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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 to hid...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 warps cobbling 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...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 Prize Women 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 responsi...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 ›
Earth's Breath
Susan Hawthorne
Breath is an origin storybefore breath is non-existence 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 destr...More ›
Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology
Ariel Salleh
As the twenty-first century faces a crisis of democracy and sustainability, this book brings academics and alternative globalisation activists into discussion. Through studies of global neoliberalism, ecological debt, climate change, and the ongoing devaluation of reproductive and subsistence labour, these uncompromising essays by internationally distinguished women thinkers expose the limits of ...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...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&rsq...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 Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls
Melinda Tankard Reist
From advertising and merchandising to Bratz and Voodoo Dolls to the Henson affair, Getting Real puts the spotlight on the sexualisation and objectification of girls and women in the media, popular culture and society. Girls are portrayed as sexual at younger ages, pressured to conform to a ‘thin, hot, sexy’ norm. Clothing, music, magazines, toys and games send girls the message ...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 prost...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 ›
Listen to Ngarrindjeri Women Speaking
Diane Bell for the Ngarrindjeri Nation
“Namawi rawul-inyeri thulun-ar: Our footprints [come] from the past. From our ancestors to us, we are the traditional owners, still guiding our young ones, connecting the Stolen Generations back to family and country, standing strong in our history and culture and heritage,” announce these remarkable Ngarrindjeri miminar [women]. Listen to Ngarrindjeri Women Speaking Kungun ...More ›
Living Laboratories
Robyn Rowland
Imagine an unborn foetus having children. In a world where frozen embryo banks and test-tube babies are presented as the ‘norm’, the culling of immature eggs from a female foetus is no longer science fiction. How does this affect our concepts of parenting and mothering? What are the ethical and moral implications of research into human reproduction? Robyn Rowland argues that ...More ›
Long Life: Positive HIV Stories
Jonathan Morgan, Bambanani Women's Group and Others
…we want to let people know that we positive people are getting a treatment to help us live longer. We want to tell the whole world that we are many and we are working, we are healthy. Also we want our stories to be published to the other countries. For those who are positive not to lose hope maybe someday we will get its cure. We want people outside to know that it is not...More ›
Love Upon The Chopping Board
Marou Izumo and Claire Maree
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, lesbian history – Love Upon the Chopping Board is all of these things and more exploring the personal and pol...More ›
Making Sex Work: A Failed Experiment With Legalised Prostitution
Mary Lucille Sullivan
Can a prostitute be raped? Are pregnancy and STIs an Occupational Health and Safety issue? What sort of society buys and sells women and children for sex? Does legalisation solve the dangers of sex work? Sex worker advocates have argued for many years that legalising prostitution is the way to make the industry safer both for workers and clients. In 1984, the State of Victoria ...More ›
Manawa Toa / Heart Warrior
Cathie Dunsford
Cowrie boards a ship bound for Moruroa Atoll during the French nuclear tests. She is in for a rough ride. As international attention is focused on the Pacific and the environment, the stakes rise. She is joined by Sahara, a young peace activist from England and Marie-Louise, a French nuclear physicist. But can they be trusted? Can anyone be trusted?With sensuous writing and a deep knowledge of the...More ›
Menopause Industry, The: A Guide to Medicine's 'Discovery' of the Mid-Life Woman
Sandra Coney
Published in four countries and into several reprints, this book has been called ‘a must read’. The information in this book is important and Sandra Coney’s incisive critique of the use of HRT should have been listened to years ago. It is groundbreaking and gives details on the benefits and risks of medical intervention in ‘the mid-life woman’. Sandra Coney argue...More ›
Mo Burdekin
Sarah Campion
The wet came that year with a cock-eye-bob; loud thunder, ragged streams of lightning and a wind of awful fury ... Now there was nothing in the whole wide river but tossing water, uprooted trees, a few bandicoots and kangaroo rats feebly struggling still, and an old wooden cradle carved with grapes and acanthus leaves in which a dirty brown baby sat drooling with bubbles at his mouth, snatching at...More ›
Modewarre: Home Ground
Patricia Sykes
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.Three roads meeting in the one bird:modewarre (the indigenous) biziura lobata (the colonial) musk duck ...More ›
