Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Family

‘Women who want to be equal with men lack ambition.’ This was the rather damning assessment of equality-based or liberal feminism scrawled on public walls in the 1970s and 1980s. It took a swipe at the strategy of achieving civil and economic equality on men’s terms. It sought a radical agenda of change that would bring about profound alteration to the deepest social, economic and psychic structures of gender identity, patriarchy and capitalism. It demonstrated, even then, that ‘equality’ did not have unqualified support among women. Thirty years later, Anne Summers is in a position to consider how this strategy has stood up to repeated attacks, and its overall gains and shortcomings.

... (read more)

This is a book about pain. In December 1999, Arthur Reilly was diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. The methods of relief offered to him, principally morphine, had drastic side-effects which undermined what pleasure he might have found in living. For four months, he lost weight and showed little interest in his usual activities. He became depressed and contemplated suicide.

... (read more)

Autobiographical tales, at least in Australian culture, tend to come in three kinds: the kind that was written as a self-consciously literary product; the kind that has a unique or sensational angle, or focus, or moment; and the kind that was written by the famous to tell the story of their fame, usually with content well to the fore over style.

... (read more)

This book is full of sadly ironic observations, such as: Most adult sons have no memory of telling their mother to stop kissing them; decades later they are simply anguished and resentful that she has shown them no affection.

... (read more)

In the profusion of images in Gerard Windsor’s Family Lore one is particularly insistent. The surgical metaphor makes remembering an act of dismembering. It suggests control and precision, and ostensibly offers an antidote for messy feelings, which looks like a useful resource in the murky business of exhuming family ghosts. It also seems to satisfy an aspect of the narrator-personality that is reflected not only in the prose but also in little self-caricatures (such as his description of the fastidiousness with which knife and fork are used and put aside).

... (read more)

No Children by Choice edited by Gloria Frydman & Mature Age Mothers edited by Berwyn Lewis

by
May 1987, no. 90

To have or not to have children: a dilemma made possible by technological advances and the consequent loosening of social roles. Once, having children was both an almost inevitable result of adult sexual activity and, generally, a desired one. For most people, being an adult member of a society implied having and taking responsibility for children. And for many people it still does. But it is now possible for people to choose when to have children, or to choose not to have them at all. No Children by Choice is a collection of interviews with men and women who have chosen not to have children; Mature Age Mothers is a collection of interviews with women who have not had children until they are over thirty (except for Junie Morosi who had three children in her teens and another child at forty-five).

... (read more)
Page 2 of 2