Books published by Ginninderra Press

Stories of mystery, desire and secret lives. A young woman with a secret walks into the life of an older woman who acts out her own daily pretence. When childhood resentments flare on a fishing trip, a man swims to shore from the boat; his decision changes his life forever. A widow delights in the dance of a bowerbird in her garden until she discovers another presence in the bamboo grove. On his first day out of prison, a man finds he is not yet free. After a chance meeting, a man is unwillingly drawn into the lives of a couple facing a major crisis. A young woman tracks down her mother in London and unexpectedly finds her father as well. From a coastal village in Australia to London and Kyoto, Jennifer Shapcott's stories sparkle with poignancy and humour.

Therese Corfiatis seeks out beauty and spirit in simple things: the curl of a wave, the flight of cockatoos ';yellow-flecked tails flashing / like airborne sunflowers' (';Black Cockatoos'). She searches for ancestral homeland and belonging ';my dispossession torn away / a birthing wound healed up' (';The Bridge at Cskrkos') and presents them to the reader with wonder, honesty and freshness.

A rusty old gate, locked or not, is no barrier to Andy's curiosity. He reckons gates are meant to be walked through or climbed over. And he will. Life's rotten anyway he was suspended from school because of rotten Rezzo and sent to England with his mother, which means he'll miss a whole cricketing summer at home in Aussie! Even worse, his Gran gave him an old green agate marble to take back, she said, to where it belongs. And does the gate lead to an orphanage? Weird kids appear: they don't even have a TV, no technology at all. They don't seem to miss it in their lives, they're busy and happy and let him share in their exploits. But they think Andy's talk of moon landings, of seeing close-up photos of Earth taken from a space station or an orbiting telescope, is all imagination. They accuse him of telling lies. To claim his mum cooks with microwaves and dries washing at the press of a button is as ridiculous as his story of flying halfway round the world in twenty-four hours. However, despite all his high-flying talk, he's friendly enough and even daft enough to think a crystal set is jewellery! For Andy, knowing them is all about growing up and appreciating the basics of life. Over the Rusty Gate is Maureen Mitson's fourth full-length novel and her first in the YA genre. It has a biographical background commended for its presentation of a lifestyle in pre-techno times. It also captures the energies and arguments of young people attempting to come to terms with life's events and learning to understand ';difference' as ';individuality'.

The Fortune Bird, the author's first book of poetry, is a collection of personal lyrics notable for their emotional maturity and their sparkling images. Reading these poems will take you around the world and into a deep well of feeling.Ron Pretty

'The Ablation of Time is a delight. An astonishing variety of birds flit among the pages, and the rural countryside is never far from view. David Atkinson has the rare ability to capture in words those significant moments that make us pause and think.' - Ron Wilkins'David Atkinson is a poet of fine distinctions in subject and in language. He writes of Australian rural life with a critical but reverent attitude stemming from an intimate knowledge of the joy and menace of growing up in the country. David's poems are a rich blend of the most profound and intense experience with a great optimism and faith in human nature. He writes in clear, precise English which is powerful and moving in its simplicity.' - John Egan'Whether capturing scenes from a rural childhood or reflecting on landscape and fauna, David Atkinson's poetry abounds with fresh connections and acute observations. The Ablation of Time bears witness not only to a deeply poetic sensibility but also to the intellectual curiosity of a born naturalist, blessed with a photographic eye for composition and detail.' - Gisela Sophia Nittel

In his interpretation of Antigone, Seamus Heaney says, ';Nobody can be sure they are always right.' Maureen O'Shaughnessy's The Truth about A further attends to this idea through various readings of the myth as portrayed by Sophocles, Brecht, Ted Hughes, Anne Carson and, most particularly, Euripides. Set in contemporary Sydney, among a fictional underworld family, The Truth about A not only considers the issue of whether to obey the law or your conscience but delves into the nature of the creative impulse and the eternal bonds and chasms between generations. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, provokes the fury of the crime-overlord Creon with her profound sense of honour, family and duty. But this spirit of defiance raises questions infinitely more complex than the brute facts of power and order, engendering a meditation on justice, ethics and personal judgement.

