Bøger udgivet af Spinifex Press

Mrs Angel Rendle-Short said that a book given to her daughter, Francesca, as an English textbook at school would teach her to be a permissive rebel. (Courier Mail, 1975)There are some things you should never speak about.In Francesca Rendle-Short's family, silence was golden. So to break ranks and tell stories about her peculiar family life and her mother's moral crusading should send this daughter straight to hell in a ball of smoke and flame along with all those books her mother wanted to burn.Some stories are hard to tell. But like reading, writing stories changes everything.Set in 1970s Queensland and also contemporary times, Bite Your Tongue is an elegant mix of novel and memoir that is in turn harrowing and delightful. It threads together the childhood story of the fictional Glory Solider, with the thoughts and experiences of the adult author, Francesca Rendle-Short, as she looks more deeply into her mother's activism at the time of facing her mother's death.Can a daughter forgive her mother for making her a pawn in her conservative moral crusades? Can greater understanding reinstate love? What does a mother owe a daughter and a daughter a mother?Bite Your Tongue is the story of the deep bond that exists between a daughter and her mother, no matter how difficult that mother might be. It is also a story of acceptance.

Invisible Women of Prehistory opens up the unknown and suppressed histories of women. Based on many years research into ancient history and prehistory, Judy Foster takes on the whole world. She argues that three million years of peace, a period when womenOs position is society was much higher than it is now, preceded the last six thousand years of war in which men have come to hold power. Her work is based on close readings of archaeological evidence from around the world, much of it appearing in the last decade or two. She also writes about the academic resistance to these ideas and to the archaeological work of Marija Gimbutas.

The Abbotsford Convent becomes more than the setting, 'the grey mince-meat walls', of this collection. It emerges as presence, intimate and familiar as well as constraining and forbidding. But it is childhood itself which becomes the subterranean geography and pulse. Subject to an overworld of lay and religious adults, 'the razor of power having such adult force', the voices in these poems create multiple pathways through memory and time as they map and navigate the many-stranded mysteries of their institutionalised lives.

In the tradition of Gertrude Stein, Finola Moorhead set about writing A Handwritten Modern Classic in 1977. The result is musings and criticisms on protestors clashing with police over freeways, political change, conservatism, Malcolm Fraser, what love can do for you, and whether the old hate the young. With discussions on the politics of suicide and unshaven armpits, one of Australia's most intriguing experimental writers has set her thoughts to writing.

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 studied around the world for its transformative creations.

In My Sister Chaos two sisters escape an unnamed war-torn country into separate lives of exile. The cartographer is obsessed with keeping the world in order, but finds it unraveling under her own demands. Her sister, an artist, arrives unexpectedly. Her very presence is a sign of chaos for the cartographer. But in spite of this, the sister has a firm grip on the real world, and a greater connection to the past. Chaos and order in tension provide the scaffolding for this compelling work of fiction. Presented within a world of obsession and trauma it asks whether any of us is immune to the forces of destruction.

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 their sacred sites in the Hindmarsh Island, Murray Mouth and Goolwa area. When they did, it became the subject of a series of court cases, legal decisions, media speculation, anthropological disputation and parliamentary conflict, ending in 2001 with a vindication of their words.

Not since Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton has anyone written so candidly about madness. Sandy Jeffs' poetry has a stark dignity, capable of conveying "e;shudders of intense fear"e;. 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 Armageddon. After all, God is only a word and angels, although mad, sing the wanderer into paradise.

Remember The Tarantella is a remarkable work. It's learned and frivolous, female not feminine, silly and serious. Written in several strands of narrative, the many characters create a space as if reading were a dance party. Story is not the main objective. Private conversations and thoughts are always within earshot of the rhythm of others, like the stamping of feet and the beat of the music. This is concerto-like poetry; many instruments of different tones assist the reader to know who is who.

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.

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 and lesbian history, Love Upon the Chopping Board explores the personal and political of lesbianism in Japan and Australia.

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 o '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? Professor Scrutari's fieldwork begins. Her notebooks fill. And the mystery mounts: disturbing odours that no air cleanser will disperse, turbulent faculty meetings, tenure politics, intrigue around women's bodies, and a strange ginger cat. The mix is complicated by secret student alliances, predatory priests, the end of a marriage and new love, an imperious college president, a lumbering dean, a faction-ridden Religious Studies Department, a radical mass and a dissident feminist liturgy.

