such as Rosa Praed and botanists like Louisa Atkinson. From household names to obscurity, A Bright and Fiery Troop rediscovers the rich treasures of Australia’s literary tradition. It is the first critical analysis of the major Australian women wri...More ›

A Kind of Vanishing

Lesley Thomson

When a child disappears, who takes the blame? A child disappears. A woman grows up harbouring a terrible secret. Her daughter wants to know the truth. It's the summer of 1968, the day Senator Robert Kennedy is shot. Two 9-year-old girls, Eleanor Ramsay and Alice Howland, are playing hide and seek in the ruins of The Mills, a deserted village on the Sussex coast. When it is Eleanor's turn t...More ›

Against Empire

Zillah Eisenstein

Zillah Eisenstein grew up against the background of the civil rights movement in the USA. The daughter of communist, atheist, Jewish parents, her worldview has been shaped by this unusual background of politics. She writes: I have never known God as an explanation for what people do, or for what happens to them. I was brought up to believe in people: that people make the world through their s...More ›

All That False Instruction

Kerryn Higgs

A SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSICWinner of the Angus and Robertson manuscript prizeGrowing up in a rural working-class home, Maureen Craig rebels against her angry mother, the privileges of her favoured brother, and the relentless conformity of 1950s Australia. University promises a new world both terrifying and exhilarating in its challenges. She explores her sexuality and sets out to make a place for ...More ›

Angels of Power

Susan Hawthorne & Renate Klein

Australian feminist Book Fortnight Favourite, 1991 In the tradition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, these writers rework images of the body. Imagination, vision and a sense of the absurd come together and demonstrate that women can resist the power of god-like scientists who long to create monsters and angels.          ...More ›

Anger of Aubergines, The

Bulbul Sharma

  Food as a passion, a gift, a means of revenge, even a source of power – these are the themes Bulbul Sharma explores in her collection of stories. Women weigh up the loss of a lover or the loss of weight; they consider whether hunger and the thought of higher things are inextricably linked; they feast and crave and die for their insatiable appetites.     &...More ›

Another Year in Africa

Rose Zwi

Winner of the Olive Schreiner AwardThe Australian, Best Books of the Year, 1995They came from the stetl to a new land, to a new life. Another year in Africa, they said, another year in exile.  Old bonds break as they adjust from the old world of pogroms to their new life in Africa. Six-year-old Ruth is haunted by memories of tragedy and persecution that are not even hers.  Awar...More ›

Ao Toa

Cathie Dunsford

A modern fictional equivalent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.What happens when a group of scientists take creation into their own hands?Ao Toa is that rare novel – an eco-thriller combining action and suspense with deep emotions and the sensual power of the natural world.  It is peopled with believable women and men, teenagers and elders, suits and activists, farmers and gardene...More ›

Australia For Women: Travel and Culture

Susan Hawthorne & Renate Klein

An indispensable book for anyone travelling in Australia who wants to understand how women have contributed to the culture and the history. With contributions from Indigenous writers on land, culture and life and from women who trace their heritage to one of the many waves of migrants over more than 200 years. From landscape to literature, from the history of feminism to women’s involvement ...More ›

Australian Women's Writing

Dale Spender

Australia has a rich tradition of women's writing.  From convict Margaret Catchpole and farmer Elizabeth Macarthur in the late eighteenth century to Germaine Greer's landmark book, The Female Eunuch.  Australian Women's Writing is a comprehensive collection of the work of thirty-seven Australian women writers between 1790 and 1970.  Writers include Faith Bandler, Barbara...More ›

Ballad of Siddy Church, The

Lin van Hek

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.          ...More ›

Between the Lines

Bernice Morris

It has been claimed that no one was hurt by the Petrov affair. This book tells another story. Among them was Bernice Morris, who draws on letters and ASIO documents to expose the devastating consequences of security services interventions. Writing of the 1950s, Bernice Morris observes: The victimization of progressives and the sustained attack on communists that took place at the time cannot ...More ›

Beyond Psychoppression

Betty McLellan

A guide to therapy, Beyond Psychoppression explores the intersection between the personal and the political. Betty McLellan surveys the development of psychotherapy and exposes the oppressive techniques of Freudian psychoanalysis, humanistic therapies, lesbian sex therapy and new age and popular therapies. She challenges the myths about women’s mental and emotional illness....More ›

