Books published by UWA Publishing

"In the dying days of the Russian Empire, a Scottish sound recordist disappears into the Caucasus mountains; a former hero of the Algerian resistance experiments with traditional Chinese medicine; a French anatomical artist models disfigured soldiers returned from the Crimea. In 1960s Poland, a grandmother hatches a plan when a Hollywood star comes to town; while during the war in Vietnam, fate and superstition guide a Filipino cook toward a new vocation; and in Weimar Berlin, a young man's efforts to rehabilitate himself are derailed by a charismatic artist."--

Unstable Relations addresses the past and emerging political tensions that mark 'green-black' encounters; provides fine-grained ethnographic case studies of 'green-black' relations; and, analyses the economic futures of 'green-black' collaborations.

Air hostesses took to the skies in the 1930s, proud and excited to have the most glamorous job in the world. This was a job like no other-filled with adventure, shiny new technology, and work that was thrilling, demanding and exhausting. Young women flocked in droves to be measured, weighed, and squeezed into snappy uniforms. Smile, Particularly in Bad Weather tells the story of the development of this pioneering profession. It describes the shift from the 1930s, when the girl-next-door took to the air with a great degree of bravado, through to the 1960s and the 'coffee, tea or me?' stereotype, where airlines sexualised the air hostess as a point of marketing difference. The book then covers the crucial period where air hostesses fought back, no longer wanting to be stereotyped nor discriminated against in terms of fair working conditions. The job of air stewardess shaped working women to become something more, it tested their independence, it encouraged self-enhancement and sophistication, and it took them to places they hadn't dreamt about.--back cover.

The Pilbara, a large, thinly populated region in the north of Western Australia, has become central to the Australian economy and imagination. With millions of tons of iron ore shipped to China, the Pilbara is a media staple, through stories of mining companies' profits, the earnings of fly-in-fly-out workers, and the wealth of new entrepreneurs. For all this, what we know about a vital region such as the Pilbara remains incomplete. The boomtime stories do not reveal much about the Pilbara itself, a place completely transformed across fifty years of mining. No one has acknowledged the Pilbara's ancient history, or the men and women who worked there from the 1960s, building unions and making communities as they worked the mines. In those days, the Pilbara excited both hope and dread about its workers and their power. "From the deserts prophets come," AD Hope wrote years before in his poem, Australia. And it appeared that the Pilbara might be the site of a novel kind of unionism, with workers winning not only high wages but control of the places where they worked and the towns where they lived. But it was not to be. Starting in the 1980s, the companies fought back, defeating the unions and remaking the Pilbara. The managers were now the prophets, with new ways of organising work and managing workers. The companies reinvented the Pilbara through workplace control, fly-in-fly-out labor, and twelve-hour shifts. Their vision reshaped not just the desert but the cities, not just the work in mines and ports but in offices and shops. When the biggest boom in mining history came along, it unfolded across a Pilbara landscape very different from a generation earlier. The union prophets were gone; the companies' profits grew. This book reveals the story of fifty years of conflict over work and life in the Pilbara, and how this conflict has affected the rest of Australia. [Subject: Australian Studies, Labor History]

A groundbreaking presentation, in a revised edition, of Indigenous Australian storytelling as it actually sounds; these stories provide a fascinating picture of the life of the people of the west Kimberley after colonisation.

Help me, words - you always have. The directness and simplicity of these poems, beautifully arranged as stages in a recovery, carry the urgency, honesty and celebration of a life reclaimed. Joan London The poems that comprise Rupture are lucid, deft, unapologetic, forthright. There are images and lines that are literally breathtaking, stanzas that punch with wisdom, and whole poems that linger long after the book is finished. Andrea Goldsmith

In an old house with 'too many windows and women', high in the Indian hills, young Hannah lives with her older sister Gloria; her two older brothers; her mother - the Magician; a colourful assortment of aunts, blow-ins and misfits; and her father - the Historian. It is a world of secrets, jealousies and lies, ruled by the Historian but smoothed over by the Magician, whose kindnesses and wisdom bring homely comfort and all-enveloping love to a ramshackle building that seems destined for chaos. And then one day the Magician is gone, Gloria is gone, and the Historian has spirited Hannah and her brothers away to a new and at first bewildering life in Perth. As Hannah grows and makes her own way through Australian life, an education and friendships, she begins to penetrate to the heart of one of the old house's greatest secrets - and to the meaning of her own existence.

