Women authors from Australia

"Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed."

"The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what happened to women."

"The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement."

"Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing."

"No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders."

"Sexism is here a misleading name for misogyny, which is distrust, hatred and contempt of women. And it's not just men who feel these feelings and act on them. Women persecute other women, humiliate them and discriminate against them. They may not grab their tits or threaten to rape them; women have more effective ways of doing other women in. "Horizontal hostility", another gem from the Flo Kennedy thesaurus, is a by-product of oppression. Oppressed people don’t dare denounce the actual oppressor; instead they betray the people alongside them. They see their shared suffering as the consequence of a defect within themselves. What should be anger becomes guilt and self-blame. This process can be discerned clearly and repeatedly in the caseload of the Everyday Sexism project. Though much of what is reported is criminal behaviour and not normalised at all, as the victims persist in imagining that whatever happened was their fault, there can be no access to redress. They should be furious but are terrified and ashamed instead. As long as a rape victim is considered to need anonymity, she is expected to shoulder shame and self-hatred as a consequence of someone else’s behaviour. Enough. Enough. Simply coughing up outrage into a blog will get us nowhere."

"How do we form ourselves into an activity — a force to improve the situation? I don't have the answers. I'm an academic — the most useless people in the world."

"Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."

"With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, with their corollaries of bitterness and diminution, no matter how glittering the objective which would justify it, she must understand that it is a wrong way and an illusory end. The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity which is the reflowering of etiolated energy. Only these can sustain her and keep the flow of energy coming. The problems are only equalled by the possibilities: every mistake made is redeemed when it is understood. The only ways in which she can feel such joy are radical ones: the more derided and maligned the action that she undertakes, the more radical."

"The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial."

"If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood — if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby."

"In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself. All that exists, exists to beautify her."

"The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the sexual object sought by all men, and all women. She is of neither sex for she herself has no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity."

"Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him..."

"Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother."

"Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of success she helped to make for him, for a shameless hussy of nineteen."

"Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone."

"The failure of women to produce great works of art and all that can be explained in terms of this statement. Insofar as she escapes or rejects her conditioning, the little girl may excel in those kinds of intellectual activity that are called creative, but eventually she either capitulates to her conditioning, or the conflicts become so pressing that her efficiency is hampered."

"Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism."

"The principle of the brotherhood of man is that narcissistic one, for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over."

"Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it."

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them."

"Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate."

"They still say "fuck you" as a venomous insult; they still find "cunt" the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary."

"The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed."

"Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity."

"The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world."

"Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse."

"By 1627 Judith Leyster was famous enough to be mentioned in Ampzing's description of the city of Haarlem; by 1661 she had been so far forgotten that De Bie does not mention her in his Golden Cabinet. Her eclipse by Frans Hals may have begun in her own lifetime, as a consequence of her marriage to Molenaer perhaps, for Sir Luke Schaub acquired the painting now known as The Jolly Companions as a Hals in Haarlem in the seventeenth century. If Judith Leyster had not been in the habit of signing her work with the monogram JL attached to a star, a pun on the name her father had taken from his brewery, Leyster or Lodestar, her works might never have been reattributed to her: few paintings can boast of a provenance as clear as that of The Jolly Companions. As a result of the discovery that The Jolly Companions bore Leyster's monogram, the English firm which had sold the painting to Baron Schlichting in Paris as a Hals attempted to rescind their own purchase and get their money back from the dealer, Wertheimer, who had sold it to them for £4500 not only as a Hals but "one of the finest he ever painted." Sir John Millars agreed with Wertheimer about the authenticity and value of the painting. The special jury and the Lord Chief Justice never did get to hear the case, which was settled in court on 31st May 1893, with the plaintiffs agreeing to keep the painting for £3500 plus £500 costs. The gentlemen of the press made merry at the experts' expense, for all they had succeeded in doing was in destroying the value of the painting. Better, they opined, to have asked no questions. At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equalling Hals at his best, had been discovered."

"The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood."

"The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not."

"While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend."

"Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust."

"Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway."

"The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all."

"The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy."

"As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue."

