Books published by Ginninderra Press

Traverse landscapes, ride in a race, cut skylines and paste metaphors on your lips. Melinda Jane's poetical words are as refreshing as a steaming cup. Sip, hold, taste, read these verses in this debut book Nature's Nuptials. And may the earth suspend you in its net.Melinda Jane is an Australian author of the children's book The Currawong and the Owl, and has forty individual written works published internationally in anthologies and literature journals. A lyricist with songs composed to music and a spoken word artist with sixty live performances, Melinda Jane holds a university degree in Social Science.

'It is poetically satisfying when gutsy is elegant and outspoken is gentle, when the snake nerve writhes with realisation so that wonder is reborn accompanied by the music of new knowledge, by the rewards of a past paid for and a future fortified. The maturity of these poems, combined with the poet's belief in the redemptive power of poetry, is a cause for celebration.' - Syd Harrex (praise for Shadow Selves)

Hay, New South Wales, 1923. Martha, a classics scholar from the coast, comes to teach in a man's town in the outback. She falls in love with Henry, a local man, and they find their dream place on the river where they raise a family and breed a flock of sheep with fine wool. The unforgiving climate erodes their dreams. When Henry leaves, Martha takes on the outside work and learns to drive. Seven-year-old Anna is her main helper and confidante. Sustained by their shared love of this stark and beautiful country with its endless skies, red plains and silvery saltbush, mother and daughter strive - against all odds - to look after livestock and land and keep the farm going. But when Anna is away at boarding school, the place is lost forever.'I ache for these women. They endure so much and still, through their determination and resilience, they triumph.' - Elisabeth Hanscombe, author of The Art of Disappearing'Remarkable for the way it portrays human lives as embedded in and deeply shaped by place, and places as indelibly marked, for good and ill, by people.' - Mary Besemeres, author of Translating One's Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography

Chiperoni: term for a kind of fog, drizzle rain, experienced in the Shire Highlands of southern Malawi during the cold, dry season; name derived from Mount Chiperone, an isolated mountain peak at the southern extremity of East African mountain ranges, covered with montane forests and surrounded by deciduous woodlands.'The sinuous rhythms and arresting imagery in Counting the Chiperoni take us on journeys through landscape and time, along lines of history - political and colonial, personal and cultural. Colourful, soulful and prismatic, here is a kind of pilgrimage through poetry itself. From elegant, observational sonnet to mellifluous prose poem, each piece is a small, bright study in care for language and its power to illuminate deeper truths about change and its cost.' - Kim Kelly, author of the acclaimed novella Wild ChicoryAdèle Ogiér Jones has lived and worked in Malawi over different periods since 2007. Poems in Counting the Chiperoni were written between 2017 and 2018. They are grouped in three sections, opening with those related to 'chiperoni', the weather phenomenon coming from Mozambique, affecting Malawi's southern Shire Highlands around Blantyre. Then 'bush and plantation' includes poems on changing land use; followed by the longest part of the collection 'and its people', which moves between local people's memories rewritten here as poems, and the poet's own reflections on present-day life, work, and customs affected by environmental and economic changes.

How ordinary becomes extraordinary when you empty the cupboard and unravel the jottings. The you will find that all lives are remarkable. Some make you weep more than others, but most are heroic.

'True to the grandmasters of times now past (like Issa), rather than projecting herself onto her subjects, Judith E.P. Johnson allows her subjects to breathe new life through her haiku and senryu. Precious cowrie shells culled from sparse windswept Tasmanian seascapes across a lifetime coolly reflected upon, her poems - in a slow burn of sly wistfulness and whimsicality - help us rediscover what will be lost within what has always, perhaps inescapably, been close at hand.' - Adam L. Kern, author of The Penguin Book of Haiku

Moorings brings together Masel's best work from the last forty years. Jagged and dramatic, these mostly free-verse lyrics direct their taut, plain-speaking voices toward discovery and, sometimes, wisdom. The poems are organised in sections - Returns, Exile, Moorings - suggesting a general move backwards in time. Returns is the largest section and comprises a range of emotions and subjects: a tree full of currawongs, teaching, friendship, love, ageing, dreams. Longer poems take on events and social issues - the difficulty of imagining a home where a woman alone can feel safe, the epidemic of youth suicides, the plight of refugees, the destruction of the World Trade Center. The Exile poems, set in England and Canada, ask questions about newness and familiarity, the rhythm of remembering and forgetting, what should be kept and what jettisoned. With the Moorings section we are returned to Melbourne, family and formative experiences, disobedience and daring. For all its scope and variety, Moorings is a remarkably unified collection, accessible and powerful.

Lives hold promise and promises. Keeping one promise might mean breaking another, for life is anything but simple. I had promised myself I would not go back to England - or, if I did, I would stay there. I did not want to pull myself up by the roots to leave it again. But I also promised Stephen that I would go anywhere with him. We had often spoken of going to England - his daughter still lived there - but we were both mindful of my promise to myself and why I made it. When the opportunity came along for us to go to Scotland to fulfil Stephen's long-held dream to explore Scotland by train, I took a deep breath and said, 'Yes, let's go.' Then his daughter moved from England to the Netherlands so inevitably our trip was extended. I was troubled that I had broken my promise to myself. But things never turn out as we think they will. In making this trip, I found my life had become like a Celtic knot. I found my place again in my childhood family, and in the world. It is said that home is where the heart is, and that proved to be true for me. Connecting is not a holiday travelogue. It tells how I made connections - connections that unified a lifetime's experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A collection of exuberantly comic verses about a magical kingdom in which live a variety of birds and animals. Vividly illustrated by a talented new artist. Ideal for reading aloud to young children.

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