Spinifex Press has sought to make the voices of Indigenous women heard

3 Oct

In media discussions about the VOICE, there have been many factual errors, including the claim that colonisation has not had a negative effect on Indigenous peoples by Jacinta Nampajinpa Price at a Press Club appearance. The evidence from Australia and abroad is that this claim cannot be sustained. Over more than 30 years of publishing, Spinifex Press has sought to make the voices of Indigenous women heard as well as those of women who have lived and worked over long periods of time with Indigenous women from different parts of Australia. Spinifex has also published works by and for Indigenous women in other countries. As we approach the referendum, it is important that as many of us as possible inform ourselves about this history.

Here is a list of books you might want to share with others, especially those who feel uncertain about how to vote in the referendum.

You can also download a flyer here.

Featured

sale

Karu: Growing up Gurindji

A$24.95 A$29.95

Biddy Wavehill Yamawurr, Felicity Meakins, Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Violet Wadrill

Gurindji country is located in the southern Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. Gurindji people became well known in the 1960s and 1970s due to their influence on Australian politics and the Indigenous land rights movement. They were instrumental in gaining equal wages for Aboriginal cattle station employees and they were also the first Aboriginal group to recover control of their traditional lands.

In Karu, Gurindji women describe their child-rearing practices. Some have a spiritual basis, while others are highly practical in nature, such as the use of bush medicines. Many Gurindji ways of raising children contrast with non-Indigenous practices because they are deeply embedded in an understanding of country and family connections. This book celebrates children growing up Gurindji and honours those Gurindji mothers, grandmothers, assistant teachers and health workers who dedicate their lives to making that possible.

2019 | ISBN 9781925581836 | Paperback | 210 x 297 mm | 96 pp | Four colour + QR codes

Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, And Will Be

A$39.95

Diane Bell

In Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin Diane Bell invites her readers into the complex and contested world of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Ngarrindjeri of South Australia; teases out the meanings and misreadings of the written sources; traces changes and continuities in oral accounts; challenges assumptions about what Ngarrindjeri women know, how they know it, and how outsiders may know what is to be known. Wurruwarrin: knowing and believing.

In 1995, a South Australian Royal Commission found Ngarrindjeri women to have “fabricated” their beliefs to stop the building of a bridge from Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island. By 2001, in federal court, the women were vindicated as truth-tellers. In 2009, the site was registered, but scars remain of that shameful moment.

In the Preface to the New Edition, Diane Bell looks to the world that “will be”, where talented, committed Ngarrindjeri leaders are building the infrastructure for future generations of the Ngarrindjeri nation and challenging the very foundation of the State of South Australia.

The Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008 and its evocation of an inclusive “us” has propelled the Ngarrindjeri on the path to “practical reconciliation”. But progress has been uneven. Petty politics, procrastinations and prevarications stand in the way of its realisation.

Diane Bell writes as an insider who is clear about the bases of her engagement with her Ngarrindjeri friends and colleagues. The story will continue to unfold and Diane Bell will be there. There is unfinished business.

Awards

Winner, NSW Premier’s Gleebook Award for Cultural and Literary Criticism

Finalist, The Age Book of the Year

Finalist, Queensland Premier’s History Award

Finalist, Gold Medal of the Australian Literary Society

Finalist, Kiriyama Award

2014 | 9781742199184 | Paperback | 234 x 152 mm | 730 pp

OUT OF STOCK | Available as an ebook

Listen To Ngarrindjeri Women Speaking

A$34.95

Diane Bell

When the Ngarrindjeri women of South Australia asked Diane Bell if she would work with them in the running of some workshops to develop a booklet about culture and governance, none of them realised quite where it would take them. This book is the result. It has developed from a booklet to a book that outlines their visions for the future. A future in which their culture is respected, their stories heard, their laws carried out.

2008 | ISBN 9781876756697 | Paperback | 248 x 176 mm | 145 pp

Holding Yawulyu: White Culture and Black Women's Law

A$32.95

Zohl dé 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 knowledge, customs and skills on to their children and youth. From 1999 to 2001, Zohl dé Ishtar lived and worked intimately with a group of thirteen women elders to establish a vibrant intergenerational cultural knowledge transmission program: the Kapululangu Women's Law and Culture Centre. Through this profound experience Zohl identified 'Living Culture', the cultural energy which is created when individuals live their culture to its fullest expression enabling them to transform their worlds even when to do so seems impossible. Her profound radical feminist analysis of the socio-cultural context surrounding this Indigenous women's initiative challenges White attitudes and behaviours and offers a deeper comprehension to those who aspire to be involved in collaborative projects with Indigenous peoples. A lyrical and passionate book.

2005 | ISBN 9781742199795 | Paperback | 220 x 140 mm | 425 pp

Sold Out

The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: Stories from Around the World

A$34.95

Munya Andrews

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 night skies and come under their spell.

Inspiring and captivating diverse civilisations, this star cluster has left an indelible mark on the human psyche. Munya Andrews, a Bardi woman from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, examines the myths and legends of the Pleiades from Indigenous and ancient cultures around the world. Designated at M45 on astronomy charts and maps, the nine visible stars are named after the Seven Sisters from Ancient Greek mythology, and their parents, Atlas and Pleione.

Around the world, people looked to the skies to tell them when to sow and harvest their crops, and when the rains would come. The ‘sailing stars’ have guided explorers and endless migrations of people. In Old Europe, among the Ainu of Japan and in Indigenous Australia the Pleiades were associated with water and birds. They become Oceanids, Ice Maidens, Water Girls and the Subaru. The Parthenon in Athens, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and the Mayan Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, are all said to be aligned with the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades will amaze and awe you, and above all will remind you that all of humanity shares the night skies.