"Next time round Hitler will be a machine, developed by male conquest as the most efficient method of subduing the peoples of the earth. Our only hope is that we have yet time to breed a generation which cannot be ruled in such a way or seek such a way to rule. We have no more need of great generals, for war is no longer fought by men but by machines against men. Machines are not mortal nor do they feel pain, so they must perforce win the war, unless the last of the fantasy heroes can acknowledge his weakness and his terror, and beg pardon."

"Compulsory motherhood is not ennobling, although the friends of the foetus are at pains to point out that most women denied abortions end up loving their issue just the same. Whether they love them just the same as they would have if they had wanted them is of course unverifiable; most women are not so perverse and unjust as to punish their children for the crimes of society (their fathers), but the oppression of their circumstances is real notwithstanding. For the oppressors themselves to take credit for the women's magnanimity is sickeningly smug. The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement."

"Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to."

"Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it."

"Doctors, lawyers and even accountants have always understood that they would have to stand firm, functioning as a solid group protecting its own expertise and hence its earning capacity, from the tendency of all merchants to buy cheap and sell dear. They made of their special knowledge a rare and valuable commodity, insisted on a mystique and protected each other by an immovable professional code. They were cynical enough to know that if they were once cast in the role of public martyrs, working harder and more generously than most other groups of workers, they would be left with nothing but masochism, exhaustion and despair to show for it. Like successful trade unions, who have always worked on the principle that the job is worth whatever you can force the employer to pay for it and not a penny more or less, they understood that nobody was going to pay them their fees out of gratitude, that if they left it to the man whose life they had saved to pay them what he thought fit, they would wind up with half an old penny."

"The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity."

"In the nuclear family the child is confronted by only two adults contrasted by sex. The tendency towards polarization is unavoidable. The duplication of effort in the nuclear family is directly connected to the family's role as the principal unit of consumption in consumer society. Each household is destined to acquire a complete set of all the consumer durables considered necessary for the good life and per caput consumption is therefore maintained at its highest level. In sex, as in consumption, the nuclear family emphasizes possession and exclusivity at the expense of the kinds of emotional relationships that work for co-operation and solidarity."

"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed."

"Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane."

"Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living."

"This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write. I believed that each generation should produce its own statement of problems and priorities, and that I had no special authority or vocation to speak on behalf of women of any but my own age, class, background and education. For thirty years I have done my best to champion all the styles of feminism that came to public attention because I wanted it to be clear that lipstick lesbianism and the prostitutes’ union and La Leche and the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom and pressure for the ordination of women were aspects of the same struggle towards awareness of oppression and triumph over it. Though I disagreed with some of the strategies and was as troubled as I should have been by some of the more fundamental conflicts, it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminism had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly. When the lifestyle feminists chimed in that feminism had gone just far enough in giving them the right to "have it all", i-e., money, sex and fashion, it would have been inexcusable to remain silent."

"Even if it had been real, equality would have been a poor substitute for liberation; fake equality is leading women into double jeopardy. The rhetoric of equality is being used in the name of political correctness to mask the hammering that women are taking. When The Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners. It's time to get angry again."

"A woman's pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man's."

"Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity."

"The few men who do a hand's turn around the house expect gratitude and recognition, so sure are they that, though it is their dirt, it is not their job."

"How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women?"

"We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional."

"If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?"

"In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death."

"Regardless of the dutiful pushing of condoms in the girls' press, the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm."

"The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more."

"I'm actually passionately opposed to double beds, they're probably more responsible for bad sex than any other single piece of furniture."

"I am a different person since I read Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch because she expressed what I felt with a great deal of humor. All my life I had experienced feelings of anger, impotence and injustice without knowing why. Suddenly I felt someone understood me and I could finally cope with my emotions. This marked not only my writing but my life."

"Early white feminists, such as Kate Millett and Germaine Greer, made arguments that resounded throughout the western world, regarding their rage against white, male-dominated society and claimed their right to be angry. "Woman" had for too long been forced into quiet complacency. In the sixties, what was the purpose of the campus bra-burning, after all, if not to demonstrate their militant refusal to be continually sexualized by male culture. And yet, when feminists of color show their indignation and express intolerance of racism, some white feminists and intellectuals accuse us of being "too angry". Should we ask first what is "anger-appropriate" so as not to offend anyone by expressing our indignation and pain?"

