Women Authors From Australia

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

"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)"

"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)"

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

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

"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)"

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

"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)"

"(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."

"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."

"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’."

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

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

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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…"

"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."

"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…"

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."