AustLit

'Throughout 2021, as COVID and climate change battled for supremacy in the hearts and minds of the world, California-based poet Heather Bourbeau and Sydney-based Irish poet Anne Casey engaged in a poetry conversation back and forth across the globe, alternating each week, to create 52 poems over 52 weeks. With poetry anchored in their gardens, they buoyed each other through lockdowns and exile from family, through devastating floods, fires, wild winds, and superstorms. Some Days The Bird, a collection of award-winning poems, is the result of their weekly communiqués from different hemispheres (and opposing seasons) in verse.' 

(Introduction)

'The American punk experimental writer, Kathy Acker, is generally assumed to be an important, if controversial, late-twentieth-century woman writer associated with a feminist politics. An examination of her early reception history, however, tells a surprisingly different story of Acker’s literary location. By examining reviews of Acker’s work in the feminist and the mainstream press, and scholarly accounts in feminist and non-feminist publications up to around 1989, we observe Acker’s relatively marginal position in the rapidly developing sub-discipline of feminist literary studies, and a continuing interest in her work by the mainstream. Acker as a belated woman writer for feminism thereby offers a micro-history of the categories of “the woman writer” and “contemporary women’s writing.” (Publication abstract)

'In September 1868, 12-year-old Catherine Rudd was arrested for living in a "miserably constructed shelter composed of rags and boughs" with a reputed sex worker, her widowed mother. Catherine and her siblings were sent to industrial schools, their mother to gaol. She herself had arrived in Australia alone in 1849, aged 15, an Irish Famine orphan. This new study centred on Newcastle Industrial School for Girls (New South Wales) from 1867 to 1871, reveals that close to one third of the inmates were girls born of Irish Famine refugees. This paper examines their story of destitution, discrimination and intergenerational incarceration driven by colonial policies and their Irish Famine origins.' 

(Publication abstract)

'From the late 1960s, with the rise of second-wave feminism, there was a resurgence of interest in women's history, especially so in Queensland where women's feminist history had rarely been addressed in any substantial way. By women's history I mean a narrative in which the subjects are women-that is, rather than addressing the power relations of gender, we address the women agents themselves.' (Publication abstract)
 

'Sisters in Crime Australia belatedly celebrated its thirtieth birthday in April with a gala ceremony at the Victorian Pride Centre in Melbourne. One of its founders, Carmel Shute, was an assistant editor of Hecate in the mid-1970s, the early years of its founding in Brisbane. Here she reflects on how the Women in Crime organisation has developed since its launch on 22 September 1991 at the Feminist Book Fortnight in Melbourne and why so many women-both authors and readers-have turned to crime over the past three decades.' 

(Publication abstract)

'Janna Thompson, feminist, social justice advocate, and internationally esteemed professor of philosophy, died on 24 June 2022, as a result of multiple brain tumours. Just prior to her death at the age of 79, she put the finishing touches to her first novel, a crime story that seeks both to render older women more visible and to bring a touch of philosophy to the genre.' 

(Introduction)