"She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now and was employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna's mind. She has repeatedly written about her own experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility, failed marriage (she was married for three weeks to a construction worker in the 1960s) and menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory … In part, her ability to remain so prominently in the public consciousness comes from an astute understanding and well-established symbiotic relationship with a media as eager to be shocked as she is to shock."

"The Female Eunuch is a fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto. It's all over the place, impulsive and fatally naive — which is to say it is the quintessential product of its time. So was Greer. … If Greer were a bit more honest and had a bit more perspective, she'd have a useful message to relay to young women about the perils of confusing sexual autonomy with the real but ephemeral ability to manipulate men. She could elucidate the difference between a sexual freedom that abuses body and soul and a sexual freedom that cherishes and respects them. But Greer has always spoken directly from the tangles of her personal experience, shamelessly extrapolating from her own condition to the rest of womankind and seemingly unaware of her presumption. … In the '70s, she admonished women who lacked her confidence, stylishness and libido for their timorousness. Today, feeling betrayed, she's become grim and hectoring, a feminist more cartoonishly man-hating than the ones she supposedly defied in the '70s, nattering on about body hair and bras."

"Women who were housewives, who were pretty miserable … felt inspired by her book and their life changed. They didn't become megastars, but they became a librarian or something. I've heard women say again and again when the subject of Germaine comes up: 'Well, her book changed my life for the better.' And they'll be modest women living pretty ordinary lives, but better lives."

"She enjoys what most women do not enjoy, and therefore it's valuable, which is going out and doing battle with men."

"For a start, her assertion that we've forgotten about liberation and settled, instead, for the hope of equality feels like a revelation. "Liberation struggles are not about assimilation, but about asserting difference," she writes. "...What none of us noticed [in the 70s] was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word. We were settling for equality." [...] Now, the Women's Liberation spearheaded by the likes of Greer never told anyone that they shouldn't shave their legs. What it did do was say that if you want to shave, you should be aware that political pressures are behind that desire; just as political pressures force women to diet, and have breast implants, and use anti-ageing creams made from placenta, and generally feel hateful towards their physical selves. Greer's new book is an exciting reminder of how discrimination against women stops them, physically, from being 'the whole woman'. 'Your cellulite is you,' she says. It might sound obvious; but what a thrill to talk about owning our bodies, about being who we are. This is where the equality-seekers get it wrong, and liberationists like Greer get it right. Because how we feel about our bodies has an impact on whether we get paid the same. Of course we'll never get equal status if we're spending all our time and energy worrying about our thighs. Of course we'll never get equal pay if we ask for it wearing a baby-doll slip."

"In this era the only feminism that makes sense to me is one that acknowledges the differences between women, and yet still encourages women to work together to forge a more equal society. Germaine Greer, who I believe helped to spring open that cage of femininity in her first book, The Female Eunuch, is now refusing to acknowledge the differences among women. In her new book, The Whole Woman, she tries to blend all women's lives into one shared experience of sorrow and unrequited love."

"I have always been wary of feminists who seek to tell me that I must share a common personal experience with them that, more often than not, seems utterly alien to me. In Greer's eyes, if I am a woman I must not only be very sad, I must be obsessed with my body, and I must have really bad sex."

"But why can't Greer acknowledge the confidence and freedom that many women now bring to their sexual lives? The liberation that Greer herself helped us to achieve she now denies."

"Greer claims that this book was one she was reluctant to write. She has said that my book, The New Feminism, spurred her to such fury that she felt she had to respond. At the end of The Whole Woman she takes up an argument with "new feminism", which she equates with "lifestyle feminism". But that equation makes me wonder if she ever read my book."

"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

"To the Muslim woman, the hijab provides a sense of empowerment. It is a personal decision to dress modestly according to the command of a genderless Creator; to assert pride in self, and embrace one's faith openly, with independence and courageous conviction."

"The world of adolescence was all I was interested in exploring, I suppose because there is no other period in your life when you feel as intensely. Love, hate, jealousy, loyalty: I remember the power of these emotions as a teenager and how navigating questions of identity at the same time was truly terrifying and exhilarating. Writing in that moment of a person’s life has always felt so right to me."