2004 | ISBN 9781876756451 | Paperback | 217 x 138 mm | 368 pp

OUT OF STOCK | REPRINTING | EBOOK AVAILABLE

Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia

A$29.95

Judy Atkinson

‘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 ever tell you, you are anything less than beautiful ...” While sitting with her, as the words settled into her soul, another woman said to the circle: you are recreating song lines — from trauma trails. I was honoured by this description of my work.’

Providing a startling answer to the questions of how to solve the problems of generational trauma, Trauma Trails moves beyond the rhetoric of victimhood, and provides inspiration for anyone concerned about Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities today. Beginning with issues of colonial dispossession, Judy Atkinson also sensitively deals with trauma caused by abuse, alcoholism and drug dependency.

Then, through the use of a culturally appropriate research approach called Dadirri: listening to one another, Judy presents and analyses the stories of a number of Indigenous people. From her analysis of these “stories of pain, stories of healing”, she is able to point both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers in the direction of change and healing.

2002 | ISBN 9781876756222 | Paperback | 217 x 140 mm | 324 pp

BESTSELLER

Daughters of the Dreaming

A$34.95

Diane Bell

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 responsibilities in land, a power base as independent economic producers and a high degree of control over their own lives in marriage, residence, economic production, reproduction and sexuality. Living in the community, developing friendships that have spanned decades, award-winning author Diane Bell shines a light on the importance of women's role in Australian Aboriginal desert culture.

As maintainers of land, ritual and culture, Indigenous women of central Australia share the patterns of their lives in this remarkable and enduring book. Daughters of the Dreaming (first published in 1983) is an outstanding study of Aboriginal women's lives, and a fine precursor to her award-winning Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin.

2002 | ISBN 9781876756154 | Paperback | 230 x 150 mm | 242 pp

Kick the Tin

A$22.95

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 homes as a virtual slave, struggled through relationships and suffered with anxiety and mental illness.

2000 | ISBN 9781875559954 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 140 pp

Featured

Daughters of the Pacific

A$29.95

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 global consequences. Without understanding that history, the world will be doomed to repeat those mistakes.

1994 | ISBN 9781875559329 | Paperback | 250 x 180 mm | 282 pp

sale

Cowrie

A$11.95 A$19.95

Cathie Dunsford

Cowrie travels to Hawaii and as she circles the island in an old pick-up truck we discover the tokens of her heritage. Sensual and sexual language brings the earth to life, and Cowrie too as she tests the limits of her endurance and explores her erotic connection with the earth. Island life erupts through the descriptions and you can taste the tropical fruit, the fish cooked in banana leaves and coconut, and smell the sweet fresh ginger.

1994 | ISBN 9781875559282 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 123 pp

ALSO OF INTEREST

Featured

Chinongwa

A$29.95

Lucy Mushita

My only dream that’s ever come true, and one I relish with a vengeance, is being able to whistle like a man. I was told a woman fit to be married should not whistle. I don’t want to be married so the more they point at me, the louder I whistle. My load is still heavy on my head, but my heart is light, for I know, like the sun, that I shall rise every morning. Be it cloudy, cold or wet, I shall not fail to rise. And I shall whistle as loudly as I like. To me, it is the sound of freedom.

In the village where Chinongwa lives, her family, displaced from their lands, are very poor. One desperate solution to hunger is to trade young daughters into marriage. At first, to their shame, her father’s and aunt’s attempts to marry off their youngest child fail. No one is interested in this small, thin girl. Eventually, a childless woman, Amai Chitsva, offers Chinongwa as a second wife to her own husband who is old enough to be the girl’s grandfather. Chinongwa is forced to grow up very fast and rely on her survival instincts. She does her best to do what is expected of her and become a good wife and mother, but being very young, very alone, and a girl, the odds are stacked against her. Eventually, after spending her whole life doing the bidding of others, all Chinongwa wants is her independence. But how can one gain such a thing as a woman? Will she ever truly be free?

JULY 2023 | ISBN 9781925950816 | Paperback | 152 x 228 mm| 248 pages

Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined

A$39.95

Cherry Smiley

Decolonizing feminism always prioritizes the collective liberation of Indigenous and other women and names patriarchy as the central component of women’s oppression.

In Not Sacred, Not Squaws, Cherry Smiley analyses colonization and proposes a decolonized feminism enlivened by Indigenous feminist theory.

Building on the work of grassroots radical feminist theorists, Cherry Smiley outlines a female-centered theory of colonization and describes the historical and contemporary landscape in which male violence against Indigenous women in Canada and New Zealand is the norm. She calls out ‘sex work’ as a patriarchal colonizing practice and a form of male violence against women.

Questioning her own uncritical acceptance of the historical social and political status of Indigenous women in Canada – which she now recognizes as male-centred Indigenous theorizing – she examines the roles of culture and tradition in the oppression of Indigenous women and constructs an alternative decolonizing feminist methodology.

This book is a refreshing feminist contemporary challenge to the patriarchal ideology that governs our world and a vigorous and irreverent defence against the attempts to silence Indigenous radical feminists.

APRIL 2023 | ISBN 9781925950649 | Paperback | 257 pages

Download the flyer

Spinifex Press

Spinifex Press has sought to make the voices of Indigenous women heard

Awards

ALSO OF INTEREST

Robyn Rowland launch speech for Harvesting Darkness

Vale Maria Mies (1931-2023)