Moebius Trip: Digressions From India's Highways
Giti Thadani
2006, Finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards, USAAt the end of the clearing, an old banyan tree grew out of the remains of an earlier round stepwell. A little further on was another lake. This must have been an oasis of multiple delights. Over a thousand years later, it was as if I could still be intoxicated by the tranquillity and protectiveness of this enclosed yet open valley. The sun star...More ›
Moments Of Desire
Susan Hawthorne and Jenny Pausacker
A feminist anthology that ranges widely across women’s writing on sex. In fiction, poetry and experimental forms, feminist writers unveil a world of female sexual experience. The editors have chosen pieces that portray women’s sexual experiences from youth to old age. The writers explore celibacy, lesbianism, heterosexuality and bisexuality but consistently return to the simple wonders...More ›
Motherlode: Excavation, Exploration, New Possibilities
Stephanie Holt and Maryanne Lynch
In this collection of essays, performance pieces, poetry and prose, mother as noun, appendage and agenda is mined for meaning in the contemporary world. Mothers are spectacular, for every child there is a mother even if unknown. Is she a bad mother, a good mother, a TV mother, a kitchen mother, an immortal mother, a devil mother, an immaculate mother? Is she the source of your mother tongue, ...More ›
Mr Hogarth's Will
Catherine Helen Spence
Jane and Alice Melville are looking for a living wage. Although well qualified with a ‘boy’s education’, neither can find a suitable position. They are disinherited by an uncle who believes that money will turn their heads and make them too independent. Driven to desperation in their struggle to support themselves, eventually they look abroad for new opportunities. But life in th...More ›
Native Tongue
Suzette Haden Elgin
A SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSICIt’s the year 2205 and women of Earth are once again property. Two women, Nazareth and Michaela – one a brilliant linguist, the other a rebel servant – are destined to challenge the power of men. Rich in wry wit, fierce intellect, and faith in the subversive power of language, Native Tongue is a feminist science fiction classic.Native Tongue offers new ...More ›
Nattering On The Net: Women, Power And Cyberspace
Dale Spender
Top Twenty Title, Listener Women's Book Festival, 1995Is 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 ...More ›
Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, And Will Be
Diane Bell
Winner, Gleebooks Award, New South Wales Premier's Awards, 1999Shortlisted, The Age Book of the Year AwardsShortlisted, Queensland Premier's History AwardShortlisted, Australian Literary Society Gold Medallion In Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin, Diane Bell presents a finely textured ethnographic portrait of Aboriginal culture. Here are the voices of women and men who struggled to protect the...More ›
Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution And Pornography
Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant
A 1985 Canadian report on the sex industry in that country reported that women in prostitution suffer a mortality-rate forty times the national average. –Sheila Jeffreys As an activist, I explain that I’m not against sex and nudity but that women do more than just have sex … whether it’s Vogue, or pornography or beer ads – the message is that women get power thro...More ›
Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique Of Postmodernism
Somer Brodribb
Lévi-Strauss tried to convince women that we are spoken, exchanged like words; Lacan tried to teach women we can’t speak, because the phallus is the original signifier; and then Derrida says that it doesn’t matter, it’s just talk.Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Nietzsche: the chant resonates through universities around the world. Have you ever tried to untangle the words of post...More ›
Outercourse: The Bedazzling Voyage
Mary Daly
Mary Daly has changed the way we think about the world, about women, about religion and about life. Here she records the journey she took through theology and philosophy into a post-Christian and post-patriarchal universe....More ›
Painting Myself In
Nina Mariette
When I paint I can move myself to a space of freedom that I’ve never felt before. Expressing oneself through creativity can be an immensely challenging and satisfying experience. Nina Mariette, a survivor of childhood abuse, uses painting to make sense of her past, and tells her story with pictures and words....More ›
Parachute Silk: Friends, Food, Passion, A Novel In Letters
Gina Mercer
Molly and Finn are passionate friends – and have been for over twenty years. They write to each other about lovers, risotto, mothering, and the many pleasures of the body. They write feisty letters – gossiping outrageously, arguing fiercely, exchanging present intimacies and past secrets. Finn, at Molly’s insistence, tells of her past love affairs in delicious detail. But...More ›
Passion For Friends, A: Toward A Philosophy Of Female Affectionp
Janice Raymond
A SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSICJanice Raymond offers a vision of female friendship that is as exhilarating as it is controversial. In this feminist classic, she explores the many manifestations of friendship between women including the ancient Greek hetairai, the sisterhood of mediaeval nuns and the marriage resisters of China. Thousands of women have created their own communities and destinies throug...More ›
Patient No More: The Politics Of Breast Cancer
Sharon Batt
Journalist Sharon Batt was a healthy athletic woman when she found a lump in her breast, and after the diagnosis she set out to understand her disease. It led her on a journey to unravelling the politics of medical research, of media and fundraisers who play the breast cancer ‘game’. Her book gives hope by closing with a call for a breast cancer movement, such as we have begun to see i...More ›
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour
Maria Mies
It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production – mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies – constitutes the perennial basis upon which capitalist productive labour can be built up and exploited. This now classic book traces the social origins of the s...More ›
Peaceful Army, The
Flora Eldershaw
Margaret Preston on Australian women artists; Miles Franklin on suffragist Rose Scott; Eleanor Dark on Caroline Chisholm; Kylie Tennant on the future ... Like mirrors reflecting mirrors this book shows the precarious position of women in a country’s history. First published in 1938, the youngest of the contributors, Kylie Tennant, just before her death in 1988 reflected again on the interven...More ›
Perverse Serenity
Robyn Rowland
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 th...More ›
Poems from the Madhouse
Sandy Jeffs
Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. Only a poet could make us hear the thundering whisper of insanity, the endless circling of the revolving door, the sheer practicality of "whatever gets you through the night". Here are portraits of other people in wards ...More ›
Poems from the Madhouse / Now Millennium
Sandy Jeffs / Deborah Staines
FAW Anne Elder Award, 1993Commended, Human Rights Award, 1994Mary Gilmour Award, 1994An award-winning joint volume of poetry, Sandy Jeffs invites the readers into the world of schizophrenia in Poems from the Madhouse, while Deborah Staines presents vivid images that evoke the mythic past and the technological future in Now Millennium.Staines' sequence, Venus Port, explores the destruction of t...More ›
Poppy's Progress
Pat Rosier
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,...More ›
Poppy's Return
Pat Rosier
Pat Rosier’s second book about Poppy sees her confronting two life crises at once: death and love vie for her attention. She travels to Yorkshire where she must take on the role of carer to her dying father. And in Yorkshire, there is also Jane…For all her family it’s a time when difficult and poignant emotions emerge – when old hurts must be put aside and new bonds forged...More ›
Quilt
Finola Moorhead
Award-winning author Finola Moorhead stitches together essays, reviews and short stories that make an incisive comment of the process of writing. She writes of sentences and mathematics, of rubbish bins and nightmares, of nuns and abortions. Through it all are is the invisible stitching of an author for whom five finger exercises are for more than musical training. Her writing encompasses pho...More ›
Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed
Diane Bell and Renate Klein
The book no feminist can live without.Q. If there's no such thing as "truth", why can you be sent to jail for perjury?A. (a) Because judges have not read Foucault; A. (b) jail is just a text; A. (c) you deserved it. &nbs...More ›
Reading Between The Lines: A Lesbian Feminist Critique Of Feminist Accounts Of Sexuality
Denise Thompson
A critical analysis of feminist writings on sexuality from a radical feminist and lesbian feminist standpoint. Critical of libertarianism, Denise Thompson provides a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of domination and the ways in which feminist theory is marginalised. A must-read for any serious feminist thinker....More ›
Rumours Of Dreams
Sandi Hall
From the author of the acclaimed Godmothers comes a new and startling novel. Beginning in the South Pacific and stretching back to a Mediterranean past, Sandi Hall explores a friendship that could affect the history of the world. When Dory Previn asked Did Jesus have a sister? Sandi Hall discovered that he did....More ›
Safe Houses
Rose Zwi
Winner, Human Rights Award for Fiction, 1994Top Twenty Title, Listener Women's Book Festival, 1993Set against the escalating violence of the last years of the Apartheid regime, Safe Houses tells the story of three families – the Sibiyas, the Singers, the Sterns – who are inextricably bound by love and hate, hope and betrayal. Ruth and Lola are drawn into the struggle against Aparth...More ›
Screaming Of The Innocent, The
Unity Dow
We are looking for a man with a hard heart; a heart of stone; a heart of a real man. One afternoon, a twelve-year-old girl goes missing near her village. The local police tell her mother and the villagers she has been taken by a wild animal. Five years later, a young government employee Amantle Bokaa finds a box bearing the label ‘Neo Kakang; CRB 45/94’. It contains evidence of hu...More ›