"Distance in time has made my voice less contrived and subjective. I don’t feel I’m writing some kind of diary (which I kind of felt I was doing when I was 16). I am far more conscious of my voice and more disciplined in separating myself from my characters…"

"The relationship between reader and writer in fiction is steeped in vulnerabilities. It really does require trust and faith because some books have the power to transform people. You feel like you can never go back, look at the world in the same way again. And that grand ambition is what I hope to do with my books because at the heart of my writing is a passion for telling stories of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the misunderstood."

"I love the stuff and material of writing: words. The games you can play with them. The rhythm and lyricism in a good passage of writing. The power of a simple sentence. I also love the paradoxical bind of writing as both freedom and constraint. You start creating characters and scenes out of thin air. But if you do it well enough, that freedom constricts, because your characters are no longer inside you. They become their own people, agents on the page who need to act and think and feel in ways true to who they are…"

"Remember that your thoughts are the primary cause of everything."

"If you are feeling good , it is because you are thinking good thoughts."

"There is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it, and that truth is this: you deserve all good things life has to offer"

"Ask once, believe you have received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good."

"Be grateful for what you have now. As you begin to think about all the things in your life you are grateful for, you will be amazed at the never ending thoughts that come back to you of more things to be grateful for. You have to make a start, and then the law of attraction will receive those grateful thoughts and give you more just like them."

"Instead of focusing on the world's problems, give your attention and energy to trust, love, abundance, education and peace."

"The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake."

"Your power is in your thoughts, so stay awake. In other words, remember to remember."

"I love writing picture books. When I get the germ of a new idea, I feel a little shiver of anticipation or recognition. I don’t do anything immediately about the idea. I just keep it there at the back of my mind and think about it now and again and let it ‘brew’, sometimes jotting down bits of the story. Once I’ve got the whole story in my head – I especially need to know how it starts and ends – I sit down at my computer and write the first draft. Then I keep rewriting – draft after draft – until I feel it’s as good as I can make it, which is often not nearly good enough."

"Really, just do it. Many people I speak to say they want to write or illustrate, but they actually haven’t completed anything. Write it, send it off to a publisher and while you’re waiting for a response, get on with the next story. Be determined and resilient, accept rejection and criticism. The publisher and editor are there to help you make the best book possible."

"I read somewhere that all this -the people, the animals, the mountains, the rivers -is just God dreaming. I wish he'd wake the fuck up."

"it was exactly like what the old law people had always said would happen if you look after country, country will look after you."

"[Aboriginal Sovereignty] had become tied into the chosen shame of a continent stolen from his people by a pack of racists, who had turned the argument against the people whose land they had stolen, and whose intergenerational lives have never recovered from so great a loss."

"In the Aboriginal world, we deeply understand that all animals that belong to this land are our close relatives. We understand the importance of our close inter-connectivity with everything in our world. This is the ancient wisdom that we must follow. If we care for our country, the country will care for us."

"We cannot be guided by an ethos of neglect, brokenness of heart, misery of spirit that will lead us into a future world devoid of joy. The world’s combined humanity must sing the planet up with careful songs, songs of responsibility and respect."

"We are going to need the greatest creativity we can find to work on the ever-increasing complex problems facing our combined humanity. We cannot afford a government censoring education and knowledge."

"Of course we will require a greater workforce in health and technology, but we will also need an even greater workforce with the imagination and passion to improve the health of our combined humanity, and our connectedness with the only planet we can survive on."

"All the governments of the world need to act now and act urgently to turn this planetary nightmare around before it is too late, because this warning of the magnitude and acceleration of biodiversity loss is a global crisis with dangerous implications not only for one million species but for human health and long-term survival."

"The Aboriginal caretakers of their traditional country have always understood its power, and why it is so important to care for the land through developing an important system of laws that created great responsibility for caring for the stories and powers of the ancestors. These narratives of great and old wisdom are the true constitution for this country, and urgently need to be upfront in the national narrative in understanding how to care for it."

"This is the only planet we know that supports life. We would do well to see the world as a sacred site that is holy, speak to our planet with kindness, and protect it as such."

"It’s a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again...English is my language because of the history and what I try to do, and I did that in Carpentaria in particular, is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking"

"Truly all it is is commitment, belief and dedication to the task and understanding in yourself that you will do it, even if it seems unbelievable at the time."

"Anyone can find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between."

"Like autumn leaves, bad days fell away as though the genius of the room could not retain them."