Edgar Williams is lost after the tragic death of his wife Jackie and can't find a way to shake off the black dog. Therapy doesn't help. His spiritual son Joe suggests leaving it to God. However, he returns to his boxing club, fellowship with the Freemasons, and his Geelong RSL, which help to fill in the hours of loss. A friend suggests a medium, who tells him of some remarkable developments to come in his life. When intruders ransack his home, Edgar hits the main offender with a golf club, putting him in a coma. In court, Edgar calls the judge fig jam (the acronym of the book's title) and runs away. Finally he is arrested and unwilling to apologise to the over-bearing judge goes to gaol. But happier times are on the horizon and an unexpected turn of events sends Edgar on a path which he never envisaged.

He is just one of many in the refugee camp: an old man, his wife dead, compelled to revisit the past. Unfortunately, what he finds is what he had known all along.It is the only story there is, ever since God looked with favour on Abel and not on Cain: Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated; Ishmael is sent out into the desert, while Isaac becomes the heir; Solomons older brother must die before he can be born to rule. The first-born dies, the second inherits: he should not have been surprised. Inherits what? I never thought to ask.It was never going to be easy being Jesus's younger brother, especially when the woman you love only has eyes for him. Just ask Judas, the Second Son.

Hauntings and obsessions, travellers in jeopardy, lives under siege A ghost story with an erotic twist; a sociopath walking his victims along their fault lines until they crack; a black GI in wartime Brisbane loses his dog tag; an Australian woman on holiday in Romania finds herself implicated in her lover's stolen jewellery fencing activities Eleven compelling stories exploring the unexpected and sometimes terrifying consequences of stepping outside your comfort zone.

Freda Brown was a political activist in the women's, peace, and anti-apartheid movements, both in Australia and overseas. A passionate believer in equality, she occupied her busy life with action and organisation. While some of her greatest achievements can be seen in her work in helping to establish and lead pioneering women's organisations, she travelled widely also in the service of political, peace and anti-racism causes. She was a widely respected activist and led an absorbing and very busy life with her political work both in Australia and overseas. She also worked as a journalist, political party organiser and theatre director. This biography is a long-overdue acknowledgement of the pioneering role Freda played at a time when second-generation feminism was decades away. At a time when women were not supposed to want anything more than being a wife and mother, Freda combined career and family successfully for decades, believed passionately in equality and peace, and fought for the rights of people all over the world. She was a leading member of the CPA long after many had left it, and remained a socialist all her life, preferring to hold her personal values rather than be fashionable. Behind Freda's story lie much bigger cultural, social and political ones: the flowering of alternative political ideas, the development of second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution and the changing nature of reproductive rights, and the blossoming of decolonisation and globalisation. Her legacy underlines the lives of many of us in the 21st century.

';Libby Sommer lays bare the foibles of human nature in her finely observed stories of love and loss in the singles dance scene. Brilliantly drawn with wit, compassion and poignancy, the characters you meet in The Crystal Ballroom are sure to remind you of someone maybe even yourself.' Jan Cornall, Writer's Journey';Libby Sommer exposes the secret lives of the singles who dance at the Crystal Ballroom. Authentic and powerful, this unique book will be loved by the dancers and readers.' Frida Kotlyar, ballroom, Latin and Argentine tango dancer';Libby Sommer's fiction has wit but is essentially serious with a subtle but strong underlying pathos, a wry humour and accomplished satirical tone.' Amanda Lohrey, Patrick White Award winner';Sommer's existentialism is one of the best and most articulate voices of middle-age angst ever.' Richard English, novelist and visiting lecturer, Brunel University London

There are so many words for wanting: longing, yearning, lusting, lacking, craving, desiring, aspiring, dreaming, hungering… To want is to be human, to experience both the agony and the exquisite anticipatory movement towards what is beyond present reality. So, wanting is both spiritual and earthy. It is a relishing of possibilities (yes, fantasy!), but equally, a measuring of the lack at the heart of human life, a restlessness, and sometimes a turbulence: 'Quick, said the bird, / find them, find them, / Round the corner. Through the first gate, / Into our first world, shall we follow…' (T.S. Eliot, 'Burnt Norton'). Wanting Only is a set of poetic meditations on how humans - individuals and collectives - are transformed by what and how they desire.

