Bücher veröffentlicht von Ginninderra Press

'Elaine Barker analyses the natural world, the home and places beyond; not with the eye of the detached onlooker but compassionately inhabiting the minds of fellow travellers, from the tough tattooed man to the accident victim, from a baby in a shawl to a merry cemetery. They celebrate the commonplace - not the pots and pans of life - but precise moments like a spider's web glinting threads strung from its bridge line / each silk strand spun with dewdrops / each glistening sharp and fine. An entire world held within a single feather. Sparrows which casually flit / in and out of life; snatches of memory or loss of memory, past and present fused into exquisitely discrete moments, pickpocketing memories not mere scraps of existence. Worlds and histories evoked by a brooch, a brass button or a mended vase; mere objects until they intersect with humanity. These poems sparkle like the sun through peppertrees glinting through lacy foliage…' - Rob Walker'There is a Zen-like stillness in Elaine Barker's new collection which is always assured in its clear notes. There are new experiences in Asia and a willingness to reference other forms of art, which inspire deep meditation. Her poetry issues an arresting peace.' - Brian Castro

Learning to speak, read and write with my mother are happy childhood memories. From that time I developed a life long passion for words and reading. More recently I have discovered an intense desire to write poetry. It's as if I am learning to speak again, but this time from the Cradle of Dreams. These poems have been selected from those written between 2014 and 2018.

Brian Hungerford is an award winning author and one of the World's most experienced storytellers, in the oral tradition. In the 1950s he sold over 40 radio plays and dramatised documentaries, along with many short stories. Later he won the top award for an audio-visual program on Bangladesh. The competition involving 140 countries was organised by the UN in New York. Born in Australia in 1935, he was brought up by his grandmother, a formidable woman, who had an unsatisfiable passion for travel. In 1940, Brian and his grandmother left Sydney and began a farming life in Candelo. Candelo later became the setting and mainspring of many stories. In 1959, with a record of more than 25 radio plays and a handful of published short stories, he left his grandmother, back in Sydney with an aunt, and sailed to Spain. He stayed for over a year but couldn't resist the urge to move and flew to London and work with the World Service of the BBC. Three years later, he was seconded to FAO (The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN) and spent the next 15 years working in Rome and 13 Third-World countries. His first country was Cuba, a country and its people he will never forget. By 1985 he was settled in Canberra living and partly living, scribbling stories, plays and, so far, three novels. He is popular on the storytelling circuit and travels up and down the east coast of Australia with a repertoire of 300 odd stories. In suburban Canberra, his neighbours also know him as a player of assorted bagpipes.

The Firing Line is the compelling true story of a girl growing up with her family from the mid-1950s. The ensuing few decades become a time when everyday life for her mother, brother and sister, and herself, changed when their father became mentally ill with manic depressive psychosis (now known as bipolar disorder), and then became addicted to prescribed barbiturates washed down with alcohol. Anecdotes of happy and tragic times are dotted with spot fires, and actual fires. Striving for a 'normal' family the reader is taken on a journey through the vagaries of childhood, and turbulent teens into adulthood. An emotional roller-coaster of pathos, aggression and fear, is juxtaposed against humorous coping skills. Dreams, love and loss, collateral damage and resilience uncover the truth about nearly forgotten times ultimately pierced by indelible memories.'This interplay of such a tough and poignant personal and family biography with the living history of psychiatry traverses some of the most difficult and still contemporary issues in our mental health field. These include the interplay of attempts at a more power-sharing and humane approach to care and its ideological excesses, the stark realities of life in institutions and the intermittent abandonment of families in the community, while making our field's early clumsy steps towards emancipation and community psychiatry. Fires of different kinds illuminate this work like a series of hilltop beacons lighting the way to a hopefully better future for people living with severe mental illnesses and their families. This is testament to the indomitable spirits of the author's parents, and her own, underlining that such protracted episodes of buffeting family life can leave a legacy of taking on momentous challenges with enormous spirit and resilience in subsequent generations.' - Professor Alan Rosen AO (Professorial Fellow, Illawarra Institute of Mental Health, University of Wollongong; Clinical Associate Professor, Brain & Mind Centre, Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney)

Carol Patterson lives in South Arm, a serene coastal hamlet south-east of Hobart, Tasmania. Her arresting style infuses her short stories with fresh, vibrant life. She explores the crucial points in people's lives when change takes place. Her post-graduate degree in Geography and Environmental Studies gained from the University of Tasmania, allows her to see the world from an original perspective, which further enriches her stories.

In 1755, the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake and the resulting tsunamis, and by fire. Perhaps 90,000 people died and 85% of buildings were shattered, including the Royal Ribeiro Palace, home to the archives of all Portuguese exploration in and around the East Indies, including the voyages of Vasco da Gama. All records were lost. Did the Portuguese send voyages of exploration, secretly, across the treaty line of Tordesillas, that divided the Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres? Did they explore and map the east coast of Australia 250 years before Cook's first voyage? Was the Mahogany Ship, first sighted in 1836, half-buried in sand dunes in the south-east of Victoria, the wreck of a Portuguese caravel? Who built the solid stone foundations of a structure on the south coast of NSW, and who lost the archaic set of keys unearthed near Geelong in 1847? Where did Mendonça's expedition of 1521 sail and when, if ever, did it return? If such a voyage ever occurred, was it like this?

