AustLit

'In the age of COVID-19, ‘working from home’ and ‘home schooling’ have become part of the Australian lexicon in a way that has never happened before. Working parents often have to juggle both of these activities during lockdowns, undertaking the paid work they would normally do outside the home (if they have jobs that make that possible) as well as supervising the lessons provided remotely by their children’s teachers. The domestic duties necessary to keep a home running need to be maintained and, as ever, research shows it is women who disproportionately bear the greater burden.'  (Introduction)

'Miles Franklin used to delight in relating an anecdote about a librarian friend who, when asked why a less competent colleague was paid more, replied succinctly: ‘He has the genital organs of the male; they’re not used in library work, but men are paid more for having them.’' (Introduction)

''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)

'Amber is sometimes called the memory stone and is reputed to bring good luck to the wearer. It is also said to clear the mind and ease stress. When I am giving book talks I like to wear the amber necklace I inherited from my mother as an 'aide memoire' and lucky charm. Occasionally, these warm, cherry-coloured stones strung in perfectly-graduated ellipses draw comments when I am signing books or chatting with audience members, particularly from older women of Eastern European background who ask me if the amber is from the Baltic coast. While much of the world's amber is found there - fossilised resin from an immense forest that once grew in the region that is now the Baltic Sea - it also washes up on other coastlines, including the so-called amber coast between Felixstowe and Southwold in Suffolk. And that is where my necklace comes from, a legacy of our long family connection with the small fishing town of Aldeburgh.' (Publication abstract)

'Aileen Palmer – poet, translator, political activist, adventurer – was the daughter of two writers prominent in Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Vance and Nettie Palmer were well known as novelists, poets, critics and journalists, and Nettie suspected that their eldest would grow up with ‘ink in her veins’.

'Aileen certainly inherited her parents’ talents, publishing poetry, translating the work of Ho Chi Minh, and recording what she referred to as ‘semi-fictional bits of egocentric writing’. She also absorbed their interest in leftist politics, joining the Communist Party at university. This, combined with her bravery, led to participation in the Spanish Civil War and the ambulance service in London during World War II.

'The return to Australia was not easy, and Aileen never successfully reintegrated into civilian life. In Ink in Her Veins Sylvia Martin paints an honest and moving portrait in which we see a talented woman slowly brought down by war, family expectations, and psychiatric illness and the sometimes cruel ‘treatments’ common in the 20th century.' (Publication summary)

An investigation of Aileen Palmer's letters to her parents while she was living in London during the Blitz in 1940.

'Aileen Palmer is one of only three women represented in a recent anthology of thirty-three poets writing about their experiences of the Spanish Civil War. The other two are English writers: Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner. In The Gender of Modernism Jane Marcus comments that the neglect of Warner's writing has occurred on many fronts: 'Left out of the literary histories of the Spanish Civil War presumably because she was a woman, she is left out of literary modernism because she was a communist and a lesbian. As her partner Valentine Ackland shared Warner's marginalities so, too, did Aileen Palmer, about whom could be added two more: she was Australian and she spent many years of her life in mental institutions.' (p94)