This deeply personal book is also an important historical record. Written from the heart and covering a period of time working on Christmas Island with asylum seekers until her return to Australia with an urgency to bear witness, Pettitt-Schipp's steady eye is levelled at a facade of Australian inclusivity and openness "this land's edge /has always been an invitation/a white-toothed smile/ to walk on." To those denied entry, those white teeth become menace, exclusion, shark, crocodile. In a book filled with heart-breakingly tender portraits, borders and bodies, sanctions and sanctuary are held close to each other in ways which articulate the space but also, the common ground between "us." - Amanda Joy These beautiful Christmas Island poems capture both the despair of asylum seekers imprisoned by rock and sea and their ancient will to continue. - Gillian Triggs

How do we describe a place? In this book, author and poet Annamaria Weldon offers an intimate portrait of the chain of lakes on Australia's southwest coast that includes Lake Yalgorup, between Mandurah and Bunbury. The Lake's Apprentice contains a suite of poems, celebrated essays, photographs, and nature notes cognizant of current environmental research. This elegant testimony collapses time, evoking the long past of Bindjareb Noongar land use and thinking through to a resilient future. [Annamaria Weldon is a widely published poet and essayist. She has won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize in 2010, as well as the inaugural Nature Conservancy Australia's Prize for Nature Writing in 2011, and she was shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2012.] *** "This kind of writing - the fruit of real contemplation, informed by a wide range of ideas, respectful of the reader's intellect and imagination, driven by an empirical sensibility - is, for me, where the best 'nature writing' is to be found." -- Barry Lopez, winner of the US National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams, and National Book Award finalist for Of Wolves and Men. *** "This is an act of pilgrimage in writing: Annamaria Weldon seeks, and finds; she advances with tact and attention, she gives her readers the gift of seeing landscape with new eyes." -- Nicolas Rothwell

Colonial Australia produced a vast number of journals and magazines that helped to create an exuberant literary landscape. They were filled with lively contributions by many of the key writers and provocateurs of the day (and of the future). Writers such as Marcus Clarke, Rolf Boldrewood, Ethel Turner, and Katharine Susannah Prichard published for the first time in these journals. This book offers a fascinating selection of material; a miscellany of content that enabled the 'free play of intellect' to thrive and, matched with wry visual design, made attractive artifacts that demonstrate the role this period played in the growth of an Australian literary culture. *** "Gelder and Weaver arrange this anthology of excerpts from the journals of Australia in the later 19th century to show off the rich contents of these journals. The excerpts refute the stereotype that Australia in this era was rousingly nationalist. The book features color illustrations of magazine covers, which show how accomplished the pre-1900 publishing industry in Australia was. Recommended." - Choice, Vol 52, No. 4, December 2014Ã?Â?Ã?Â?Ã?Â?Ã?Â?

David Ades' luminous and honest collection, Afloat in Light, is chiefly a celebration of fatherhood and of paying attention, utilising Simone Weil's notion that 'attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity'. The collection extends to existence and loss, and a discourse on motive and meaning. Maps and moral compass are never far away in such explorations and like all good navigators Ades consults the moon and the stars to guide him through emotional terrain that crosses the globe via Australia, India and the United States. Poems about connection and love - familial, intimate, parental and friendship - hold their weight of history via scar tissue and heritage to allow 'a vast and full space to fill the maps of our lives'. Afloat in Light delicately balances that most crucial aspect of life - of how the ordinary is anything but. Ades is a poet that fully harnesses the verve of small miracles. - Libby Hart

Joseph Brodsky, the Russian Nobel laureate, once remarked that memory and art have in common the 'ability to select, a taste for detail.' In the work of Nathanael O'Reilly, memory and art come together to bring us poems that remember what cannot-what must not-be forgotten, in rich and telling detail and with a taste for quiet but incisive irony.--Paul Kane ***Nathanael O'Reilly's poems sound the major themes of Australian poetry: landscape, displacement, yearning, and above all a critique of cultural narrowness. O'Reilly's plain-spoken diction is often laced with understated wit, but is given ballast by its principled grounding in lived experience.--Nicholas Birns ***The poems in this transnational, cosmopolitan collection traverse fourteen countries, from Australia, the poet's homeland, to the United States, his place of residence, making stops in ancestral homelands Ireland and England, and passing through continental Europe and the Middle East. O'Reilly's poetry continually crosses both visible and invisible borders, excavating landscapes and the local, belonging and unbelonging, cross-cultural exchanges, expatriation, globalisation, exile, identity, youth, loss, relationships, aging, and death. The speakers in the poems are often in motion or making preparations for departure, unwilling and unable to remain static, always eager to explore. (Series: UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]

Of course not all great art has its genesis in pain, and not all pain - not even a fraction - leads to the partial consolations of art. But if lancing an abscess is the surest way to healing, can poetry offer that same cleansing of emotional wounds? Shaping the Fractured Self showcases twenty-eight of Australia's finest poets who happen to live with chronic illness and pain. The autobiographical short essays, in conjunction with the three poems from each of the poets, capture the body in trauma in its many and varied moods. Because those who live with chronic illness and pain experience shifts in their relationship to it on a yearly, monthly or daily basis, so do the words they use to describe it. Shaping the Fractured Self gives voice to sufferers, carers, medical practitioners and researchers, building understanding in a community of caring.