"I have felt very privileged to know and to have been able to work with many senior Aboriginal people of great wisdom and intellect. I could name many Aboriginal people right across Australia who have influenced my thinking in a lifelong journey of trying to understand how to see, feel and understand our world, and fight for it. Their perspective and worldview is huge and cosmopolitan in its outlook. Our world is one that teaches the benefits of having eyes wide open, to be attuned to a spiritual understanding of the environment and self-knowledge, and this leads to having an ability to maintain and build internal worlds of visualization and exploration, to hold a vision. Perhaps this helped me to create a novel such as ‘The Swan Book’."

"I think that it is amazing to have a culture where stories were treasured over countless millenniums, and kept sacred to this day. It is a unique undertaking to have a governing system that was built to ensure the sustainability of the country, and built on the idea of preserving peace and cooperation between people. When you look at it in this way, this was a far more sophisticated form of culture than ones that seek to colonise others or create wars. These laws and spiritual ideas about country are known and understood by every Aboriginal person, and I think because there is such emphasis on stories, storytelling is almost second nature to most Aboriginal people."

"(what is one thing that you want people to take away from The Swan Book?) AW: Just to be kind to the world – it is the only one we have, and to be kinder to each other and to see the beauty and genius in all our cultures, and to see the beauty and right to exist and thrive of the creatures sharing this planet with us. The Swan Book asks for respect and the need to gain greater knowledge and respect for the responsibilities that Indigenous peoples have for the good stewardship of the world."

"Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut snake virus in its doll's house. Little stars shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notices stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! it thinks, worse than the swarms of rednecks hanging around the neighborhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains. Inside the doll's house the virus manufactures really dangerous ideas as arsenal, and if it sees a white flag unfurling, it fires missiles from a bazooka through the window into the flat, space, field or whatever else you want to call life. The really worrying thing about missile-launching fenestrae is what will be left standing in the end, and which splattering of truths running around in my head about a story about a swan with a bone will last on this ground. (first lines)"

"In every neck of the woods people walked in the imagination of doomsayers and talked the language of extinction. (p5)"

"The girl convinced herself that only the mad people in the world would tell you the truth when madness was the truth, when the truth itself was mad. (p64)"

"People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that. (p84)"

"After clouds, always mist, and another ghost story to tell. (p187)"

"She remembered Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions once saying that no story was worth telling if no one could remember the lesson in it. These were stories that have made no difference to anyone. Old Aunty was fading away forever. But... even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered. Ah! The truth was always forgotten. (p210)"

"The important public officials, passionately depicting themselves as unified people, were obsessed with imagination, narrow though it was in their minds. Well! Aesthetics was all. (p265)"

"Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction. (p333)"

"We have to think big...'We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it."

"No matter what happens to you, you can maintain your own control about what you believe and who you are."

"I've seen that harshness in policies handed out to Aboriginal people over decades, and it doesn't seem to get any better. That's how the politics are played out: not doing the best you can do for someone, but working out how you can beat your opponent. So the swans are a different way of pausing and reflecting on what's happening in the world, and doing it in a light way."

"We've got a beautiful country, a beautiful world, why not enjoy it?"

"I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror— The wide brown land for me!"

"It’s gettin’ bits o’ posies, ’N’ feelin’ mighty good; A-thrillin’ ’cause she loves you, An’ wond’rin’ why she should; [...] As if there’s nothin’ mattered, As if the world was good, As if the Lord was lookin’, An’ sort o’ understood."

"It's us two when it's morning, And us two when it's night; And us two when it's troubled, And us two when it's bright;And us two don't want nothing To make life good and true, And lovin'-sweet, and happy, While us two's got us two."

"I have grown past hate and bitterness, I see the world as one; But though I can no longer hate, My son is still my son.All men at God's round table sit, And all men must be fed; But this loaf in my hand, This loaf is my son's bread."

"It was, it was a fairy man Who came to town today. "I'll make a cake for sixpence, If you will pay, will pay."I paid him with a sixpence, And with a penny, too; He made a cake of rainbows, And baked it in the dew. [...] He iced it with a moonbeam, He patterned it with play, And sprinkled it with star-dust From off the Milky Way."

"Youth troubles over eternity; age grasps at a day and is satisfied to have even the day."

