Books published by Spinifex Press

Pared down to cold hard facts, surrogacy is the commissioning/buying/ renting of a woman into whose womb an embryo is inserted and who thus becomes a 'breeder' for a third party. Surrogacy is heavily promoted by the stagnating IVF industry which seeks new markets for women over 40, and gay men who believe they have a 'right' to their own children and 'family foundation'. Pro-surrogacy groups in rich countries such as Australia and Western Europe lobby for the shift to commercial surrogacy. Their capitalist neo-liberal argument is that a well-regulated fertility industry would avoid the exploitative practices of poor countries. Central to the project of cross-border surrogacy is the ideology that legalised commercial surrogacy is a legitimate means to provide infertile couples and gay men with children who share all or part of their genes. Women, without whose bodies this project is not possible are reduced to incubators, to ovens, to suitcases. And the 'product child' is a tradable commodity who has never consented to being a 'take away baby' removed from their birth mother and given to strangers aka 'intended parents'. Still, those in favour of this practice of reproductive slavery speak of 'Fair Trade Surrogacy' and 'responsible surrogacy'. In Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation Renate Klein details her objections to surrogacy by examining the short- and long-term harms done to the so-called surrogate mothers, egg providers and the female partner in a heterosexual commissioning couple. Klein also looks at the rights of children and compares surrogacy to (forced) adoption practices. She concludes that surrogacy, whether so-called altruistic or commercial can never be ethical and outlines forms of resistance to Stop Surrogacy Now. www.stopsurrogacynow.com It is the global advertising campaigns that groom infertile couples and gay men that have led to the establishment of multibillion cross-border industries: money made literally from women's flesh.

Is it the sun a hole sucking in a bird or Icarus about to singe the sun? Which composes which? The poet asks as she circumnavigates the globe, history, and an inner universe. When it responds, there's the small shudder, the sprawl of a spin, or the quiet before and after a full circle. The eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry. After four novels, Merlinda offers poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But in between, the poet hopes: ‘there could be accidents / of kindness here.'

This collection of imagist poems combines mythology, archaeology and translation. Susan Hawthorne draws on the history and prehistory of Rome and its neighbours to explore how the past is remembered. Under the guidance of Curatrix, Director of the Museum Matricum, and Latin poet, Sulpicia, travellers Diana and Agnese are led through the mythic archives about wolves and sheep before attending an epoch-breaking party to which they are invited by Empress Livia.

Sydney, Milsons Point, 1926. Entire streets are being demolished for the building of the Harbour Bridge. Ellis Gilbey, landlady by day, gardening writer by night, is set to lose everything. Only the faith in the book she's writing, and hopes for a garden of her own, stave off despair. As the tight-knit community splinters and her familiar world crumbles, Ellis relives her escape to the city at sixteen, landing in the unlikely care of self-styled theosophist Minerva Stranks. When artist Rennie Howarth knocks on her door seeking refuge from a stifling upper-class life and an abusive husband, Ellis glimpses a chance to fulfil her dreams. The future looms uncertain while the past stays uncannily in pursuit.

this tiny crack in our lives wind and rain strewn stranded on the limen that space between water and sky rain and sun cold and heat When two women and a dog set off on a holiday they have no inkling of what's to come. They wake to find the river has crept up silently during the night. Trapped by floodwater, they devise escape routes only to be faced with more obstacles at every turn. Only the dog remains calm. This novella grips you with its language, its pace, its anxieties.

A classic text for health activists and feminists interested in the complexities of how drugs are developed, marketed, and sold to women around the world, this book reviews the unusual history of the French abortion pill RU-486. Critical of the positive claims made for RU-486, it argues that its promotion is filled with myths and misconceptions. Scrutinizing the science and politics behind RU-486, this account examines how the pill benefits the medical profession, drug companies, and government health economies and offers no advantage to women. Topics include the safety and effectiveness of RU-486, whether or not RU-486 privatizes and de-medicalizes abortion, and the dangerous effects of prostaglandins. This updated edition includes a new introduction.

Remember The Tarantella is a remarkable work. It's learned and frivolous, female not feminine, silly and serious. Written in several strands of narrative, the many characters create a space as if reading were a dance party. Story is not the main objective. Private conversations and thoughts are always within earshot of the rhythm of others, like the stamping of feet and the beat of the music. This is concerto-like poetry; many instruments of different tones assist the reader to know who is who.

The Abbotsford Convent becomes more than the setting, 'the grey mince-meat walls', of this collection. It emerges as presence, intimate and familiar as well as constraining and forbidding. But it is childhood itself which becomes the subterranean geography and pulse. Subject to an overworld of lay and religious adults, 'the razor of power having such adult force', the voices in these poems create multiple pathways through memory and time as they map and navigate the many-stranded mysteries of their institutionalised lives.

