A quest for freedom Reply

By Karen Crawshaw

Courtney Collins. Picture by Lionfish Media

1921. A baby born too soon in the wrong house, by a wrong deed, is laid to violent rest. Swaddled by the earth, it sees and hears all things above. Its mother, the only person to see it alive, is Australia’s first female bushranger, Jessie Hickman.

The Burial is a debut Australian novel that took Courtney Collins 10 years to write. It is about a quest for freedom, based on the life and times of Jessie Hickman. Jessie was 12 when her mother sold her to a circus. She became a self-sufficient survivor, a child circus performer, a buck jumping champion, a skilled horse rustler, a cattle thief, convict, murderer and fugitive.

When Courtney Collins began the book, Jessie Hickman was its logical narrator. Courtney says she had a fascination for bushrangers who were “invariably all blokes”. She asked herself why we didn’t know about Jessica Hickman and she imagined what it was like to feel a sense of aloneness in an incredible Australian landscape. It stirred her to start scraping the layers off Jessie’s story.

Bookshops as a refuge for the mind Reply

By Sarah Clark

Bookshops help you discover what you don’t know.

The melodic tune of a live jazz band floats out through the doorway and onto the nighttime street below. A bunch of fresh roses sits on a table in the window beside an aged copy of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. And the clinking of cutlery on dinner plates, accompanied by spirited chatter, is in tune with the music.

Inside, there is a distinctive smell. Paper. Ink. Books. That’s right – books. This is not a restaurant or bar. This is a bookshop.

All may not be well in the retail landscape, but bookshop lovers have no need to fear impending doom; bricks and mortar book retailing appears here to stay.

And it’s all thanks to two things.

The first thing is the innovative store owners who are committed to offering more than paperbacks for sale. They’re creating community hubs designed as places to meet, learn about and share a love of literature and books.

Saving ourselves through story-telling Reply

By Jodi Lee

Ashley Hay

“We tell ourselves stories to live,” muses author Ashley Hay, pondering on what drives her to tell stories. She echoes the words of acclaimed American writer Joan Didion who has written stories of dread.

It’s interesting that Joan Didion’s words resonate so strongly with Ashley Hay, whose latest novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, follows the story of a family torn apart and lives altered by a dramatic workplace accident. Her previous work, The Body in the Clouds, follows the tale of a man who falls from the Sydney Harbour Bridge during its construction. Both stories are hinged on dramatic accidents, circumstances that could incite a fair amount of dread.

A life of engagement Reply

by Maddie Palmer                                          

Dr. Anne Summers

                                 

Anne Summers was taking a rare break from work in front of Question Time on the afternoon of October 8.  She watched Prime Minister Julia Gillard rise to the podium and begin the speech that would soon be heard worldwide. “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not.”

Dr Summers’ ears pricked up. “What is going on here? I started tweeting, ‘she’s smoking, this is incredible’,” she said.

The Prime Minister’s speech has become a potent symbol of the daily aggressions experienced by women in Australian public life. For a journalist whose career has been dedicated to documenting and exploring these violations, it was a pivotal moment.