"We are the sons of Australia, Of the men who fashioned the land, We are the sons of the women Who walked with them, hand in hand; And we swear by the dead who bore us, By the heroes who blazed the trail, No foe shall gather our harvest, Or sit on our stockyard rail."

"Never admit the pain, Bury it deep; Only the weak complain. Complaint is cheap."

"I never knew how wide the dark, I never knew the depth of space, I never knew how frail a bark, How small is man within his place,Not till I heard the swans go by, Not till I marked their haunting cry, Not till, within the vague on high, I watched them pass across the sky. ..."

"I span and Eve span, A thread to bind the heart of man!"

"I have no thunder in my words, Thunder is much too high; But I can see as far as birds, And feel the wind go by.And I can follow through the grass The darling-breasted quail; For, though things great in splendour mass, I choose the lesser grail."

""I'm old Botany Bay; Stiff in the joints, Little to say.I am he Who paved the way, That you might walk At your ease to-day; [...] I split the rock; I felled the tree: The nation was — Because of me!"Old Taking the sun From day to day. ... Shame on the mouth That would deny The knotted hands That set us high!"

"Never allow the thoughtless to delcare That we have no tradition here!"

"I shall go as my father went, A thousand plans in his mind, With something still held unspent When death lets fall the blind.I shall go as my mother went, The ink still wet on the line: I shall pay no rust as rent For the house that is mine."

"Nurse no long grief, Lest the heart flower no more; Grief builds no barns; its plough Rusts at the door."

"Emptied of us the land, Ghostly our going, Fallen, like spears the hand Dropped in the throwing.We are the lost who went, Like the cranes, crying; Hunted, lonely, and spent, Broken and dying."

"I am not very patient, Yet patient I must be With him beside my pillow And the babe upon my knee. [...] Strange that I was given Thoughts that soar to heaven, Yet must I sit and keep Children in their sleep!"

"Moorangoo, the dove, in her high place mourned, And Mulloka, the Water Spirit, turned In his shade as he heard her weep, Sad as the lone that cries in his sleep At the sound of the gun, Asking for pity where pity was none."

"s are nothing new. In fact, fossil evidence shows us that jellyfish have been blooming for hundreds of millions of years. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, it became fashionable for naturalists to report all sorts of odd and unusual events from the natural world. The early issues of the and others like it are full of such interesting tidbits. One such report described ' as so abundant in , Germany, that an oar pushed down between the jellyfish remained standing upright ( 1880). Today, just about any bay or harbor has Aurelia shoals so dense that one may wonder whether there is actually enough water between each jellyfish for it to obtain enough oxygen to survive."

"Jellyfish as a group holds some astonishing records. The world's most venomous animal is a jellyfish, the Australian Deadly Box jelly-fish (', page 50). The largest invertebrate discovered in the twentieth century is a jellyfish, the so-called Black Sea Nettle (', page 114)—thought it is practically a toy compared to the lion's mane jellies of the North Atlanta (' spp., page 52), which can reach three meters (ten feet) across the body and drag tentacles nearly 30 meters (100 feet) long. One jellyfish helped scientists win the Nobel Prize (page 198). Another grows ten percent of its body length per hour (page 208). And the world's first known case of true biological immortality was discovered in the diminutive and aptly named Immortal Jellyfish (', page 74)."

"Imagine one of Australia’s foremost jellyfish specialists, a robust scientist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of jellyfish taxonomy and a deep understanding of their place in the . Now make them enthusiastic, unashamedly and female. This is Lisa-Ann Gershwin. Dr Gershwin this year was named one of The Science Show's Top 100 Australian Scientists, along with greats such as Sir FRS, Sir FRS, and Professor FRS. Her road to science has not been a smooth one though. ... Lisa-Ann describes her neurodivergence as central to her science and who she is. While it has been a source of joy as she has been able to immerse herself in the details of jellyfish taxonomy and ecology, it has also come with difficulties."

"What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don't what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I fell as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily."

"... Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushion and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, It is Bozzy who asserts that in the country the only things that make him happy are meals."

"She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a pleasant laugh, and limbs were long and slender. Certainly she ought to have been enjoying herself. Instead, she wasted her time in that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule restricted, among women, to the elderly and plain."

"By the time she was twenty-four, nearly all the girls who had when she did were married, and she felt as though she were a ghost haunting the s of a younger generation."

