Bücher veröffentlicht von Ginninderra Press

'Stephen Matthews's initiative in establishing Ginninderra Press has made a significant contribution to contemporary Australian literature, providing welcome opportunities for both emerging and established writers. Matthews's dedication and passion are the lifeblood of this unique independent publishing house, which had its beginnings in a spare room of his Canberra home twenty years ago. Now firmly based in South Australia at Port Adelaide, Ginninderra Press has published hundreds of writers of both adult fiction and non-fiction. It has launched many poets in an innovative variety of formats, and its authors have garnered an impressive number of awards. In this celebratory volume, Rays of Light: Ginninderra Press - the first 20 years, nine essays by GP authors give an insight into its raison d'être, its achievements and its founder, and express their gratitude for the opportunities Ginninderra Press has given them to fulfil their writing aspirations.' - Christobel Mattingley AM

In the summer of 18S9,]ames leaves his sweetheart, Sally, to seek adventure as a stockman in the Snowy Mountains high country. Before the summer is over, the Kiandra gold rush has broken and his life has taken a direction he could never have foreseen. The Snowy River Diggings at Kiandra saw one of the shortest but most turbulent rushes in Australia's gold rush history. In April 1860, at the height of the rush, ten thousand men and women were scouring the district in search of gold. Within less than two years, the township that sprang up amongst the slush and snow had faded to a half-empty shanty town. For a brief period, Kiandra became the haunt of some of Australia's most notorious bushrangers, including Frankie Gardiner, and was so renowned for lawlessness and robberies that it was dubbed Mount Rascal. Disputes amongst the miners were rife. River men were pitched against ground sluicers and a mob of ruffians known as The Boys intimidated anyone who stood in their way. Complaints about Gold Commissioner Cooper's biased decisions and drunken antics eventually led to a Parliamentary Inquiry in 1862. James falls in with a young radical, Davy Hughes, who provokes the ire of The Boys and Commissioner Cooper by challenging their authority and championing against injustice. The arrival of Kitty McCrae changes Davy's and ]ames's lives forever. Sally joins the three of them briefly for summer, before the events of the following spring bring tragedy.';A very accurate and well researched history of Kiandra in the 1860/61 gold rush, interwoven with believable i ctional characters.' Paddy Kerrigan, Kiandra historian';Kiandra Gold is well named: it glitters like the mineral that lies at the heart of the story. And what a story: murder, love, mystery, the tough leathery life of the diggings in the high country, sublime scenery, and a gritty realisation of a world we have lost. Any historian would be proud to claim the research. I couldn't put it down.' Professor Iain McCalman, historian and author

Barcroft Boake's star blazed briefly and brightly as an Australian bush poet for little more than a year before he took his own life by hanging himself by his stockwhip in 1892 on the shore of Sydney Harbour. Barcroft's life was touched by romance, adventure and, finally, tragedy. In Where the Dead Men Lie, his story is told as an imaginative work of fiction, to bring the characters to life. Barcroft rode with Charlie McKeahnie, who is reputed to be one of the famed mountain horsemen Banjo Paterson had in mind when he wrote The Man From Snowy River. Barcroft also fell in love with Charlie's sisters. It has been suggested he killed himself for the love of a McKeahnie girl. After Barcroft left the McKeahnie homestead in 1888, he headed north, seeking excitement and adventure as a stockman and a drover, travelling as far as the Diamantina River in Queensland. Throughout his travels he wrote regularly to his father. Luckily, a number of his original and interesting letters have been preserved and they have been woven into the story. Was it May, or was it Jean McKeahnie that he truly loved? Why did he kill himself, just as he was gaining recognition as a poet? These are the questions this book tries to answer.