Bird

Susan Hawthorne

'Birds don't fly with leads,' I said.'Safety belts are to learn with, not to live with–I'm safer on the trapeze than crossing the road.And I do that every day, often by myself.' So says thirteen-year-old Avis when confronted by the limitations imposed on her at school. She has epilepsy and some of the teachers want to stop her participating in the sport she loves...More ›

Blood Relations

Sandy Jeffs

Sometimes memory warpscobbling together a host of images leaving the self embellished by the past The poems in this collection are an evocative documentation of the harrowing experiences of a child living in a hostile and unhappy home. The reader is shown the pain, the bitterness and the mixed emotions that accompany the experiences of growing up in a family torn apart by domestic v...More ›

Bloodwood Clan, The

Beryl Fletcher

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 ...More ›

Body In Time / Nervous Arcs

Diane Fahey / Jordie Albiston

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 mi...More ›

Body/Landscape Journals

Margaret Somerville

The space of the Queen is above all a liminal space between different ways of knowing.Reading Body/Landscape Journals is like falling through a faultline, 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 t...More ›

Building Babel

Suniti Namjoshi

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.Exploratory and experimental, Suniti Namjoshi’s work is...More ›

Butterfly Effect, The

Susan Hawthorne

No, here there’s not a straight line to be seen anywhere–chaos in the shape of two vulval wings– the butterfly effect   The butterfly effect is a concept from physics in which it is surmised that small actions can have enormous consequences, and that the flutter of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the world can cause devastating storms on the ...More ›

C-Word, The

Jean Taylor

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....More ›

Car Maintenance, Explosives And Love And Other Contemporary Lesbian Writings

Susan Hawthorne, Cathie Dunsford and Susan Sayer

What is mythic? / What is true? Asks the opening anonymous poet of this collection. Lesbians have become cultural amphibians. This anthology reflects the varied tongues, the inventiveness of lesbian culture and the diversity of lesbian writing. It explores the mechanics of daily life, the explosiveness of relationships and the geography of love.Here is toughness, conviction, perseverance and passi...More ›

Cat Tales: The Meaning Of Cats In Women's Lives

Jan Fook, Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein

A sister volume to the internationally successful A Girl’s Best Friend, this book explores the relationships between women and their cats– or more aptly, cats and their women. There are cats of all colours and sizes - from the city, the farm, the bush; cats who can open fridges, sign contracts, and cats-in-drag.  They get stuck in strange places and survive amazing ordeals.&n...More ›

Charts And Soundings

Sue Fitchett and Jane Zusters

Charts and Soundings is a book of myths and a loaded camera.Bones are the bottom line / at the end / we can be sure / there’ll be a skeleton / connections / which shine / whitely in murk / map a way to the / heart of matterA luminous collection of photographs and poetry earthed in the New Zealand landscape by two of its finest artists: award-winning poet Sue Fitchett and photographer Jane Zu...More ›

China For Women

Anna Gertslacher and Margit Miosga

From the Palaeolithic to the present, Chinese women have held up half the sky. Today they work as architects, soldiers, physicians and fruit growers, and some have travelled the Yangzi rapids in a rubber raft. China for Women is the perfect guide for tourist or armchair travellers. It neatly bridges past and present and brings to life the complex culture and history of China. From the si...More ›

Chinese Medicine For Women

Bronwyn Whitlocke

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. ...More ›

Cowrie

Cathie Dunsford

Cowrie travels to Hawai’i 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 leave...More ›

Crowded Beach, The

Laurene Kelly

The powerful sequel to the acclaimed I Started Crying Monday tells the story of fourteen-year-old Julie trying to forge a new life for herself after a family tragedy.  Adapting to life in the city, without her parents, is sometimes exciting, but often overwhelming, and discovering the joys of the beach provides Julie with an escape from the ongoing dramas.  At first, it seems the turmoil...More ›

Cyberfeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity

Susan Hawthorne & Renate Klein

An international anthology of writings on cyberculture and feminist interventions. A diverse and at times fractious discussion of issues raised by these new forms of cultural expression. The contributors engage with a range of questions including: What is cyberfeminism? How does feminism influence multimedia production? What are the possibilities for feminist activism and research on the internet?...More ›