"Pitied? Horrid thought. The great thing in life was to be so situated that you can pity others. But to be pitied yourself?"

"You see, what has happened has taken away my faith in goodness—I don't know who you are that I keep on wanting to tell things to, but I must talk and tell you. Yes; that it is what it has done; and the hurt goes too far down to be healed. Yet I know time is a queer, wholesome thing. I've lived long enough to have found that out. It is very sanitary. It cleans up everything. It never fails to sterilize and purify."

"Once I knew a bishop rather intimately—oh, nothing that wasn't most creditable to us both—and he said to me, "Dear child, you will always be happy if you are good." I'm afraid he couldn't have been quite candid, or else he was very inexperienced, for I have never been so terribly good in the bishop's sense as these last three years—turning my back on every private wish, dreadfully unselfish, devoted, a perfect monster of goodness. And unhappiness went with me every step of the way."

"Looking out of the club window into —hers was an economical club, but convenient for , where she lived, and for 's, where she shopped—Mrs. Wilkins, having stood there for some time very drearily, her mind's eye on the Mediterranean in April, and the , and the enviable opportunities of the rich, while her bodily eye watched the really falling steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing , suddenly wondered whether this was not the rainy day Mellersh—Mellersh was Mr. Wilkins—had so often encouraged her to prepare for, and whether to get out of such a climate and into the small mediaeval castle wasn't perhaps what had all along intended her to do with her savings. Part of her savings, of course; perhaps quite a small part."

"Father ... appeared to take it for granted that his daughter would continue about him as before, side by side with his new wife, on the ground that homes were the natural places for maiden daughters; and when she reminded him that she was thirty-three, he merely inquired with acerbity, for in his heart he was thinking that she ought to have been married and out of the way long ago, whether being thirty-three altered the fact that she was a maiden daughter."

"Father was very pleasant indeed, if faintly apologetic — not embarrassed, for he was never that, but there was a faint flavour of apology in his manner, which was perhaps not to be wondered at, since his new wife was ever so much younger, one could see at once, than his daughter, and he sixty-five. "You mustn't think, Jennifer," he said after , which had been the oddest meal of her life, as he called her into the back diningroom where protected by folding doors from anything that might be going on in the front one, they had worked together so long — she the obedient handmaid waiting on his thoughts, taking them down as they emerged from him, typing and retyping them, over and over again with dogged patience typing a single paragraph, a single sentence, sometimes for days working on a single sentence till it was, in father's eyes, as near perfect as it could humanly be got, — "you mustn't think, Jennifer," he said, "that I've sprung this on you unfairly.""

""... I haven't had much time to think, have I? But I can't stay here," said Jen quickly ... "There isn't room for two women in this house. It simply wouldn't hold us both." No; that was precisely what he had been thinking. Though he never, being a decent father, would have said so, it was perfectly true. The house, except extremely awkwardly, couldn't hold them both. No house had yet been built which could hold, in peace and comfort, a maiden daughter approaching middle age, and a young second wife. But that Jennifer should see this at once, and clearly, was the last thing he had dreamed of."

"Beauty; beauty. What was the good of beauty, once it was over? It left nothing behind it but acid regrets, and no heart at all to start fresh. Nearly everything else left something."

"Still, she did seem to have shrunk. Now why should she have shrunk? he wondered, aggrieved. He hadn't; quite the contrary. However, he mustn't mind. She was Fanny, presently to be his Fanny, and he mustn't mind any little alterations. What he did mind mind was that, like Soames, she appeared not to recognize him. She soon would, though, he told himself; and he went over to her determined and confident, lifted her unresisting hand, kissed it with all the fervor of happy reunion, and said with what he felt was immense tact and presence of mind, "I would have known you anywhere." Fanny was much too astonished to speak. She stared at the head bent over her hand. Who was this bald man?"