Communists like us is simple love story, a little fiction told in a hundred poems, a hundred little places to live large, fragments of a story of love in a time of struggle. But then, when isn't it a time of struggle? And when is a story not about love? And when isn't love a fragmented but tender dialectic of the personal as political? This volume celebrates and explores the possibilities of political engagement in the midst of the very simple, the very human; an attempt at a confluence of dust and desire.

It is one thing to know what the law says: it is another to try to understand what it means and how it is applied. When Indigenous relationships with a country are viewed through the lens of a Western property rights regime, this complexity is seriously magnified. Crosscurrents traces the path of a native title claim in the Kimberley region of Western Australia (Sampi v. State of Western Australia) from its inception to resolution, contextualizing the claim in the web of historical events that shaped the claim's beginnings, its intersection with evolving case law, and the labyrinth of legal process, evidence and argument that ultimately shaped its end. Katie Glaskin examines native title law by tracing the development of a single claim, and, in doing so, makes this complex area of law more accessible to non-specialist readers. Also discussed is the interaction of Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge and governance. Policy-makers, native title lawyers, land councils, environmental groups, native title advocacy groups, anthropologists, historians, and scholars in the field will find this book of great interest. The author has worked as an anthropologist on native title claims since 1994, and has published widely in the area of native title. In 2015, she won the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland's prestigious Curl essay prize. [Subject: Australian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Anthropology, Social Science, History, Legal History, Law]

Zwicky is one of the world's finest poets; her sophistications of form and theme remind one of Akhmatova, Szymborska, Adrienne Rich and William Blake. With poise and control, she tracks the personal encounter with the weight of history and the obligation to declare a position. --John Kinsella **In her poetry, Zwicky, the ex-concert pianist, technically adroit, dramatic and profoundly serious, is there alongside the joker, the edgy ironist making wry asides against the world, patriarchy and herself. Her formal poems sit easily beside her mostly short-lined, tightly wrought free verse. Her cadences are a delight. --Katherine Gallagher ***Zwicky's poems deal with such over-whelming intimations of mortality-and much more than intimations-while striving for and attaining a breathtaking authority and stubborn subjectivity of voice.--Lyn McCredden [Subject: Poetry]

'Bruce Dawe is that rare phenomenon, a natural poet with a superlative feeling for language.' - Geoffrey Lehmann, The Bulletin

With poems ranging from the confessional to the mock-autobiographical, from imagism to a strange storytelling, from the comic and satirical to the plangent and disturbing, Star Struck startles us with the many faces of lyric poetry.

In Every Mother's Son is Guilty, Chris Owen provides a compelling account of policing in the Kimberley district from 1882, when police were established in the district, until 1905 when Dr. Walter Roth's controversial Royal Commission into the treatment of Aboriginal people was released.

"e;In 1987 Mary Gaudron became the first female justice of the High Court of Australia. In fact, this brilliant, brash and outspoken lawyer had a lot of firsts. A passionate advocate of human rights, her working-class background and the racism she observed as a child growing up in a country town were indelible influences on her career. From Moree to Mabo is the remarkable story of Mary Gaudron. With wit, astonishing intellect and the tool of the law, she exposed inequality and discrimination in the workforce and campaigned for women to be accorded equal pay and equal opportunities, and years later, went on to become one of the justices who ruled on Eddie Mabo's landmark case on Aboriginal land rights. "e;

From inside her Toorak mansion, Margaret, matriarch, widow of Edmund Rice O'Day of O'Day Funerals, secretly surveys her family in the garden. Everyone, including Margaret herself, is oblivious to the secrets that threaten to be uncovered by a visiting American relative who is determined to excavate the O'Day's family history. How far will Margaret go in order to bury the truth? Family Skeleton examines a family that has for generations been engaged in dark business. You can't dig a grave without disturbing the smooth surface of the ground. Deftly woven with elegant wit and with compassion, this dark comedy is about what you might unearth if you dig deep enough.