Darkness More Visible

Finola Moorhead

When Margot Gorman finds a body in the women’s toilets a tangle of mysteries opens up. Margot Gorman, ex-cop, is now a free agent, a triathlete and has the equivalent of perfect pitch in the sense of smell and, naturally, is a connoisseur of good wine.From murder and kidnap, drug dealing and gay bashing, to illegal mining and an underground network of cyberfeminists – the Solanacites &...More ›

Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi, A

Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal el Saadawi has been pilloried, censored, imprisoned and exiled for her refusal to accept the oppressions imposed on women by sex and class. For her, writing and action have been inseparable and this is reflected in some of the most evocative and disturbing novels ever written by or about Arab women.Born in a small Egyptian village in 1931, Nawal el Saadawi went on to train as a medical docto...More ›

Daughters of Development, The

Sinith Sittirak

This is a powerful feminist critique of the Western concept of development, which has brought profound changes to the lives of women in the South over the last thirty years. It is also an attempt to rediscover and rehabilitate traditional indigenous knowledge as an important basis for empowering women and re-establishing the foundation of reciprocity in the North-South dialogue.Sinith Sittirak loo...More ›

Daughters of the Dreaming

Diane Bell

A SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSIC Finalist for the 1993 J.I. Staley PrizeWomen are rarely mentioned in the literature as owners of country in their own right or as decision-making individuals; they appear as wives and mothers, their relationship to the jukurrpa always mediated through another. Yet I believe women enjoyed direct access to the jukurrpa from which flowed into rights and responsibiliti...More ›

Daughters of the Pacific

Zohl de Ishtar

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 glob...More ›

Day Kadi Lost Part of Her Life, The

Text by Isabel Ramos Rioja Photos by Kim Manresa

Shortlisted, Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing, 1999Silver Medal for PhotojournalismVisa d'Or for L'Image del Festival International du PhotojournalismeHuman Rights Award for the International Week of PhotojournalismKadi’s first scream went through me like a dagger. … Kadi, the cheerful four-year-old … had just discovered pain, the horror of tra...More ›

Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics

Melinda Tankard Reist

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 perce...More ›

Don't Shoot Darling: Women's Independent Filmmaking In Australia

Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed and Freda Freiberg

Australia’s film industry was amongst the earliest and most innovative in the world. Don’t Shoot Darling brings together more than forty women film-makers, film critics and theorists to create an important and fascinating record of independent women’s filmmaking in Australia.The book contains essays and statements by film theorists and film makers. Barbara Creed writes about femi...More ›

Ecofeminism

Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva

Biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge and reproductive technology, intellectual property, development, war, responsibility and globalization – these issues and more are discussed by two of the world’s most original thinkers on ecology and feminism. In constructing their own ecofeminist epistemology and methodology, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva look to the potential of movements advoc...More ›

Enough

Patricia Hughes

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 a...More ›

Everything Good Will Come

Sefi Atta

Winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature Finalist, Multicultural Fiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards Foreword Magazine, Book of the Year Award, Honourable Mention An international prize-winning novel by Nigerian-born Sefi Atta, Everything Good Will Come is a powerful and eloquent story of a young woman’s coming of age. It is 1971, and Nigeria is unde...More ›

Evil: A Novel

Diane Bell

“Sex, silence and sin”, this is what newly appointed professor, Dee P. Scrutari, writes in her notebook as she turns her anthropological gaze on the tribe of “non-reproducing males” who dominate St Jude’s, a prestigious Catholic liberal arts college. Evil is in the air. Something is awry. What happened to the previous occupant of her newly-painted office? Profess...More ›

Excuse Me, Is This India?

Anita Leutwiler & Anushka Ravishandar

My Aunt Anna came back from IndiaWith stories of places to which she had been.To warm me through winter she sewed me a quiltWith pictures of all the things she had seen.Under the quilt I closed my eyesAnd I found I was in for a big surprise …This absurd and fantastic story of travel through a child’s imagination is illustrated with exquisite art. Put together with fabric collected dur...More ›

Exploitation of a Desire: Women's Experiences with In Vitro Fertilisation

Renate Klein

OUT OF PRINTBeing accepted on the [IVF] programme raised wild hopes without any realistic information to back them up. Looking back I cannot say why I did not see through it.IVF: the miracle technology, or an experimental procedure that violates women? In this exploratory study Renate Klein asks important questions of women who have been on the IVF programmes: Do women contemplating IVF know its d...More ›