"... Whether in or New York, London or , von Arnim’s settings almost always tell the reader about the insufferable constraints placed upon the women who inhabit them. Elizabeth von Arnim was also brilliant at men, or rather at skewering their behaviour, usually with the help of outlandish names. Married men, in particular, are targeted as they ignore their wives, whine about their misfortunes, or want fish for breakfast. They also lie, cheat, bully, and diminish. Von Arnim made frequent and barely disguised use of the men in her life. The husband of Elizabeth and her German Garden, based closely on her own, is referred to as ‘the Man of Wrath’, a bald-faced hint that, for all of its delights, Elizabeth was only superficially a book about gardens. Subsequent lovers, including H.G. Wells and publisher (thirty years her junior), also became fodder for her fiction. So did her second husband, , brother of the more famous Bertrand and a human bulldozer who pursued von Arnim in various forms for perceived damages long after their separation. Von Arnim tended to hide such unpleasantness under the guise of humour, at which she was unequivocally brilliant (P.G. Wodehouse must surely have been inspired by her novels). Clergy, relatives, dogs, and toddlers all come with laugh-out-loud descriptions, while her skill at satire rests upon ruthlessly close observation filtered through playful, often inventive language or placed in biting juxtaposition. But underneath – whether taking aim at dismissive doctors or overbearing fathers or the bizarre niceties of the – bristles a bitterness that goes beyond the waspishness of say, Muriel Spark, as von Arnim exposes the societal structures used to limit the autonomy and opportunity of her female characters."

"Hugh Walpole was tutor to Elizabeth's children during her time at , as was E.M. Forster, who was a Cambridge friend of Elizabeth's nephew, . In later years, Forster was to recall his inconspicuous arrival at the , 'his average welcome' ... by the von Arnims, as well as his genuine appreciation of Elizabeth 'as a writer'. ... Though he also insisted that personally, the two, 'were never — or almost never! — in sympathy'. ..."

"Elizabeth von Arnim is probably best remembered as the author of ' (1898) and ' (1922), and as the elder cousin of Katherine Mansfield. In recent times, fresh scholarship has begun has begun to reinstate van Arnim into the cultural milieu of which she was a significant part, while research into the complex relationship between Mansfield and her cousin has done much to shed light on the familial, personal and literary connections between these unlikely friends. ... Although their lives appeared to be very different (Mansfield's largely one of penurious poor health, von Arnim's chiefly one of robust privilege), we know each experienced the other's influential presence. They read and commented on each other's work, and Manfield's critical assessments became part of the widespread reception of von Arnim's writing, while von Arnim's skill as as an author seeped into her cousin's youthful aspirations and into her firs collection of stories, ' (1911)."

"s like , s and s will flower better if any dead spent flowers are snipped off."

"Australian didn't come of age until 's contribution. Her creative genius and her philosophy of integrating the house and garden into the landscape have had a huge influence on our garden history."

"More and more people are becoming aware of herbs and appreciating the pleasure these plants give in the garden, kitchen and for cosmetics, medicines and s around the house. I couldn't live without my ."

"Most of us enjoy or need a cup of tea or coffee at regular intervals, but with a within easy reach of the kitchen it is a very good reason to vary the flavours of the cuppa!"

"I’m standing outside Jane Edmanson’s home, drenched by the flash floods sweeping the city. A tour of her garden, I assume, is out of the question. “Nonsense!” she says, zipping up her coat. “There’s no such thing as ‘gardening weather’. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining, you just get out there and do what you can.” She strides through a muddy garden bed to get to her , then yanks off a sprig and crushes it. “Smell that,” she says, lifting it to my nose. “Isn’t it marvellous?” Her front yard is a jumble of flowers, s, trees and herbs. Some might consider it a smidge “overgrown”; she prefers the word “full”. She adores bushes that spill onto paths and sprouting in the cracks."

"“I’ve been doing it for 34 years,” says Jane Edmanson. “Can you imagine that?” Edmanson is speaking about her time on , where she has been a since the show began back in 1990. Outside of that role, the gardening expert has also published books on propagation and planting, and in 2004 received an medal for services to . She feels “very lucky” to have made a career out of her passion."

"If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with perhaps a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay down the book immediately and betake yourself to "Sandford and Merton" or similar standard juvenile works. Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are."

"In 2012, the Chinese sociologist Sūn Lìpíng (b. 1955) suggested the PRC [People's Republic of China] faced four possible paths. One was return to Mao-style egalitarian populism, reducing inequality and corruption but risking the violence and irrationality of the Mao era. Another was to deepen the reforms – further privatizing the economy regardless of increased inequality. The third was to maintain the status quo. The fourth was to pursue reform while applying notions of fairness, justice, and universal values."