Contemporary crime novels were neatly fitting into predictable plots with universally understood characters. The excitement of Sherlock Holmes and Hannibal Lector were becoming stories from the past, and there were no modern publications to challenge them. Then, in 2005, Stieg Larsson`s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was published in his native Sweden. The combination…
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What’s a girl (or several) to do when there are so many wonderful front women in the world? Why, get them together for a night of solo performances, of course! Lip had a chat to Jennifer Kingwell of The Jane Austen Argument about Ladies Singles (an event comprising an impressive line-up of five solo women…
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If you’re anything like me, you like to eat. In fact, if you’re anything like any human being on the planet, you like to eat. Without food we end up dying. So it figures that anything to do with ‘food security’ should be on our proverbial plate. It scared me somewhat that ‘peak phosphorus’ had…
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Aboriginal woman, Veronica Baxter, was born in Cunnamulla country in outback Queensland and died in Silverwater Metropolitan Reception and Remand Centre, NSW. On 16 March 2009, she was found dead in her prison cell hanging from a bed sheet. She was just 34 years old. Veronica, a Sistagirl, had lived as woman since she was…
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An array of young people are in a room together competitively solving Rubik’s Cubes. We got lost on the way to the event and a young man with a Rubik’s Cube t-shirt directed us to the hall, saying ‘you won’t miss the rattling of the cubes when you’re close’. He was quite right. The plastic…
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Lanolips 101 Ointment. This product consists of two ingredients: lanolin and lanolin oil. As the pretty sheep on the packaging suggests, lanolin is a natural product derived from fleece (the website stresses the practice is cruelty free and it’s suitable for vegetarians, but perhaps don’t gift the product to your vegan friend). As suggested by…
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I have been an avid reader of fashion blogs on the interwebs since I was fifteen years old (and now I am ancient, so it has been quite a while) and have spent countless hours pouring over these blogs, admiring the personal style and lusting after the clothes of these very stylish women. So I…
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Love Connection‘s sophomore album, Euphoria begins with ‘Piezoelectric’, a calming instrumental reminiscent of Jamaican steel drums. I was immediately transported to another place and time. It made me think of a tropical island holiday. ‘Forest’ has a similar vibe but with a more naturalistic sound of nature. It is really a quite unique sound, with…
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By now, just about everyone in the feminist blogosphere has seen and/or read about Lena Dunham’s new HBO show, Girls. This is because we feminists in particular get super excited about anything that might change the representation of women in the media. And Girls, with its awkward self-awareness and even more awkward sex scenes, seemed…
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If you had asked me this question at 15, there would have been no delay; just a clear, unequivocal yes. However, at the same age, if you had asked me the meaning of life and who I would have married the answers would have been just as immediate. Education. Work. Happiness. Orlando Bloom. When I…
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From year eight until year ten I only ate intermittently. Of course, by year eleven it had gotten to the point where I had stopped eating all together. Needless to say I did not have a positive relationship with my body. I didn’t like it because it ran into things, couldn’t catch or throw, and…
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The mention of British indie rockers, Reef, tends to elicit responses like, “Is that the ‘Place Your Hands’ band?” and a brief rendition of Gary Stringer’s distinct vocals; they have a solid decade-long career under their belt in addition to a couple of seminal songs, and reformed in 2010 to again tour together and share…
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Women face a lot of pressure, from themselves, from friends, from family, even from outside sources. And none seems more harsh and critical than when a woman is pregnant. Recently, a friend who just became pregnant went to her in-laws with her husband and the first thing the mother-in-law said to her? “Wow, you’re fat!”…
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Man jailed for Nude Facebook Photos In a landmark case a man has been sentenced to jail for posting nude pictures of his ex-girlfriend on Facebook. This is the first time in Australia that someone has been convicted of a crime committed on social media and one of only a few cases of this kind…
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