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Helen Thurloe is an award-winning Australian writer, with her poems and essays widely published. Promising Azra is her first novel. To support its completion, the project was awarded a mentorship from the Children's Book Council of Australia (NSW), as well as two residential fellowships through the NSW Writers' Centre, and Varuna The National Writers House. Her day jobs have included political staffer, public relations consultant, teacher of the Alexander Technique, and furniture sales and marketing. Helen has lived in both Brazil and Britain, but Sydney is now home
'Reading Promising Azra prompted me to revisit stories I have heard too many times to count. Forced marriage is not bound to a certain culture or religion, it's an epidemic affecting children from many backgrounds. For real change to be possible, it's important for us to hear these stories.' Dr Eman Sharobeem, Community Engagement Manager, SBS Azra is sixteen, smart and knows how to get what she wants. She thinks. When she wins a place in a national science competition, she thinks her biggest problem is getting her parents' permission to go. But she doesn't know they're busy arranging her marriage to an older cousin she's never met. In Pakistan. In just three months' time. Azra always thought she'd finish high school with her friends and then go on to study science, but now her dreams of university are suddenly overshadowed. Can she find a way to do what she wants, while keeping her parents happy? Or does being a good daughter mean sacrificing her freedom?
'An extremely important anthology' Tracey Spicer In October 2017, the hashtag MeToo went viral. Since then we've watched controversy erupt around Geoffrey Rush, Germaine Greer and Junot Díaz. We've talked about tracking the movement back via Helen Garner, Rosie Batty and Hannah Gadsby. We've discussed #NotAllMen, toxic masculinity and trolls. We've seen the #MeToo movement evolve and start to accuse itself - has it gone too far? Is it enough? What does it mean in this country? And still, women are not safe from daily, casual sexual harassment and violence. In this collection thirty-five contributors share their own #MeToo stories, analysis and commentary to survey the movement in an Austral...
Winner of the 2017 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize Sparked by the description of a ‘Malay trollope’ in W. Somerset Maugham’s story, ‘The Four Dutchmen’, Mirandi Riwoe’s novella, The Fish Girl, tells of an Indonesian girl whose life is changed irrevocably when she moves from a small fishing village to work in the house of a Dutch merchant. There she finds both hardship and tenderness as her traditional past and colonial present collide. Told with an exquisitely restrained voice and coloured with lush description, this moving book will stay with you long after the last page.
Over the last five years, from the #Me Too Movement to same-sex marriage, from devastating bush fires to the global pandemic, the online poetry journal Not Very Quiet has dedicated itself to publishing women's voices from across the globe. Not Very Quiet: The anthology selects poetry that has given voice to the social conscience of the community, constructions of lesbian and queer, the challenges posed to the social construction of gender, as well as the complexities and possibilities of the human condition.
Hal Colebatch's new book, AUSTRALIA'S SECRET WAR, tells the shocking, true, but until now largely suppressed and hidden story of the war waged from 1939 to 1945 by a number of key Australian trade unions against their own society and against the men and women of their own country's fighting forces at the time of its gravest peril. His conclusions are based on a broad range of sources, from letters and first-person interviews between the author and ex-servicemen to official and unofficial documents from the archives of World War II. Between 1939 and 1945 virtually every major Australian warship, including at different times its entire force of cruisers, was targeted by strikes, go-slows and sabotage. Australian soldiers operating in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands went without food, radio equipment and munitions, and Australian warships sailed to and from combat zones without ammunition, because of strikes at home. Planned rescue missions for Australian prisoners-of-war in Borneo were abandoned because wharf strikes left rescuers without heavy weapons. Officers had to restrain Australian and American troops from killing striking trade unionists.
Winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry, Smile, or Else by Chanel Brenner, is a moving collection of elegiac poems dealing with the death of Brenner's six-year-old son, and her and her family's ongoing trek toward healing.
'I open the gate and walk into the field . . . As the sun pours a river of light down this valley, I realise there are hundreds and hundreds of trees and I've seen those silver leaves before, not here in Australia, but shimmering in the groves that grace the terraced hillsides of Tuscany.' When Adrienne's marketing company goes down, her lifestyle does too. She retreats from the city to the beautiful, abandoned olive grove once owned by her Italian grandparents. A 'tree change' isn't what Adrienne has in mind, however, and life in the country delivers some surprises as she confronts the past and learns the secrets of the Olive Sisters . . . Old loves, new loves, warm toast and rich traditions are all part of the delicious blend of this absorbing story.
The contest between Arthur Phillip and Jean-Francois Laperouse to get to Botany Bay first and to claim rights to sovereignty of either Britain or France over the Australian continent