AustLit

Contains 50 works by 37 Australian women writers. The themes include exploration of identity, the politics of feminism and the self-consciousness of writing. Many women have written of journeys: journeys of discovery, imaginary travels, forced movements, escapes. The 'statelessness' of women, whether oppressive or liberating is a recurrent motif throughout this collection. -- from a foreword titled: Second Degree of Tampering : Towards a Politics of Identity

Frictions: An Anthology of Fiction by Women marks the distance Australian women have travelled as writers.

It was 1973 and Jane, married, with two primary school children, in her second year of uni as a mature age student, working part-time as a waitress in the evenings to make ends meet and a member of a newly formed weekly Women’s Liberation Conscious Raising Group felt that life was finally coming together. Till a car failed to give way to the right as she was travelling out to La Trobe Uni on her motor bike for her second English tute of the year and broke her left tibia and fibula. This book details the excruciatingly painful time Jane had over the next nine months as she learned to walk on crutches with her left leg in plaster, struggled to continue her studies and to come to terms with the fact that her marriage was over when she and her husband agreed to separate after a bone graft operation to mend the break in her leg that wasn’t healing properly. However, the members of her weekly Consciousness Raising Group and once she’d moved into Glenn College, leaving the children with their father in the marital home, Jane gradually came to realise that terrible and all as it had been, breaking her leg had proved to be a necessary catalyst for her to realise, amongst other things, that she had fallen in love with her best girlfriend.

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