';I have known Carolyn Cordon for many years and I'm proud to call her my friend. I have read her stories and watched as her poetry developed. Her poetry journey began in pain and self-examination, yet has continued to grow into joyous maturity. Tense & Still is the culmination of that journey. In Tense & Still Carolyn turns her perceptive gaze outward. We not only get to see all sorts of animals in their everyday lives, but we have the rare opportunity of seeing through their eyes. She captures the cold-blooded instincts of the hunting dog, reluctantly tame, mercilessly stalking its hapless prey. We feel the careless sorrow as a passer-by as they observe the common remnants of roadkill and ruminate on the life that once was. In Tense & Still, you will find all sorts: dogs, cats, birds and bugs warm-blooded and the so very cold. All the Tense and Still creatures you could want and some you'll be glad to never meet. Tense and Still is Carolyn's best book yet.' Joanne Baker

The poems selected in this book taken from Therese Corfiatis's four published books, and a Pocket Poet convey striking images of landscape, childhood, travel and place. Some of the poems have a mystical element. Colour, light and sound weave together the threads of human experience. This book resonates with a multitude of richness gathered over the years, and offers the reader insights into fundamental values reflecting our world.

'The haiku in Alone at the Window resonate with warmth, wit and wisdom. The poet's tender observations and clear imagery create an unfolding of meaning as the reader reflects on each poem. These moments of celebration are imbued with a sense of wonder and appreciation for life, inviting us to share the richness to be found in daily living in our relationships with each other and the world around us.' - Lyn Reeves

An extraordinary love story unfolds in these pages, more than forty years of a wife and husband balancing the reality of being in relationship with the truth of each their ';own-being' through the exacting discipline of tanka poetry. Day by day, they observed and concentrated their ever-shifting emotions into five-line capsules. It is not a fairy tale; all sides of love find expression here, including its loneliness, uncertainty and ephemerality even after decades of marriage. This record proves there is no ';ordinary' in the everyday of human life, not when it is borne witness to by poets with wide-open, honest hearts. - Sonja Arntzen, Professor Emerita, University of Toronto, translator of the Kagero Diary and Sarashina Diary

Half-caste is what the bullies call her, like she isn't complete, but the taunts are the least of Velvet Brown's problems. A disloyal friend, a long distance romance which is no longer working, a crazy colt that has to be ridden and a hidden threat which is slowly being revealed, pose far greater challenges. Velvet must quickly fine tune her abilities to save herself, and the ones she loves, from death or worse. ';A compelling world of an insightful teenager with a keen sense of adventure, an instinctive bond with horses and a spellbinding mission to pursue.' Joanna Campbell, UK award-winning author of Tying Down the Lion and Estuary RoadPraise for The Journey of Velvet Brown: ';A pacy exciting ride through a book layered with crime, special abilities, mystery and horses.' Paddy O'Reilly

';This day we were going to let the horses go. They'd been working for a while and it was their turn to have a spell. Old Alf Turner came down there watching the blokes tying their horses' legs up. And he seen me get my horse and bring him up just drop the reins on the ground and the horse waiting down there while I went and got the hammer and the chisel and the rasp to just pull the shoe off.Then he seen me pick the horse's leg up pick it up and just hold it while the horse was standing there. And he was thinking, ';Hey, what's this bloke! Hey! He should tie his legs up.' And he called out to me, ';Hey! He might turn and kick you!'';No,' I said. ';He be right.'And I just took the horse's shoe off and he just standing there with his head down and I was there holding his leg up. Old Alf Turner got the biggest shock and he gave me the job of breaking horses after that, because the other blokes' horses still wild. They can't touch a horse or the horse would kick them or something. But mine, mine were just quiet with me straightaway. That's why he gave me the job breaking in horses. Horses I got to like horses. They liked me, the horses, straightaway.'His former jockey, and later boss, Ian Rankin, once called Marty Dodd ';the kindest man who ever lived'. This is Marty Dodd's remarkable story, told in his own words.';As an Anangu child who was forcibly removed and as a parent who single-handedly parented seven children, Mr Dodd fought the odds to become the winner of horse races and an even bigger winner in life.' Dr Irene Watson, Tanganekald woman, lawyer, activist and academic';From exploitation to independence a story of resilience that needed to be told. Marty Dodd's experiences and philosophy make a worthwhile addition to the growing literature of Aboriginal autobiography.' Christobel Mattingley, AM, DUnivSA, editor/researcher of Survival in Our Own Land