Face To Face: Making Dance And Theatre In Community

Judi Fisher & Beth Shelton

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...More ›

Falling Woman, The

Susan Hawthorne

Top Twenty Title, Listener Women's Book Festival, 1992   The Australian, Best Books of the Year, 1992     A vivid desert odyssey; the falling woman travels through a haunting landscape of memory, myth and mental maps. Told in three voices – Stella, Estella and Estelle – this is an inspiring story drawn from childhood memories, imagined worlds and the p...More ›

Far and Beyon'

Unity Dow

For Mara, mother of four, and sole provider for her family, life has never been easy. In her community women carry a heavy burden as the world changes around them. In Botswana, the tensions are growing as young people attempt to resolve the magicks of tradition with the technologies of now....More ›

Fear Of Food

Carol Bacchi

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. Provocative and deeply personal, Fear of Food is a compelling read....More ›

Fedora Walks

Merrilee Moss

In the nineteenth century Charles Dickens wrote his novels as serials; in the late twentieth century Merilee 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 F...More ›

Feminist Fables

Suniti Namjoshi

There was once a man who thought he could do anything, even be a woman. So he acquired a baby, changed its diapers and fed the damn thing three times a night. He did all the housework, was deferential to men, and got worn out. But he had a brother, Jack Cleverfellow, who hired a wife and got it all done.Suniti Namjoshi is elegant and subversive in creating new patterns of meaning through stories t...More ›

Figments of a Murder

Gillian Hanscombe

The Australian, Best Books of the Year, 1995First there was the detective novel with its stubble-chinned PI. Then came the feminist super-sleuths. Feisty, fierce and real. Now there’s Figments of a Murder. And Babes. Babes is about lust. Babes is about power. But what else is she up to? In her world women are torn asunder by love and lust, by murder and menace. Babes says she calls the ...More ›

Fortunes of Mary Fortune, The

Lucy Sussex

After arriving in Australia with her young son in 1855, Mary Fortune went on to become Australia’s first female crime writer. Lucy Sussex’s detective work reveals something of this remarkable woman, but Mary Fortune’s writing is her best testimony. Its verve and quality recreate Melbourne in the grip of gold fever and of life on the goldfields. She depicts the harshness of l...More ›

Frictions: An Anthology of Fiction by Women

Anna Gibbs & Alison Tilson

Frictions is a classic. Frictions is writing that is risky and exhilarating. Now in its third edition, Frictions shows where the writing of now started. With work by Elizabeth Jolley and Finola Moorhead, Andrea Goldsmith and Ania Walwicz, this anthology brought a fresh generation of writers to the world. A passionate and witty anthology that is an adventure for any reader. Edited by Anna...More ›

Gap in the Records, A

Jan McKemmish

A Gap in the Records is about spies. But these are no ordinary spies. In a world where women are unnoticed, women make excellent spies. Gathering information, attending functions or taking a simple holiday by the beach, these women are to be reckoned with. From Paraguay to Paris, from Hong Kong to Pine Gap, the women are watching and interfering.A Gap in the Records by Jan McKemmish has come back ...More ›

Get Used To It: Children Of Gay And Lesbian Parents

Myra Hauschild and Pat Rosier

As a lesbian who has brought up children I want this book for lesbian and gay parents and their children, and as a counter to the prejudice and fear promoted by the anti-gay voices that get media attention. —Pat RosierSixteen young people are interviewed about their experiences of growing up with lesbian and gay parents. As one young person relates: ‘We’re a real family with our ...More ›

Getting The Measure: A Collection Of Essays From The Forum 'The Lie Of The Land'

Carmen Grostal (Curator)

Art that inhabits its ambiguity is simultaneously a political stance and an artistic attitude. —Paul CarterBringing together eight major and emerging artists as well as philosophers, writers and environmentalists, this book focuses on the essential connection and reciprocal relations between culture and the land. These essays were originally presented as part of ‘The Lie of the La...More ›

Getting Your Man

Melissa Chan

Getting your man, getting the right man, is not always easy. But women whether they be pieceworkers, housewives, artists, business women or farmers, know just how to get their man.In the tradition of Thelma and Louise, women’s revenge drives these stories....More ›

