The Rust Red Land

Suniti Namjoshi

What do you do when you fall in love with your next-door neighbour?  You peer at each other through a hole in the fence and eventually climb over.

Sybil is a member of The Good-Hearted Gardeners, a Society for Well-Meaning Efforts for the Betterment of Language and the Salvation of the Planet, which her lover, Demo, is allowed to join.  It’s funded by MI5, who ask them to monetise and weaponise the English language.  Soon afterwards they discover that English is even more widespread than anyone had thought.  Even the birds and the fish, the cows and the kangaroos can speak it – when they choose. The Good-Hearted Gardeners set about trying to talk to anyone – crows, magpies, robins, goldfish, cows, horses, rats, mice – who will talk to them.

With climate change and technology gone mad, what’s in store is a frightening scenario that threatens everyone – humans, animals, plants.  Can the headlong rush to extinction be halted?

When the birds, and the cows and the horses and the mice and all the rest come together, much is made possible. But at what cost? Will the planet and its inhabitants be saved?

A comedic allegory for our future.

NOVEMBER 2023 | ISBN 9781922964007 | Paperback | 112 pages | 148 x 210 mm

Robin Morgan

She sleeps naked, wearing pearls, to play her part.

Robin Morgan’s latest collection is a tour de force: poetry that thrills the intellect and stirs the emotions. Robin shares her joys and intimacies which take centre stage and laments ‘the ringmaster’s desertion’ as death hovers in the wings and aging unfolds, while laughing at the pain / through the gridlocked traffic in my brain. 

Light and shadow, sleep and wakefulness, holding tight and letting go, regret and contentment, order and chaos, battle it out simultaneously through the interplanetary and domestic worlds.

So trust disorder’s order,
be glad all permanence
is temporary, since
no matter what you lose
you gain: chaos composts
grief and love together.

19 SEPTEMBER 2023 | ISBN 9781925950830 | Paperback | 148mm x 210 mm | 64 pages

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 | 248 pages | 228 x 152 mm

Pauline Hopkins (editor)

Feminists have long known that it’s all connected. The stories, the families, the country, the River.In this anthology, poets and short story writers create worlds with words. This book includes stories that draw on mythic traditions rewritten for our time. There are thieves, grandmothers, teenagers breaking out, dark caves to explore and real estate to sell; there are mysteries from the grave, experiments that go wrong, road trips, a circus, an opera, families that break and families that hold together; there are birds and animals and babies, and there is the pandemic. There is stillness and movement; closeness and distance.

This eclectic range of authors brings their unique perspectives to storytelling as they each grapple to understand the past and meet the challenges ahead, daring to share their joy and pain, their fear and anger, their hopes and disappointments. These are women who dare to remember, to claim their own stories and to wonder what may have been.

Memory’s a burden, forgetting even more so.
—‘Lost Bird’ by Merlinda Bobis

All the stories I can think of turn out to be full of traps for the unsuspecting.
—‘Keep Telling’ by Marion Molteno

DECEMBER 2022 | ISBN 9781925950564 | Paperback | 248 pages | 228 mm x 152 mm

Carol Lefevre

The wooden stair was just as she had imagined it, even down to the creak in its second-to-bottom step. But the tower room was lovely beyond anything she could have dreamed – afloat at the level of the treetops, it seemed to Dorelia more like a boat than a room, with everything that might trouble her banished.

Widowed after a long marriage, Dorelia MacCraith swaps the family home for a house with a tower, and there, raised above the run of daily life, sets out to rewrite the stories of old women poorly treated by literature.

Throughout this winding story, Dorelia and the elderly artist Elizabeth Bunting are sustained by a friendship that reaches back to their years at art school, and bonded by the secrets of a six-month period when they painted together in France.

The loneliness of not belonging, of being cut adrift by grief, betrayal, or old age, binds these twelve connected stories into a dazzling composite novel. Within its complex crossings and connections, young and old inhabit separate yet overlapping firmaments; grown children, though loved and loving, cannot imagine their parents’ young lives. For most, the past is not past, but exerts a magnetic pull, while future happiness hinges on retreat, or escape.