In this compelling collection, eighty-nine writers traverse their particular territory of loss and bring back travellers' tales. Their skilfully crafted accounts are insightful, inspiring, amusing, heart-breaking, resilient and, above all, damn good reading.'This beautiful collection of writings explores the landscape of loss. It will meet you where you are. You'll find yourself reaching for particular pieces that somehow articulate how you're feeling, even before you've found the words to express it yourself… May this book become both a friend and a warm companion.' - Petrea King, Quest for Life Centre

Leylines is Katherine Buchanan's first book of poetry. It presents a selection of poems that either touch on the physical environment and our impact on it or provide the reader with a glimpse into a less tangible, somewhat ethereal, inner world. Imagery of the Rena oil spill disaster, for example, is hauntingly presented in 'Bay of Plenty', and 'Nomura' provides some insight into an issue with gargantuan jellyfish reaching the Sea of Japan, which have even been known to block seawater pumps used to cool nuclear reactors. Poems like 'Leylines' and 'Spiral Dance' remind the reader that there is still beauty and potential in the natural world. As Katherine says in 'Seasons', the natural cycle continues.

No chemist, no bank, no library, even in primary or secondary school, and no mains electricity until the writer turned fifteen. Some might say he was disadvantaged. But from the perspective of some city children today he was far from being deprived.Mallee Roots is an account of the rich community culture of Walpeup, a small, remote Mallee town in the years 1942 to 1956. Isolated from bigger centres by gravel roads and distance, life demanded a high degree of interdependence and sharing. Occasionally it was in grief but regularly in fun. Until he left, the author encountered no apparent differences in status or wealth. He found plenty of things to do and boundless opportunity to get into trouble, but later, to work side by side with adults and become more responsible.As well as describing his relationships with townspeople and farmers, the writer paints an affectionate picture of a father who was always on his children's side. For the mother, life brought fewer rewards in the town and before that, during the Depression on a struggling farm with no domestic amenities.To compensate for the routines of school life, the author caused more mischief than is reasonable but not enough to prevent completion of high school and his departure, ultimately to train teachers like those he gave so much grief. Funny, informative, Mallee Roots gives a unique view of community strength, something now not always attainable.

As the title suggests, this collection of short stories focuses on a variety of unusual but not atypical emotional and life-style reactions people experience as a result of guilt, compassion, indiscretion, abuse, jealousy, fantasy, loss, sense of mission, and impending death. It provides insight into the strange nature of what it means to be human.

Two Green Parrots positions our lives in a broader, ecological context. Anne M. Carson's poems affirm human culture and values in the face of implacable realties. Beauty and suffering are skilfully interwoven to create poems with the meditative power to move and sustain.'Anne Carson's rich lyric poems are the product of a sharp eye, alert to any particular bird, tree or loving gesture. We can almost hear her human subjects, fully alive in their world. In it, love commands a dancing harmony of language, for Anne Carson's poetry is also music. And her pastoral is immensely detailed. Hers is the art of attentive inspiration. For any reader at all, she will articulate delight.' - Chris Wallace Crabbe, poet'With a painterly eye, Carson's gaze directs a catalogue of beauty and grief in poems that revel in lyric description of birds, foliage, clouds, rivers, seedpods and trees. Meditative and magisterial, these poems turn to art and music, as well as nature, to list under the weight of human love, tenderness and loss. Slow time accrues.' - Shari Kocher, poet

'The verse novel genre is ideal for poet and fiction writer Jill Gloyne to convey the rapidly changing life of Jim McFarlane. Through a series of tragedies his old self is shed like the bark of the trees around him revealing a new mask that is both a curse and a key. And like the tender young shoots that grow after a bushfire, love slowly grows back around him. Jill Gloyne's life in regional Australia ensures authentic and memorable rural characters and settings. Join her on this journey of transformation, a rough ride for Jim McFarlane but a rewarding one for lovers of language and genuine stories.' - Jude Aquilina

Sarah Tiffen's third book of poetry is full of the sensual imagery and textured observations for which she is becoming known. The sense of place and people resonates in these stories of life and love, connection to land, the struggle to survive, to belong, to reconcile. Here is Australian work, exploring Australian themes, familiar, yet renewed. There is something for everyone in this collection - work that can be read and reread to enjoy the subtleties and the beauty of the language, the depth of the narrative line. In the words of Donald Hall, fourteenth American poet laureate, 'Sarah Tiffen is writing some beautiful stuff.' 'Rain Event in the Whispering Country', which appears in this collection, was selected for publication in Best Poems of 2008 (UQP).

Sarah Tiffen's second collection continues to probe the spiritual and social themes revealed in her first book, Learning Country: Song Cycles from the Heartland. Stories of her home country, in the western plains of New South Wales, reveal a powerful response to place and a visceral sense of nostalgia, landscape and love. With story-poems, nature poems and spiritual explorations, this collection will speak to the reader of Australia, of a passing way of life, of family and history, and of the notions of home, time and loss and spirituality. Representing a development of the writer's craft, there is much in this volume to compel, challenge and uplift, as the reader will again take a journey into the heart, and share the love of language and of the country in evocative imagery.