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 safety that helped her to survive.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is based on the relationship between mind, body and emotions. Chinese Medicine for Women takes a common-sense approach to women's health based on these principles. A practitioner of shiatsu therapy, acupuncturist and TCM herbalist, Bronwyn Whitlocke outlines the practices and applications for women's health, including stress, diet and lifestyle. There are chapters on menstruation, pregnancy, menopause and infertility, as well as on migraines, colds, obesity and depression. Bronwyn Whitlocke is also the author of Shiatsu Therapy for Pregnancy.

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.

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 politics, power, history, culture and relationships. Theirs are performances of celebration and hope as they wire dance through circumcision and incest, madness and suicide, genocide and war. There is passion and resistance, hot comedy and fire in the belly. Falling is the first victory, balance is the ultimate skill.

Senior Detective Margot Gorman has been assigned to watch over a raving woman in an asylum. What could a madwoman know? And Peter, the sportsman, can he become a warrior in Vietnam? With a deft hand, the author challenges the traditional stereotypes of a crime novel with questions of politics, patriarchy, sanity and murder. First published in 1991, Still Murder was widely praised by reviewers for being a 'cross-over' novel, bringing together literary and crime styles of writing and narrative. This feminist classic edition has an introduction by Marion Campbell and an Afterword by the author.

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 that soar and wreck themselves at the base of cliffs, Robyn Rowland takes us into a raw and exultant world.

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 - there are many skeins to be unravelled. A complex and intriguing novel that deals with the selfhood of women, it ranges from musings on the Amazons to a self-sufficient community in Australia's womenslands. There is mystery and philosophical enquiry in money, madness, motherhood and much more.

Zest for Life draws on lesbians' experiences of menopause to highlight how lesbians, particularly at midlife, are invisibilised in society at large. Many writers and researchers have critically analysed the medical construction of menopause, yet even they fail to ask whether the issues are the same for lesbians. Zest for Life includes the voices of lesbians who tell us that despite lesbian invisibility and homophobia, many are resisting current standards that exclude them. The experiences of these women challenge negative, stereotypical views of menopause and add a new positive dimension to the presently narrow and medicalised view of women at midlife. An important uplifting book both for lesbians and heterosexual women as well as health professionals which shows that menopause need not be a time of despair.

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 threat to women's basic human rights.

An 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. Alternately mythic, wistful or quirky, Merlinda Bobis' tales resonate with an original and confident storytelling voice. Published as The Kissing in the United States.

Julie is getting her life back together after the tragedy that destroyed her family. She has a passion for surfing, and is making new friends and finally starting to feel like she belongs. But when her brother Toby wants to leave Sydney and return to the bush to live, and Aunt Jean becomes unwell, Julie fears she is losing whatOs left of her family, and wonders if she is being punished for being happy. While Julie continues to be besieged with dramas, she also finds an inner strength, and vows to stop crying and make this her laughing year.

Modewarre is the indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories - her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place,in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. It sweeps its subjects along in a flow of striking images and strong feelings, these buoyed by an intelligent sense of poetic structure and modulated by a sometimes ironic eye.

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 traditions, the reader can feel the rock of the sea, taste the food, and fear the attacks on the peace flotilla as it approaches Moruroa Atoll. Dive into a luscious feast of language and imagery.

In this book, Mary Lucille Sullivan asks whether the concept of sex work as 'a job like any other' matches the reality. Discussing the practicalities of brothels as regular businesses, the author unearths astounding facts about both the legal and illegal sectors. Covering issues such as violence, organised crime, women's health, and mainstream businesses, involvement in the sex trade.

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 its 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, her life and her family. And the story of a family's struggle with a daughter/sister they can never hope to understand.

A vivid desert odyssey; the falling woman travels through a haunting landscape of memory, myth and mental maps. Told in three voice, Stella, Estella and Estelle, this is an inspiring story drawn from childhood memories, imagined worlds and the pressing realities of daily life. The Falling Woman charts one woman's journey into the heartland. It is a journey taken across the desert, into the heart of memory, and into the mythic heart, that place to which we return in times of crisis.

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.

Breath is an origin story before 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 destruction to regeneration. earth roaring, water roaring and this cyclone inside