Second Degree Tampering
Sybylla Collective
Second Degree Tampering is the criminal offence under USA law which renders illegal the introduction of a virus into a computer system. Such viruses become active weeks, months, even years later – when the programmer is absent – often with unpredictable effect.Second Degree Tampering explores the (dis)connections between writing and women’s experience. Key western narratives of w...More ›
September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives
Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter
After September 11, feminists around the world spoke out, wrote for newspapers, for email lists and for the Internet. But in the male-dominated mass media, it was hard to find feminist perspectives. This collection brings together women who discuss the connections between war, terrorism, fundamentalism, racism, global capitalism and male violence. From the USA to Afghanistan, from Pakistan to Pale...More ›
Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, The: Stories from around the World
Munya Andrews
Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards, 2005, USA What do Halloween, Atlantis, Subaru, the American Presidential elections, the Petticoat Lane markets in London, the ship Titanic and atlases all have in common? Each can be traced to the legends of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades. Poets, priests, prophets, shamans, storytellers, artists, singers and historians throughout time have all gazed into the ...More ›
Sexual Decoys
Zillah Eisenstein
In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving critique of United States from the point of view of a US citizen. She charts its most recent forays into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. She argues that these share much with the domestic problems of the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women&...More ›
Sexual Gerrymander, The: Women And The Economics Of Power
Jocelynne Scutt
Gerrymander sb. US 1868 (f. the family name Gerry) A method of arranging electoral districts so that one party will be enabled to elect more representatives than they could on a fair system. —Oxford DictionaryJocelynne Scutt’s insightful analyses of history, politics, and economics pervade this book. Writing across the scholarship on women, she brings to the fore the social and politic...More ›
She's Fantastical
Lucy Sussex and Judith Raphael Buckrich
Shortlisted for the 1995 World Fantasy Award A pregnant spaceman. A witch. A knight-errant princess. The nuns of St Mary Magdalene. A time-traveller. Love and lyrebirds. Dreams and poetry. Philosophy. The creation of the universe. Two very different angels. Were-marsupials......More ›
Shiatsu Therapy For Pregnancy
Bronwyn Whitlocke
Shiatsu is a traditional method of treating illness through stimulating points and meridians with the fingers, thumbs and palms. Shiatsu Therapy for Pregnancy is an instructive manual for pregnant women, practitioners, partners, and birthing partners caring for pregnant women. The author provides practical solutions to a host of problems experienced during and after pregnancy. From the antenata...More ›
Silicon Tongue, The
Beryl Fletcher
The Silicon Tongue follows the award-winning The Word Burner and critically acclaimed The Iron Mouth. These novels explore the relationship between language and identity and tell stories of women’s lives in a time of radical social change. The Silicon Tongue is centred on the life and times of London-born Alice who was brought to New Zealand as a servant in the 1930s. Tricked by the autho...More ›
Skeleton Woman, The
Renée
There doesn’t seem much point in drawing attention to blackbirds or high tides when five thousand people are said to have died in the towers, when people in wheelchairs had to be left by the able-bodied because the lifts weren’t working and there was no time to step a wheelchair down the flights and flights of stairs … The images play on, over and over, as though if they are rep...More ›
Soil Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity
Vandana Shiva
A must-read for anyone who takes the future of the planet seriously, Soil Not Oil dares us to imagine a world where people matter more than profits. Vandana Shiva brilliantly reveals what connects humanity’s most urgent crises—food insecurity, peak oil, and climate change—and why any attempt to solve one without addressing the others will get us nowhere. Condemning industrial b...More ›
Song of the Selkies
Cathie Dunsford
The Edinburgh Festival brings together artists from all over the world, and Cowrie is among them, telling stories and giving readings. But even Cowrie can’t anticipate the chemistry that will begin when a group of traditional storytellers sets off to the Orkney Islands with Ellen, to stay at her coastal family cottages. For Ellen turns out to be Morrigan, and Morrigan is a selkie, living in ...More ›
Speak The Truth, Laughing
Rose Zwi
Shortlisted for Steele Rudd Award 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 Ea...More ›
Spinifex Quiz Book, The
Susan Hawthorne
Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing, 1993 Who invented hieroglyphics? Who did Einstein’s mathematics? Who led the defence of Viet Nam in 40 AD? Who invented the first computer? Who built the pyramid at Giza? Who developed the merino sheep? Who was the first writer in the world? Who invented the wheel? All were women. When the next person asks: Where are all the famou...More ›