In 1987, the Philippine government fights a total war against communist insurgency and the village of Iraya is militarized. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped. With her 12-meter hair, the "e;fish-hair woman"e; Estrella trawls the corpses from the water, which now tastes of lemongrass. She falls in love with the visiting Australian writer Tony McIntyre before he disappears in the conflict. Ten years later, his son Luke is reading this story in a mysterious manuscript sent to Australia with love letters. Tony left Australia when Luke was six, and now at 19 Luke is traveling to the Philippines because his father is supposedly dying. On arrival he is caught in a web of betrayal that spins into the dark, magical tale of the manuscript as fact bleeds into fiction. Luke meets Stella, who could be Tony's lover-or the fish-hair woman-but Tony cannot be found. Poetic and eclectic in style, this epic tale threads a multitude of voices and stories worldwide and ignites a mystery of who is really telling the story.

The unprecedented mainstreaming of the global pornography industry is transforming the sexual politics of intimate and public life. This title offers an expose of the hidden realities of a multi-billion dollar global industry that promotes itself as a fashionable life-style choice.

Mrs Angel Rendle-Short said that a book given to her daughter, Francesca, as an English textbook at school would teach her to be a permissive rebel. (Courier Mail, 1975)There are some things you should never speak about.In Francesca Rendle-Short's family, silence was golden. So to break ranks and tell stories about her peculiar family life and her mother's moral crusading should send this daughter straight to hell in a ball of smoke and flame along with all those books her mother wanted to burn.Some stories are hard to tell. But like reading, writing stories changes everything.Set in 1970s Queensland and also contemporary times, Bite Your Tongue is an elegant mix of novel and memoir that is in turn harrowing and delightful. It threads together the childhood story of the fictional Glory Solider, with the thoughts and experiences of the adult author, Francesca Rendle-Short, as she looks more deeply into her mother's activism at the time of facing her mother's death.Can a daughter forgive her mother for making her a pawn in her conservative moral crusades? Can greater understanding reinstate love? What does a mother owe a daughter and a daughter a mother?Bite Your Tongue is the story of the deep bond that exists between a daughter and her mother, no matter how difficult that mother might be. It is also a story of acceptance.

An intriguing approach to the rewriting of myth, this poetry collection journeys through the history of languages and symbolic traditions. Through main character Queenie, a cow of many abilities, these poems delve into the creation of the universe as Queenie fashions the galaxies and travels through the sky as a herd of stars. Delightful and surprising, this compilation draws on the Greek lyric tradition of Sappho as well as on South India's Sangam poetry tradition to provide a balanced work of both humor and melancholy.

Breath is an origin story before breath is non-existence Cyclonic storms inform the still eye of Earth's Breath. It's an eye that radiates out from the personal to the communal, tracking its subject matter through the lenses of history and myth. Susan Hawthorne's poetry shifts with seismic intensity, from tranquility to roar, bureaucratic inertia to survival, and the slow recovery from destruction to regeneration. earth roaring, water roaring and this cyclone inside

Angelica's twelve -- and no angel, as she says herself. But does she deserve this crazy situation? Why? Why? Why? She punches on the keys of the computer. Why has Dad gone? Why has Mum flipped her lid? And why does that dog howl every night? Doesn't anyone care? In 'Thriller and Me', Angelica sets off with Beth and try-hard Max to find out the truth. She learns heaps: about the RSPCA, back lanes, computers, gays, writing. She realises that understanding is as about as close to the truth as you can get. And that nobody's an angel.

A vivid desert odyssey; the falling woman travels through a haunting landscape of memory, myth and mental maps. Told in three voice, Stella, Estella and Estelle, this is an inspiring story drawn from childhood memories, imagined worlds and the pressing realities of daily life. The Falling Woman charts one woman's journey into the heartland. It is a journey taken across the desert, into the heart of memory, and into the mythic heart, that place to which we return in times of crisis.

The butterfly effect is a concept from physics in which it is surmised that small actions can have enormous consequences, and that the flutter of a butterfly's wing on one side of the world can cause devastating storms on the other side. Susan Hawthorne explores the impact of the love between lesbians. The butterfly effect is a force that can destroy families and bring down governments, but also a force full of vitality and world changing creativity.

Modewarre is the indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories - her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place,in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. It sweeps its subjects along in a flow of striking images and strong feelings, these buoyed by an intelligent sense of poetic structure and modulated by a sometimes ironic eye.

This thoughtful follow up to Poppy's Progress explores issues of family relationships, especially grief and loss. Middle-aged Poppy Sinclair is content enough with her life and her comfortable relationships with her friends, family, and cat. She is thrown into turmoil, however, when she must move back to her hometown to care for her dying father. There, she must face not only the difficult, slow loss of a parent to cancer but also her lingering feelings for a former flame, Jane. In a time of strong emotions for her entire family, Poppy reaches a turning point in her life, torn by grief for her father and excitement over what Jane might offer. Exquisite characterization and engaging dialogue distinguish this subtly challenging novel.