Girl Who Hated Books, The

Manjusha Pawagi and Leanne Franson

Once there was a girl named Meena. If you looked up her name in a book, you would find that it means ‘fish’ in Sanskrit. But Meena didn’t know that because she never looked up anything anywhere. She hated to read, and she hated books.When Meena one day opens the books she is in for a great surprise.Hilariously funny, this is an appealing story about a young girl who lives in a ho...More ›

Girl's Best Friend A: The Meaning Of Dogs In Women's Lives

Jan Fook and Renate Klein

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 ...More ›

Globalized Woman, The: Reports From A Future Of Inequality

Christa Wichterich Translated by Patrick Camiller

Globalization creates growth without jobs in the North, structural adjustment in the South, privatization in the East and the dismantling of states everywhere. It is a process which unifies through market integration and new information technologies, yet separates through growing social polarization. It is also a process which depends on the feminization of employment; rather than liberating women...More ›

Glory

Sarah Brill

She lies in the bed and she is sick. Sicker than she’s ever been. But with the sickness comes a pain and in that pain she finds a glory. And it’s the glory that gets her through. When her body heals and she is out of hospital and home with her family, she needs to seek out a new glory, a stronger glory. She finds it in starvation. A story of one girl’s struggle with herself,...More ›

Goja: An Autobiographical Myth

Suniti Namjoshi

I had thought once that I felt most at home in a plane in mid-air, but that isn’t true. I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is.Suniti Namjoshi traverses the cultures of the East and of the West. She muses on the patterns of her life, and of the impact of colonisation, both the resistances and the accept...More ›

Heavens May Fall, The

Unity Dow

The Heavens May Fall takes up the story of a fiery up-and-coming lawyer at the Bana-Bantle Children’s Agency in Mochudi, Botswana. Naledi Chaba’s caseload is bulging with stories of rape and abuse. So when she takes on the case of a 15-year-old girl who has been raped by the lodger, she’s on a familiar battleground, involving her own peers.And it’s not only J.J., her silk-s...More ›

HELP! I'm Living with a Man Boy

Betty McLellan

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 prac...More ›

Heroines: A Contemporary Anthology Of Australian Women Writers

Dale Spender

Twenty-two writers of fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, television, film and drama reflect upon their heroines. There are ordinary women; mothers, detectives. Old women, teenagers, sisters, lesbians, women rural and urban; women who kill and women who resist violence; women from the past and from the present; there is comedy and music, satire and calls for action; a story that takes us back to ...More ›

Holding Yawulyu: White Culture and Black Women's Law

Zohl de Ishtar

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...More ›

Honour: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence against Women

Lynn Welchman & Sara Hossain

Norma Khouri brought the issue of honour killings into the news in Australia. Whatever one thinks of Khouri, the story she had to tell was based on the reality of many women’s lives, not only in Jordan but also in Italy, Kurdistan, Latin America, the UK, South Asian and Nordic countries. The purpose of this book is to support human rights activists, policymakers and lawyers by explainin...More ›

HorseDreams: The Meaning Of Horses In Women's Lives

Jan Fook, Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein

Horses and women have always shared a bond. Why else do little girls plaster their schoolbooks with pony pictures?  Why do women spend weekends devotedly mucking out paddocks? Or willingly go out in public wearing tight, unforgiving, pale jodhpurs? How is it that otherwise fastidious females cheerfully fill their cars with hay, their nails with dirt and their boots with mud, while turning out...More ›

House at Karamu, The

Beryl Fletcher

What does a place mean? An old kauri villa with a one-roomed school attached is the place that has sustained a writer, Beryl Fletcher, through turbulent years and an obsessive love. Sent away at the age of six for a few months to the house at Karamu, she discovered books and spent many nights reading by candlelight, listening to the call of the moreporks. Karamu became a symbolic landscape of safe...More ›

I Started Crying Monday

Laurene Kelly

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 shatt...More ›

Idea of Prostitution, The

Sheila Jeffreys

There are (at least) two competing views on prostitution: Prostitution as a legitimate and acceptable form of employment, freely chosen by women; And men’s use of prostitution as a form of degrading the women and causing grave psychological damage. In The Idea of Prostitution, Sheila Jeffreys explores these sharply contrasting views. She examines the changing concept of prostitutio...More ›