Spinster And Her Enemies, The: Feminism And Sexuality 1880-1930
Sheila Jeffreys
Sheila Jeffreys examines the activities of feminist campaigners around such issues as child abuse and prostitution and how these campaigns shaped social purity in the 1880s and 1890s. She demonstrates how the thriving and militant feminism of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was undermined, and asserts that the decline of this feminism was due largely to the promotion of a sexual ideo...More ›
St Suniti And The Dragon
Suniti Namjoshi
Once she had reconciled herself to the view that a garden snake, however beautiful, was not evil, Suniti decided to set about the matter in a more businesslike way. She put an ad in the paper: ‘Elderly gentlewoman seeks to make a bargain with the devil’. Where are good and evil to be found? What is the path to sainthood? Is it through poetry or good deeds? St Suniti talks to angels ...More ›
Still Murder
Finola Moorhead
A SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSICWinner, Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction In love and in war there is killing, but is it still murder?Why has Senior Detective Margot Gorman been assigned to watch over a raving woman in an asylum? Is she being sidelined by a conniving boss? Is it vital police work? And what is Patricia raving about? Does it have anything to do with the dead body discov...More ›
Still Waving
Laurene Kelly
The doubts of yesterday left as soon as I caught my first wave. I felt so strong and powerful and forgot the crap in my life as I skimmed down the face of a wave. 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 leav...More ›
Subsistence Perspective, The: Beyond The Globalised Economy
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies
A product of twenty years of analysis and activism, this unique book poses a radical alternative to the current free-market industrial system. A book of history, theory and polemic, the authors show how, if we are to survive, economies must become needs-based, environmentally sustainable, co-operative and local. They explain how the current capitalist system is none of these things, is inherently ...More ›
Summer Was A Fast Train Without Terminals
Merlinda Bobis
Shortlist, 1995 The Age Book of the Year Award To love in a language prised from my wishbone. To sing a landscape where village girls once burst the moon with giggles. To dance through the fattest eye of a rice-grain. To do all these in peace and war is the wish embodied in Merlinda Bobis’ poetry. From her epic poem Cantata of the Warrior Woman: Daragang Magayon to lyric reflections on lo...More ›
Sybil: The Glide Of Her Tongue
Gillian Hanscombe
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. ...More ›
Taking The Revolution Home: Work Among Women In The Communist Party Of Australia: 1920-1945
Joyce Stevens
Communist women who were active in political struggles of the inter war and war years reflect on the issues, the campaigns and the way in which their political commitment changed their lives. This is a history that allows contemporary activists to consider the ways they might learn from past struggles – both the defeats and the wins. The book includes interviews with women who were activi...More ›
Talking Up: Young Women's Take On Feminism
Rosamund Else-Mitchell and Naomi Flutter
What drives young women and what drives them mad? Twenty-something women talk about living their feminism. What they do, how they do it and why they choose to do it as feminists. The private collides with the public, anger with humour, desire with ideals. Writing themselves into the debate, these young women are talking up.More ›
Tansie
Erika Kimpton
Shortlisted for the APA Design Awards, 1996 Alix Clemeger, sophisticate and internationally famous composer and concert pianist, is the toast of high society. A succession of momentous milestones has determined her life and career. The last is when she meets Tansie Landon. Tansie, beautiful, enigmatic, fragile, is – although not yet successful – an exceptional sculptor. But Tans...More ›
Thanks Girls And Goodbye: The Story Of The Australian Women's Land Army 1942-45
Sue Hardisty
Based on the highly successful ABC television documentary of the same name, this book excavates the history of thousands of women who worked on farms during World War II. City-bred, in the main, and only reluctantly taken on by farming communities, the women proved themselves to be tough, resourceful and indefatigable workers whose efforts kept Australian agriculture alive at a crtitical time. ...More ›
The Iron Mouth
Beryl Fletcher
Top Twenty Title, Listener Women's Book Festival, 1993 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 ...More ›
The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court: Reflections on the Rape Trial of Jacob Zuma
Mmatshilo Motsei
This book is inspired by the courage of a young woman, known variously as ‘Khwezi’ and ‘the complainant', who took a principled decision to lay a charge of rape against Jacob Zuma, a man who was a father-figure, a family friend, a comrade, and the Deputy President of South Africa. She took on the fight against considerable odds. Zuma is one of the most popular and powe...More ›
