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''Late afternoon. An isolated lagoon, water glassy, teeming with birdlife-black swans, ducks, a pelican. Sunset begins to tint the sky. I point the camera at the water to catch the clouds reflected there just as a solitary duck swims into view. Everything in the photograph is familiar yet the effect is entirely strange. The duck is swimming across the sky...'
'The reflections in Sky Swimming can be read as meditations on the enigmas of love, family, ageing, memory, home and belonging. At its heart is a mudbrick house built by two women on an ancient lava flow in the Warrumbungle Mountains, circling back to a childhood filled with music in Melbourne and an early career in the theatre. It fans out across the world to a family mystery in The Netherlands of the 1950s and a friendship in Montreal in the 1990s. Reflections on the process of writing feminist biography are included and the women from Martin's biographies thread their way through the narrative alongside the people who have helped shape her life, often in unexpected directions.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Large print.
- Dyslexic edition.
- Braille.
Works about this Work
-
Geography of Desire : Not Quite a Memoir
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 423 2020; (p. 66)
— Review of Sky Swimming 2020 single work autobiography 'Queer memoir is particularly given to formal play, to unpacking and upsetting the conventions of genre in order to question women's roles as both narrator and subject. Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) mixes scholarship and bodily transformation. Carmen Maria Machado's In The Dream House (2019) unpacks the nature of narrative itself to reflect on an abusive relationship. Into this field comes Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin's 'memoir that is not quite a memoir, more a series of reflections in which I act as a biographer of my own life'. For Martin, the critical distance of the biographer enables her to consider the resonances that exist between her own experiences. ' (Introduction)
-
A Tapestry of Exquisite Threads : Matthew Stephens Launches ‘Sky Swimming’ by Sylvia Martin
2020
single work
prose
— Appears in: Rochford Street Review , no. 28 2020;
-
Geography of Desire : Not Quite a Memoir
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 423 2020; (p. 66)
— Review of Sky Swimming 2020 single work autobiography 'Queer memoir is particularly given to formal play, to unpacking and upsetting the conventions of genre in order to question women's roles as both narrator and subject. Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) mixes scholarship and bodily transformation. Carmen Maria Machado's In The Dream House (2019) unpacks the nature of narrative itself to reflect on an abusive relationship. Into this field comes Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin's 'memoir that is not quite a memoir, more a series of reflections in which I act as a biographer of my own life'. For Martin, the critical distance of the biographer enables her to consider the resonances that exist between her own experiences. ' (Introduction)
-
A Tapestry of Exquisite Threads : Matthew Stephens Launches ‘Sky Swimming’ by Sylvia Martin
2020
single work
prose
— Appears in: Rochford Street Review , no. 28 2020;