Fremantle Arts Centre Press

Rivers are important to us in all sorts of ways: usefully symbolic for poets, often loved in childhood while ‘messing about in boats’, sucked dry by cotton farmers, worried over by environmentalists, boosted by local patriots, and so on. The indefatigable Australian poet John Kinsella was certainly onto a good idea when he recruited two other poets based in England to join him in a three-way livre composé about the subject.

The image of the woman imprisoned in a tower is recurrent in Dorothy Hewett’s work. In the early poem, ‘Grave Fairytale’, Hewett refashions the figure of Rapunzel to signify the woman poet whose writing depends on isolation and the suppression of her sexuality.

Elizabeth Jolley strikes dread into her Australian reader in 1988 as she makes due acknowledgement of the auspices under which Sugar Mother was written:

Tim Winton writes on the dedication page of Scission, “this one is for Gonzo”, and his youth and astonishing rate of publication suggest that he may produce one for each of his friends and relatives. After bursting on the Australian literary world with An Open Swimmer Winton has published another novel, Shallows and this new collection of short stories.

In an authorial note Fay Zwicky describes her collection of stories as thematic rather than chronological.

They are all concerned more or less ironically, with the growth of a writer’s consciousness which may help to account for the varying degrees of stylistic density and the shifts in personae.

The first seven stories, the Helen Freeman sequence, offer a retrospective view of Helen’s struggle to establish a female identity in a world dominated by men and by masculine edicts and rituals. Taking a hint from the introductory note, these stories reflect, in essence, the stages in the author’s personal development from her youthful recollections of her family during and after the Second World War to her marriage and separation. It is arguable whether these stories should be treated as the discontinuous narrative of one life, though they can be read that way. They are not, however, an autobiography.