Last weekend I went to a staged reading performance at the State Library of NSW. The play, Her Brilliant Career, is about Miles Franklin and written by Alice Spigelman. According to the event spiel, The State Library was a home away from home for Miles where she often arranged to have tea with one of … Continue reading Her Brilliant Career | Alice Spigelman #Play
The Edith Readalong has been my priority of late. But before I got started with it, I was determined to finish a few of the half read books by my bed which included a trip to Nigeria, dabbling with some poetry and a peek inside a leper colony. Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, … Continue reading June Mini Reviews
Mary Gaunt's first short story collection The Moving Finger (1895) contains seven stories. I read the two Christmas themed ones back in December last year. These were read with a seasonal lens in mind. The following five stories have been read using my 'female experience' lens as they will be part of a post that will end up … Continue reading The Moving Finger | Mary Gaunt #AWWshortstories
Mary Gaunt^ This post was originally conceived for the Australian Women Writers Challenge and posted on their site on the 18th May 2022. A big thank you to Bill for offering me the chance to be one of his incredible guest posters. I'm honoured to be part of such illustrious company and to be involved … Continue reading Mary Gaunt – an #AWWbiography
East Gippsland panorama | Image source Native-Born, according to Wikipedia, regularly appears in Australian anthologies. However I had never come across it until an article in The Conversation last year when Donna Mazza^ referenced it. Mazza declared that, Native-Born...is still startlingly relevant to contemporary ecofeminism by subtly linking the discovery and cremation of a dead … Continue reading Native-Born | Eve Langley #AWWpoem
1980 should have been a good year for the Soviet Union. Black Inc. has been publishing books in their Shortest History series since 2012. The Shortest History of the Soviet Union by Shelia Fitzpatrick is the sixth book to be published. My studies (at school and university) focused on Russian history leading up to and … Continue reading The Shortest History of the Soviet Union | Sheila Fitzpatrick | AWWhistory
The Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home sleeps deeply on this summer night. The heat trapped in its brick walls radiates outwards, through the skin of its painted facade. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is set in an aged care home in Western Sydney. It's run by a Sri Lankan refugee, Maya and her husband, Zakhir. The … Continue reading Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens | Shankari Chandran #AWWfiction
Laura Palmer-Archer c.1904 | John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland We were married at six in the morning, and now my brand-new husband and myself are starting to our station home, sixty-five miles from the little Queensland township. When the Classics Club announced their latest Dare - Love is in the Air, I went … Continue reading A Bush Honeymoon | Laura M. Palmer-Archer #AWWshortstory
During Bill @Australian Legend's Gen 4 Reading Week, both he and Lisa posted about anthologies that fitted the week/gen in question. I also have an anthology that I had looked into for the week, but unlike Lisa, I only had time to read one of the stories in the collection and ran out of time … Continue reading The Penguin Anthology of Australian Women’s Writing #AWWanthology
Even with months of planning and anticipation, Bill @The Australian Legend's Gen 4 Reading Week has still caught me by surprise! Bill describes Gen 4 as Australian "women who began writing in the 1960s, 70s and 80s." Postmodernism and Magic Realism were some of their tools of trade, but for Bill, this generation is defined … Continue reading Collected Stories | Shirley Hazzard #AWWshortstories
Gillian Mears often likened herself to a Clarence Valley butcherbird, a creature filled with beautiful song who could also peck out the eyes of fledglings. I have put off writing this book response for weeks now. Reading Leaping Into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears by Bernadette Brennan was such a tremendous example of how to … Continue reading Leaping Into Waterfalls | Bernadette Brennan #AWWbiography
It was a comfortable place, the wide verandah at Warwingie, a place much used by the Warners on all occasions, save during the heat of the day - but the long hot day was drawing to a close now. For this year's A Literary Christmas, I decided to hunt down some seasonal short stories. Most … Continue reading The Moving Finger | Mary Gaunt #AWWshortstories
'All over the country, brooding on squatters' verandahs, or mooning in selectors' huts,' so A. G. Stephens wrote in the Bulletin in 1901, 'there are scattered here and there hundreds of lively, dreamy Australian girls whose queer uncomprehended ambitions are the despair of the household. They yearn, they aspire for they know not what...' I … Continue reading Friends & Rivals | Brenda Niall #AWWbiography
It has never been my way to say much about my private life. Autobiographies are by their nature completely different beasts to biographies. In a biography, the researcher is keen to unearth the 'real' person, to dig deep into archives, letters, journals and other people's memories. Mostly this is done respectfully to honour the subject's … Continue reading Myself When Young | Henry Handel Richardson #AWWautobiography
Eve Langley (1904 -1974) is an enigmatic figure in Australian literary history. One of the (many) reasons why Eve Langley is considered enigmatic is her writing. There was a LOT of it, but was it fiction or was it autobiographical? And how is it possible to tell the difference when the author deliberately leads you … Continue reading Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers | Helen Vines #AWWbiography
bronasbooks.com 