In this wise, witty and moving story, fifteen-year-old Lucy arrives from inner-city Melbourne to live on a farm in the early 1980s. Wandong hosts the second largest truck and country music festival in the southern hemisphereand nothing else.';It is rare to find a story that takes us into that liminal territory of adolescence with such force and such heart. Desire, disappointment, betrayal and forgiveness written in libretto, an ode to the tumult of coming of age.' Gabrielle Carey, co-author, Puberty Blues

The concept for this book grew while I was commuting between Sydney and the NSW Central Coast, camera and journal close at hand. Misty reflections and images of the countryside, as in the cover photo, are like dream images in the labyrinthine mind, in half sleep, stirred by the motion of train or coach. This concept was intensified by a long train journey in New Zealand, in 2011, expressed in the poem ';Memories of the Waikato, NZ', when I retraced a journey and rewrote a poem from when I was a student at Waikato University, NZ. Now I live in Australia, on the NSW Central Coast. I returned to study, graduating with a BA from GU, Queensland, in 2005. I have travelled in the UK, Spain, Italy, Canada, India, USA and the Caribbean, among other locations. My day job has predominantly been in roles assisting the unemployed and residents of public housing. I have worked in the lonely tower of a super-rich magazine company, selling subscriptions, but this ran contrary to my visions as a writer. I have remained a wanderer and writer at heart, camera and journal at hand along the way.

It was an act of simple kindness for an Australian couple to take two Czech refugees from post World War II Europe into their working-class home. They could never have foreseen the tensions these sophisticated Europeans would create, or the life-changing impact they would have on their teenage daughter. A Promise of Peaches explores sympathetically the culture clashes of 1950s immigration, not unlike those of today, and shows with sensitivity the unfolding of adolescent sexuality.';A Promise of Peaches is a thoughtful and deeply compassionate examination in verse of female adolescence and cultural tensions in Melbourne in the early 1950s. Valerie Volk has the reader sympathising almost equally with all her main protagonists, despite the steadily mounting conflicts between them. Mutual incomprehension between and within the ';old' Australians and the ';new' is dramatically portrayed and its climactic resolution persuasively drawn.' Geoff Page';I read this manuscript in one sitting, without pause, a testimony to its readability and its inherent interest A verse novel has proved ideal for the task: the work is compressed and the form suits the intensity of the subject The climax, when the adolescent Claire begins her sexual awakening in response to Viktor, is handled with tact and expertly delineates the responses of the two. The triumph of the novel is this respect for all the main characters even Irena, who could be a standard ';femme fatale'.' Thomas Shapcott (Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing, University of Adelaide)

Ethan is 14 and running wild. This is Sumatra, Indonesia. Land of jungles and volcanoes. And heart-stopping traffic and cheap beer and clove cigarettes. The rules from home don't seem to apply here and Ethan's having a ball. Ethan's party is Jon's worst nightmare. He's only 19, but he knows he has to do something. You can't just let your little brother drink whenever he feels like it. Not when you're the adult. Not when you're the only one in charge.

Bill Cotter's poems and stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines throughout Australia. He has won a number of literary awards, including the International Library of Poetry competition, the Maryborough Golden Wattle Festival poetry competition and the Melbourne Shakespeare Society's sonnet competition. His work has also been recorded, published and read over the ABC. Some of his poetry, depicting issues of conservation, has also been on display in the Sale Regional Gallery and the East Gippsland Gallery in Bairnsdale. He has conducted a number of creative writing courses for adults and children. He has, in addition to the writing of poetry, an interest in the oral presentation of verse to an audience. Ginninderra Press has published eight books of his poetry, a collection of short stories and a short play for voices exploring the tragic journey of Burke and Wills.

';This first book is packed with clear-eyed veracity, offers a shining resilience, personal insight and shared comfortwe are enjoined, a chorus.' Les WicksFew poets express the meeting of nature and emotion as tenderly as Susan McCreery. Her poems open with images of nature and draw the reader in to scenarios of such heartbreak and love it is at times hard to surface. The sparkle of a boy playing in the surf, the metallic sound of betrayal on a Greek island, the humidity of a summer's night part physical, part longing for what has been lost. Among these gentle poems are suggestions of violence, of politics, of alienation, all held in a lacuna, waiting for that southerly to bring the pressure down.