There Is An Alternative: Subsistence And Worldwide Resistance To Corporate Globalization
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas Faraclas and Claudia von Werlhof
This thought-provoking collection of essays from radical speakers from around the world moves beyond criticism of the current trends of globalization and deregulation to challenge Thatcher-inspired economic rationalists with both theoretical and practical alternatives for our world. If there is no alternative to corporate globalization, doesn’t that mean this society, and our current militar...More ›
Thriller And Me
Merrilee Moss
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 lear...More ›
To Sappho, My Sister: Lesbian Sisters Write About Their Lives
Lee Fleming
In this one-of-a-kind anthology, lesbian sisters from several countries explore their relationships with one another. Through their words and photographs, both well-known and less-famous siblings reveal the many faces of lesbian sisterhood. Here is a fascinating chronicle of what it is like to grow up, come out, laugh, cry, work and live together, as sisters in a family and as lesbians in a w...More ›
Too Rich
Melissa Chan
‘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 riveti...More ›
Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia
Judy Atkinson
Shortlisted, The Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing, 2003 I was running a workshop in the Kimberleys, and in the circle a woman began to speak from a place of deep pain and despair. She described herself as bad, dirty, ugly, words she had taken into herself from childhood experiences of abuse. I lent forward and sang her a song. ‘How could anyone eve...More ›
Travelling Alone Together / Ruby Camp
Miriel Lenore / Louise Crisp
The mask reaches below my shoulders & the pink stone she carries airborne nestles like a heart in the song of possibilities 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...More ›
Two Lips Went Shopping
Lizz Murphy
Two huge lips went shopping/on a pogo stick/for a red satin handbag/coordinated in colour/with their cupid’s bowThis 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 ...More ›
Unsettling the Land
Suzanne Bellamy and Susan Hawthorne
Birds and water–a pair that indicates / vitality, a dynamic system, a system // that changes season by season. But / in our unsettling of the land we have // removed the seasons and the birds Susan Hawthorne Unsettling the Land is a reflection on the plight of the land in these drought-addled times, conjuring through both text and illustration the complex relationships that create...More ›
Vaccination Against Pregnancy: Miracle Or Menace
Judith Richter
Judith Richter examines the research into a new class of birth control methods in which the body is challenged by immuno-contraceptives or anti-fertility ‘vaccines’. A model book that challenges unorthodox and dangerous research on women’s bodies and on their lives. A book that has wrought changes to research and stopped further development of medicines that create harm. Recommen...More ›
Voices Of The Survivors
Patricia Easteal
I hope with the women who break their silence and contribute to this survey some very much needed changes will take place. God knows we need them.This book is the result of a nationwide survey of 2300 letters from women and 97 from men about rape and sexual abuse. Patricia Easteal analysed the materials primarily from women who have experienced abuse from husbands, estranged husbands, relatives, d...More ›
Walking Through Fire
Nawal El Saadawi
Nawal El Saadawi, internationally known for her novels, short stories and writings on women, now writes about her life, about the reactions in the Arab world to her writings on sex; about her imprisonment under Sadat and her struggles against oppression and discrimination.Beginning her working life as a rural doctor, she goes on to set up women’s organisations and publish magazines later ban...More ›
Wee Girls: Women Writing From An Irish Perspective
Lizz Murphy
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 u...More ›
White Turtle
Merlinda Bobis
Co-winner, Steele Rudd Award, best collection of short stories, 2000Winner, National Book Award (fiction), Manila Critics Circle, 2000An anomalous kiss. A white turtle ferrying the dreams of the dead. A working siesta in a five-star hotel. A woman’s twelve-metre hair trawling corpses from a river. Or a queue of longings in Darlinghurst. These enigmatic tales are stories of chance and hope. A...More ›
Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Bio/diversity
Susan Hawthorne
Best Book, Australian Book Review, 2002 Dominant culture knowledge diminishes the knowledge and understanding of the powerless, and because knowledges of the powerless are regarded with contempt, the powerful are cut off from greater understanding. The powerful suffer from the syndrome of Dominant Culture Stupidities.Looking for a new way forward? Or a different explanation of what is current...More ›
Will To Violence: The Politics Of Personal Behaviour
Susanne Kappeler
Sexual violence, racial violence, and the hatred of foreigners: how should we understand these and other forms of violent human behaviour? A brilliantly original analysis of violence in its many forms. Susanne Kappeler argues that violence is not just a social phenomenon which can be analysed scientifically: rather, it is a type of action which individuals ‘will’ or choose to perform. ...More ›
