women-authors-from-australia

"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."

"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."

"“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."

"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!"

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

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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)."

"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."

"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."

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

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

""... 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."

"... 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."

"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."

"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)."

"... 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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

""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!"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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!"

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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)"