There are few crimes worse than killing your own child – it appears to be an action which goes directly against our nature. And yet, on average, twenty-seven children are killed by their parents in Australia each year—with around half of them murdered by their mother. The question of what would drive…
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Feminism. Proudly screwing up gender roles since the seventies. Generally, when we hear about the subversion of gendered tasks, most narratives are from women taking on masculine roles. There aren’t many accounts of men taking on roles that traditionally belong to women – but new memoir Reservoir Dad by Aussie blogger, Clint Greagan, who is a SAHD, tells all….
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Lilith Grainger is on the front page of the newspaper. She doesn’t know how she’s going to explain the photograph—how she ended up sitting on a fence on Sydney’s worst street in the middle of the afternoon when she was meant to be at a job interview. What will she say to her husband, her…
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As the train lurched forward, the woman grabbed her daughter’s hand and dragged her towards our carriage. She came so close I could see a mole above her lip. She spat. A glob landed on the window in front of my face. ‘Bloody Japs!’ she said, shaking her fist. After Darkness draws the reader into…
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In 2008 longtime activist, social commentator, and overall renaissance superwoman Rebecca Solnit made a splash in the feminist blogosphere with her post Men Explain Things to Me, a bold and quirky manifesto against male-on-female silencing. Ever since her wry critique hit the scene, Solnit has been dubbed the matriarch of mansplaining and has further cemented her…
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Trigger warning: this review contains discussion of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse and sexual harassment. When Laura Bates started the Everyday Sexism Project back in April 2012, she did so with a simple goal in mind: to give women a place where they could share their stories. Initiated in response to Bates’ experiences…
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Candy Royalle is a formidable performance artist who inhabits a unique place somewhere between the magic of storytelling and poetry. To see Candy bring her words to life is a three-dimensional spectacle—one I was fortunate enough to witness at the Melbourne spoken word gig Sweetalkers a few years ago. Performance is so much at the…
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It can be tough for young writers to get a break, even when they are extremely talented. For publishers, they are a risk, and unfortunately many publishers feel they can take only a limited number of risks. Express Media is a rare exception, being entirely devoted to providing young Australian writers with opportunities. Its recent Hologram…
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Eleanor is the new girl who is finding it hard to get a comfortable seat anywhere in life – in the bus, in her new school, even in her family. Park is the boy who wants nothing to do with Eleanor. The status quo dictates the rules of his hierarchical, hormone-induced teenage universe and in this case,…
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Do you ever think that you’d be better off as a man? As readers of a feminist magazine like Lip, you’ve probably given some thought to the notion that inequality exists, that it occurs daily in a variety of different situations, that it rears its ugly head in a hundred different ways, and that career-wise…
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Traditionally when a person dies in China, yellow or gold joss papers are burned to ensure the deceased’s safe passage into the nether world. Thirteen-year-old Chen Mu is studying in America when his mother dies in 1875, and cannot return home to perform the rite. Instead, he swaps his mourning clothes for American suits and…
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Shakerism is a religion on its way to extinction. Its three surviving members occupy a crumbling old house in rural New England, where they are surrounded by historical settlements, tourist museums and libraries devoted to their faith. At its peak in the 1800s, six thousand Shakers lived in this region. They were led there by…
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Award Winning Australian Writing 2013 is an anthology of 52 of last year’s competition winners in short fiction and poetry. The book features a different variety of competitions each year, and you’ve probably never heard of most of them. In Carmel Bird’s introduction, she reminds us that there are more than 300 smaller annual literary…
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I admit that I know very little about New Zealand. But until I read the Griffith Review’s 43rd, New Zealand-themed edition, (Pacific Highways, edited by Julianne Schultz and Lloyd Jones), I didn’t realise how much I didn’t know. I spent four days there once as a short stopover on my way to the US, but…
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