Wings of Angels, The: A Memoir Of Madness
Sandy Jeffs
Not since Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton has anyone written so candidly about madness. Sandy Jeffs' poetry has a stark dignity, capable of conveying "shudders of intense fear". Yet in the midst of her rigours, she can access a voice both wild and funny. Sandy Jeffs' leavening sense of humour peoples her darkness with the sirens of the supermarket, a tinsel paradise and high-tech technicolour Ar...More ›
Wire Dancing
Patricia Sykes
Commended, Anne Elder AwardCommended, Mary Gilmore Awardit takes neither dynamite / nor earth quake /the business of circus / is its own upheaval Circus as drama and risk, as exuberance and irrepressible spirit, is the central metaphor Patricia Sykes uses to open a world where public and private share the same tightrope. The poems speak of women searching for footholds along the spectrums of ...More ›
Woman As Wombs: Reproductive Technology And The Battle Over Women's Freedom
Janice Raymond
A scathing analysis of high-tech biomedical reproductive techniques. Women as Wombs provides groundbreaking insights into the debate over reproductive technology and its ethical, legal, and political implications. Raymond asserts that far from being liberatory issues of ‘choice’, these techniques – including in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and sex selection – are a threa...More ›
Women And The Law: Judicial Attitudes As They Impact On Women
Anne Thacker
An insightful and illuminating compilation of essays generated from the ground-breaking ‘Women and the Law ‘ conference. This conference held a torch above what was a current public debate focussing especially on judicial attitudes and their impact on women. This selection of conference papers are published to inform a wider audience and remind us all that the work of refor...More ›
Women And The Rule Of Law
International Commission of Jurists
A fascinating collection of conference papers regarding women’s access to justice, and the promises Australia made at the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women.Includes pieces on issues such as Equality before the Law, Aboriginal Women and the Law, and Women’s Rights and Human Rights, by Hilary Charlesworth, Elizabeth Evatt, Sally Brown, Jocelyn Newman, David Malcolm, Moira Rayner, an...More ›
Women In New Asia: From Pain To Power
Yayori Matsui Translated by Noriko Toyokaw And Carolyn Francis
This remarkable book charts the effects of the economic boom on women across Asia. Yayori Matsui, one of Japan’s leading journalists, demonstrates how Asian women are confronting rapid economic development which is accompanied by widespread infringement of human rights.Matsui explores the impact of globalization and trafficking of women, sexual violence and so-called ‘development proje...More ›
Women's Circus
Adrienne Liebmann, Jen Jordan, Deb Lewis, Louise Radcliffe-Smith, Patricia Sykes and Jean Taylor
Have you ever wanted to join the circus? Wondered what goes on behind the scenes? What trapeze artists think about as they swing through the air? Reading this book lets you become an armchair acrobat. Established in 1991 as a community theatre project to work with survivors of sexual assault, the Women’s Circus has gone on to create innovative shows, toured to China in 1995 and...More ›
Women's Studies, Women's Lives: Theory And Practice In South And Southeast Asia
Committee On Women's Studies In Asia
Women’s Studies scholars and practitioners from South and Southeast Asia share their thoughts on their lives as women and on the impact of Women’s Studies on their work and their lives.What are the critical issues facing women in Asian countries? How are women’s needs reflected in women’s centres and academic institutions? What has been written and by whom? Is there a new A...More ›
Word Burners, The
Beryl Fletcher
A SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSICWinner, Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Book, SE Asia & South Pacific, 1992How do you decide to live? Or do others make that decision for you? In this lyrical novel, Beryl Fletcher explores the paradoxes of modern life. As a new academic, Julia finds her beliefs challenged by her students, reinforced by her friend’s mistreatment and dismissed by her fami...More ›
Wounded Breast, The: Intimate Journeys Through Cancer
Evelyne Accad
Winner, Prix Phenix de Litterature, 2001 (Voyages en 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....More ›
Writing A New World: Two Centuries Of Australian Women Writers
Dale Spender
OUT OF PRINT Through their letters home and their diaries, the first European women who came to Australia were literally writing a new world. A lively and provocative history of two hundred years of Australian settlement as seen through the records of women writers. With characteristic verve and style Dale Spender challenges received wisdom. She presents over 200 women writers and an ima...More ›
Zelda
Zelda D' Aprano
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 Buildi...More ›
Zest for Life: Lesbians' Experiences of Menopause
Jennifer Kelly
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 despit...More ›