OCTOBER 2022 | 9781925950625 | Paperback | 300 pages | 216 x 140 mm

Lynne Spender (ed)

These heart-warming tales of trials tribulations and trysts at Australia’s only ocean pool ­ just for women – will make you want to dive in, naked at midnight, to revel in all that joyous aquatic camaraderie.

—Kathy Lette, Writer, ocean swimmer and shameless sea pool skinny dipper.

The history of Coogee’s McIver’s Ladies Baths – Australia’s only ocean pool reserved for women – is eloquently told in these stories from women who have found friendship, sanctuary and sheer pleasure as they have gathered and swum at ‘the Women’s Pool’.

Humorously told tales of encounters at the pool sit together with stories of sorrow and regret. Older women tell of the history of the pool and the famed ‘Thursday Married Ladies Club’; younger women detail their delight at the natural beauty, the safety and the sense of freedom that the pool offers. No aquatic manspreading here.

In this book, women from a diverse range of cultures reveal the role that the women’s pool has played in their lives. From the ‘365ers’ who brave the elements all year round to the younger women who seek summer sun on the rocks, a picture emerges of a place of natural beauty and a space for women to simply be themselves.

The ancient seasonal cycles find their own rhythm at our pool, at our place of ‘women’s business’. In the vastness of the largest Continent on Earth, it is a tiny space of companionship if wanted, or solitude if needed.

—Mary Goslett

The Baths welcomes us to its shelves of stone and grass for drying off, to doze, to talk, to preen, to gaze into the aqua green, ivory and midnight blue pool, to the rocks and outcrops either side, and the Pacific Ocean beyond.

—Jane Messer

NOVEMBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950458 | Paperback | 140 x 210 mm | 160 pp

Merlinda Bobis

An oriole sings to a dying father. A bleeding-heart dove saves the day. A crow wakes a woman’s resolve. Owls help a boy endure isolation. Cockatoos attend the laying of the dead. Always there are birds in these linked stories that pay homage to kindness and the kinship among women and the planet. From Australia to the Philippines, across cultures and species, kindness inspires resilience amidst loss and grief. Being together ignites resistance against violence. We pull through in the company of others.

Kindness cannot self-isolate. It moves both ways and all ways, like breath.

MAY 2021 | 9781925950304 | Paperback | 152 x 229 mm | 220 pages

Merlinda Bobis is an utterly distinctive voice in Australian letters. In our ironic and cynical times, here are stories of heartfelt feeling — fulsome, tender and unabashed — in which grief and hope are equally things with feathers.

— Gail Jones, award-winning novelist

These stories are beyond beautiful and deeply moving, raw, tender, brimming with love and pain, death and life. Like “lit diamonds,” to borrow a phrase from Bobis’s own exquisite language. I love how birds are everywhere in attendance, signalling ancestral wisdom, pointing to the strength of the human spirit and its deep ties with all of life. I love how each story feels like a tonic for our time, illuminated from within by so much grace and kindness, it gives hope and inspires awe.

— Jennifer Ackerman, bestselling author of The Genius of Birds

WINNER, CANBERRA CRITICS’ CIRCLE
SHORTLISTED, CHRISTINA STEAD PRIZE FOR FICTION, NSW PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARDS 2022

Sarah Brill

1999. Winter. Bondi. Harry’s been on the streets so long he could easily forget what time is. So Harry keeps an eye on it. Every morning. Then he heads to the beach to chat with the gulls. Or he wanders through the streets in search of food, clothes, Jules. When the girl on the bus sees him, lonely and cold in the bus shelter that he calls home, she thinks about how she can help. She decides to write a symphony for him.

So begins a poignant and gritty tale of homelessness and shelter, of the realities of loneliness and hunger, and of the hopes and dreams of those who often go unnoticed on our streets. This is the story of two outcasts – one a young woman struggling to find her place in an alien world, one an older man seeking refuge and solace from a life in tatters. It is also about the transformative power of care and friendship, and the promise of escape that music holds.

An uplifting and heartbreaking story that demands empathy. Amid the struggles to belong and fit in, we are reminded that small acts of kindness matter. And big dreams are possible.

MARCH 2020 | ISBN 9781925950069 | Paperback | 225 pages | 234 x 153 mm

Simple, rippling, meditative prose details a miracle of kindness.

—Carmel Bird