Jane Williams's Parts of the Main is her chemistry, abuzz in a murmuration of organic electrons that at once forms memory, then problems of translation not solely of words, but in comprehending our modernity. These shape-shifting poems are an assignation of author to grace with it, with her, we travel to Europe, her youth, to longings of elsewhere and an ever developing raison d'tre. - Kent MacCarterJane Williams is a poet who leans out of the frame, who turns your ear if not your head. In Parts of the Main we are caught - sometimes caught out -by her ';days of blue and banter', ';eyeball spoils of war', trees ';falling like the bones of oracles'. She writes the tender, the vulnerable, the unshowable. Sometimes there is a touch of the brogue. Jane Williams answers the question ';Will poetry be enough?' Convincingly. - Lizz Murphy

This collection evokes situations confronting ordinary people in their ordinary lives. The author creates images of loss, love, hatred and warmth of particular characters in particular places as far apart as Scotland and Australia. Against a background haunted by Destiny, people are led or pushed by emotions into a stream of experiences. In ';Whispering Shadows' we learn about the significance of an invitation to a dinner dance during World War II and how it shaped the life of the unnamed narrator. In ';Legacy' we read about the influence of alcohol on the lives of four young brothers. ';Inheritance' and ';Foxy Ladies' bring a lighter tone to the collection to balance other weightier issues. Based on her close observation of the human condition, Rose Helen Mitchell's stories reveal uncanny insights into the emotional state of characters who could be someone the reader knows.

A gallimaufry is a medley of things, originally a culinary term for a stew. One could equally call it a hash, a potpourri or even a hotchpotch. Whichever term you choose, I hope you enjoy this particular recipe, finding it to your taste and easily digestible. It is spiced with ingredients drawn from several countries, moods and styles. The cover picture, which is a composite portrait of the author and his wife, by his daughter, Anna, is from a photographic exhibition called Mixed Emotions, described in The Sydney Daily Telegraph as ';an act of metaphorical self-creation'. That could be said of some of these poems, too.

';Greg Tome's poetry is always immediate and felt. His responses to the immediacy and intimacy of daily living are counterpoints to those poems in which he explores the pain of the human condition and, ultimately, indicate how the personal and the communal are inextricably entwined.' - Trish Topp';Greg Tome was a secondary school teacher, and a close observer of history and the foibles of mankind. His poetry covers many aspects of the human condition, from the whimsical to the tragic. In his writings he makes use of an extensive range of styles and approaches. All his work is characterised by a keen eye for the unusual, by an unexpected turn of phrase and always by a sensitivity to the nuances of carving out an existence on this planet.' - John Dixon';In his poetry, Greg Tome retrieves and cleverly explores universal subjects the contemporary reader contemplates. Economical with words, his writing is accessible and pleasurable to read.' - Dr Geoff Cains

';In Mark Mahemoff's Urban Gleanings the routine of the urban commute, punctured by fragile incidents and ruminations, is interspersed with poems drumming against mortality, such as the refugees whose ';corpses washed to shore / all in the same boat'. Many poems are shaded by nostalgia and a tinkering unease: an old garage where ';dreams often end up in mothballs', parents and children cagily circling each other, or watching balloons ';disappear into their past'. As well as these segmented descriptions of daily life demarcated by a crowded metropolis, two long centos chronicle some recent Australian injustices.' Gig RyanUrban Gleanings is an urbane collection that manages to be both sophisticated as verse and open-hearted as poetry. To ';glean' is to seek what is left behind, overlooked, deemed superfluous but which yet sustains the gleaner, who patiently works the fields others have forsaken. In this manner, Mark Mahemoff scrutinises the ground of our living and uncovers what is valuable in it. What we, in our turn, discover is that these poems these gleanings are in fact the true harvest itself, its rich abundance laid out before us as his gift.' Paul Kane This book is remarkable for the humanity of its content and austerity of its language. It is a constant going out of itself into the experience of others. Family, friends and strangers are seen for themselves in an effort of sympathy. The style is entirely appropriate to what is said, opening out possibilities from one line to the next. There is a drive to make sense of experience and then offer that as a new experience in the form of poetry. The impulse to remember is richly present. To memorialise the overlooked or unseen is the constant intention. Words pick up words through subtle rhyming and alliteration demonstrating interconnection, the abiding theme.' Robert Gray