If Passion Were A Flower

Lariane Fonseca

Here the shadows of the plants were miraculously distinct. She noticed the separate grains of earth in the flower beds as if she had a microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the intricacy of the twigs of every tree. —Virginia Woolf, OrlandoInspired by the writing of Virginia Woolf and the painting of Georgia O’Keefe, Lariane Fonseca uses the camera as a medium through which to depict the...More ›

Imago

Francesca Rendle-Short

ACT Book of the Year Award, 1997imago 1. the final and fully developed stage of an insect after all metamorphoses e.g. a butterfly or beetle. 2. Psychoanal. an idealised concept of a loved one formed in childhood and retained uncorrected in adult life.Molly Rose Moon dreamt of worms the night before she married Jimmy Brown in Tooting Bec. Milky sticky wet worms wriggled and fed off one a...More ›

Internet For Women

Rye Senjen and Jane Guthrey

The first book to be published anywhere in the world to provide women with an introduction to the Internet. The authors explore the role of gender, anonymity, privacy, pornography, harassment and security. It is a straightforward guide to the use of electronic systems, as well as a brief history of women and computers including Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. This book is a collector’s item, ...More ›

Journey Home, The/ Te Haerenga Kainga

Cathie Dunsford

Cathie Dunsford's much-loved Cowrie returns. The Journey Home follows her through her passions for life, love, food and challenge. Peopled by a diverse array of characters: Benny,  the outrageous film-maker; Peta, who Cowrie falls in love with; and the student DK, who has a few things to learn. Torn between her newly-made friendships in California and her roots in her homeland, Cowri...More ›

Juggling Truths

Unity Dow

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 th...More ›

Kath Williams: The Unions and the Fight for Equal Pay

Zelda D' Aprano

 Kath Williams was a trade unionist, and a communist, before taking on the mantle of feminist after World War II. With a trade unionist ex-husband who was elected to Federal Politics opposing her left wing campaigns, Kath emerged as a feisty and quietly determined woman. Her campaign of conviction was the major force behind the achievement of equal pay for women. This important soci...More ›

Kick the Tin

Doris Kartinyeri

When Doris Kartinyeri was a month old, her mother died. The family gathered to mourn their loss and welcome the new baby home. But Doris never arrived to live with her family – she was stolen from the hospital and placed in Colebrook Home, where she stayed for the next fourteen years.   The legacy of being a member of the Stolen Generations continued for Doris as she was placed in white...More ›

Kindness Of Strangers, The: A History Of The Lort Smith Animal Hospital

Felicity Jack

The poignant story behind the Lort Smith Animal Hospital, and the women who were its driving force.  Based on a desire to alleviate the suffering of animals irrespective of profits, this group of society women established the Animal Welfare League of Victoria, and then the Lort Smith Animal Hospital.  Staging fundraisers, fighting battles, and dealing with the intricacies of human relati...More ›

Language in Common, A

Marion Molteno

‘Marion Molteno’s stories concern one community and her relationship with it that has been sustained and practical over the years… Their chief and overwhelming characteristic is her compassion and her talent for sensitive perception.’ —Anita DesaiA vivid collection of stories based on the author’s nine years as an adult education worker, mainly among women from...More ›

Last Walk In Naryshkin Park

Rose Zwi

Shortlisted, NSW Premier's General History Award, 1999Naryshkin Park is a place where lovers once walked. On 2 October 1941, it became the site of a mass grave. Rose Zwi deftly weaves together clues from survivors’ accounts, old photographs, official documents and archival research to form a many-layered account of the proud history and tragic destruction of the Jews of Lithuania....More ›

Lesbian Heresy, The : A Feminist Perspective On The Lesbian Sexual Revolution

Sheila Jeffreys

The backlash against feminism has been documented powerfully by Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi … within the lesbian community too there has been a parallel backlash.A lesbian sex industry is now making a profit from women’s oppression, teaching lesbians to turn the pain of abuse and subordination into ‘pleasure’ and calling it liberation. Feminist theorist Sheila Jeffreys cha...More ›

Life on the Edge

Judy Horacek

Judy Horacek’s work … is a serious challenge to the established order. —Dale SpenderLife on the Edge is a whole book of laughter by one of Australia’s most irrepressible cartoonists. Judy Horacek can make you laugh about love and loss, about science and postmodernism, about serious social issues and the light-hearted events of life. They will make you laugh on the way...More ›