Dan Disney's highly original either, Orpheus remakes the villanelle. The 'sound-swarms' in this contemporary 'orphic' work riff laterally on received poetic and philosophical ideas and incorporate fascinating shreds of thinking and saying. Rainer Maria Rilke and Soren Kierkegaard are the presiding spirits in the volume, and Disney is also in discussion about divergent ways of seeing and understanding with writers from all over the globe. This inventive poetry explores culture, authenticity and translation, and quizzes the lyric modes of apostrophe and song. - Paul HetheringtonDan Disney's either, Orpheus arrives with the force of a tropical weather event to deliver a series of pulsating shocks to the languages of everyday life. Neither strictly poetic nor purely philosophical, these deliriously pedagogical poems summon Rilke, Levertov, Ashbery, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Cage and multitudinous others to reconsider what we thought we knew of authorship, form, religion, phenomenology and love. For Disney, the proper response to Bloom's anxiety of influence is 'a godless both/and' in which a series of 'elegiac anthroposcenes' transforms the labyrinth of solitude into the kinds of worlds that we 'non-residents' might want to inhabit. Hospitable, demanding, festive and fearless, either, Orpheus passes through 'where previously it was not evident that anyone could find a passage'. - Fiona Hile

The advent of the Royal Flying Doctor Service in the 1930s was a testimony to Australian innovation and ingenuity. Much has been written about the early history of the iconic organisation, adapting aircraft and pedal radios to meet the needs of people in vast remote areas. In this book, Dr Stephen Langford, the Service's longest serving medico, provides a compelling account of the Service since the late 1970s. Langford's history emphasises the technology and innovation that has enabled the RFDS to remain at the forefront of aeromedical care. [Subject: ?Military History, Biography, Aeromedical Care

We're travelling light, without excess, into our future. Gran had been rough as she uncurled my hands from their position, gripped around the open car doorframe, and shoved me into the passenger seat. A man returns from World War II and struggles to come to terms with what has happened in his absence. Almost seventy years later, his middle-aged granddaughter packs up her late grandmother's home and discovers more than she had bargained for. These two tales book-end thirteen closely linked stories of one family and the rippling of consequences across three generations, played out against the backdrop of a changing Australia. A debut collection-as powerful as it is tender-from the winner of the 2013 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

In September 2013, just before the weather turned even more intense, a group of intrepid writers made their way to three Australian desert settings to work with groups and individuals wishing to write. Both Aboriginal people with a profound connection to country and residents of more recent arrival who had made the choice to live in remote places participated in workshops. You'll read new voices and hear perspectives on living in extreme geographical and climactic regions in today's Australia. In the variety presented here we welcome you into the vitality of remote communities, often isolated but full of commitment and hope for the future.

Australia's advertising agencies enjoyed their reputation as a glamorous and fun place to work. Not surprisingly, many of the nation's brightest and most creative people were drawn to advertising. Behind Glass Doors ventures into the offices to reveal the inner workings of the Australian advertising business during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

"How is emotional meaning found in places? How can creating new urban spaces be a vehicle for less adversarial forms of political coexistence, new customs of social innovation? Places Made After Their Stories shows how the emotional geographies we carry inside us and the ecstatic desire at the heart of democratic community-making can come together to inform contemporary landscape and urban design. Using case studies of public space design from Alice Springs to Perth and Melbourne, in which the author forged for himself the novel role of designer-dramaturg, Carter describes a new approach to place-making in which topography and choreography fuse. He counters the symbolic neglect of functionalist design with a brilliant account of poetic and graphic techniques developed to materialize ambience. Bringing together and further transforming insights from such earlier publications as Material Thinking (2004) and Meeting Place (2013), Carter describes a practice of sense-making and form-making that embodies fundamental gestures of welcome, arrangement and exchange in the built setting. This is a book of characteristic eloquence, generously gathering philosophical and poetic evidence to illuminate a new way of place-making. It will be a practical vade mecum for artists wanting to work in the public realm and a key reference for planning authorities, governments and communities keen to reconnect place making to human creativity and affect"--Provided by publisher.

Melbourne Journal: Notebooks 1998-2003 is the third instalment in Alan Loney's notebooks, covering the period in between his previous publications (Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976-1991 and Crankhandle: Notebooks June 2010-November 2013).

"Judith Wright (1915-2000) remains a giant figure within Australian art, culture and politics. Her 1946 collection of poetry, The Moving Image, revolutionised Australian poetry. She helped to establish the modern Australian environmental movement and was a key player in early campaigns for Aboriginal land rights. A friend and confidante of artists, writers, scholars, activists and policy makers - she remains an inspiration to many. And yet, as Georgina Arnott is able to show in this major new work, the biographical picture we have had of this renowned poet-activist has been very much a partial one. This book presents a more human figure than we have previously seen, and concentrates on Wright's younger years. New material allows us to hear, directly, thrillingly, the feisty voice of a young Judith Wright and forces us to reconsider the woman we thought we knew."--Back cover.