Where to Go For a Seven-year Cycle is a philosophical, often off the main tourist beat travel book based on the author Lyn Drummond's seven years' travel experiences working mainly in central and eastern Europe. The book's title is based on a Jung philosophy that seven years of our lives represent a particular cycle and she has just completed such a cycle. The seven years began when she left Sydney in 2002 to work in Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia as a volunteer for an aid agency. The journey continues in 2003 to Hungary and a three year contract at the Australian embassy in Budapest, and later as a teacher and journalist in other parts of the region, such as Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Albania. It is not a travel book in the sense that it lists places and contact details, but an exploration of a region she previously had no particular interest in, a renewed discovery of her European heritage, a strong relationship with a city (Budapest) she has no traditional or family connection to and a contemplation of the strong feelings she once had for Australia. The book also examines elements of exile, and anonymity in foreign countries which can create a rather contented bubble of living, sometimes immune from more deeper emotions including in the context of her long friendship with the late Australian writer Randolph Stow, who settled in her home town in England and whose books dwelt on these themes. For further information about this book's topics and her travel business, please contact Lyn on ldrummond75@gmail.com

';These days many individual collections of poetry (and some anthologies as well) are presented in language which all too often, offers the particular experiences of the poets as if they were clues in a cryptic crossword. If we could only put those poetic hints together (we tell ourselves) we'd be in a position to know what they were pointing towards all along. Antonia Hildebrand's collection is a far cry from these puzzle works. Her poems are invariably so skilfully handled that they may seem to the reader to be easily achieved. They are not, of course, although the illusion that such things are easily accomplished is surely one of the reasons so many try their hand at poetry.' Bruce Dawe';In these poems the violence of war is not confined to battle fields. There are cities where dead children lie in residential streets covered in the dust of bombed buildings, and, closer to our home, conflict that is fostered by hateful words spoken at suburban barbecues. In War Stories, Antonia Hildebrand will not let us ignore the burning cities on another continent, or accept the hateful words that would justify conflict. In these poems she sees our world as one community, a community that is being destroyed by the violence that affects us all. She writes about the historical brutality of South African apartheid and our own colonial past, the present day atrocities in Syria, and the terror of abuse in a suburban home. These are the real war stories and Hildebrand will not accept monuments that glorify conflict without showing the ugly reality of humans caught in the violence. By forcing us to accept the reality of war, these poems make a powerful plea for peace.' Robin Hillard

The poems in Signs of a Poetic Life have been randomly selected from those written between 2014 and 2016. Most of the poems have arisen from associations between memories and emotions. But a few poems have arisen spontaneously and feel inspirational because, like some abstract paintings, they seem to come from an original place in my mind. I have discovered that when I paint with an open mind, images arise that feel similar to poetry in that they both originate in the unconscious mind. But it can be difficult to make sense of abstract paintings that are formed in this way because, while they express many unconscious sensations and feelings, they are non-verbal communications and usually remain in a primitive form. Of course, for art lovers like myself, this is completely fine. Whereas an abstraction can leap directly out of the unconscious mind onto the canvas and become a painting, the embryonic poem pauses briefly on its journey at a preconscious place. It is here that the poem is assembled into a language of many wild thoughts and associations. This imaginative process feels like daydreaming, fantasy or play. Only when the poem is born into consciousness does it become clothed in words, while still retaining its primitive origins. I have learnt so much from exploring this unique process and hope that I have conveyed this experience in some of my poems