JUNE 2009

Mischa Merz
Bruising: A Boxer's Story
$32.95
9780977504794 (pbk.)

Click here to buy Bruising

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I regard having someone try and hit me in the head as almost a friendly gesture. In fact I have made some friends that way and really only lost them when we stopped hitting each other.

Mischa Merz

Bruising is the story of Merz’s long love affair with the art of boxing - from throwing and receiving her first punches - to competing in an Australian amateur title fight and beyond. Boxing opens her to new ideas about what it means to be a woman, it tests her courage as well as her physical limitations and connects her with others in unexpected ways. It provides her with the thrilling and often hilarious background against which to examine myths about feminine virtue and physical weakness.

Bruising, which was short listed for the Dobbie Award in 2001, and this latest edition is updated with new material based on a trip to New York where Merz spent time training with the women at one of America’s oldest and most famous boxing gyms.

Mischa Merz is a journalist and author of both fiction and non-fiction. She has worked for newspapers and magazines for twenty years. Bruising, originally published by Picador Australia, has been reissued with updated material, by Vulgar Press. She lives in Melbourne with her husband Peter.

www.mischamerz.com

Click here to buy Bruising

Bruising takes us deep into the illicit realities of female anger and aggression, and then by way of the male stronghold of the boxing gym into the ring . . . Merz makes her own body, discipline and courage her subjects of experiment as she explores the terrors and the exhilarations of the female capacity for violence with startling honesty. You can almost smell the sweat.

Inga Clendinnen
Author of Tiger’s Eye

Every now and then a book comes along that invites you to shake off your dusty old prejudices, and stop thinking along dichotomous lines . . . it's a gripping read and a timely call to re-examine both sanctioned and unsanctioned violence.

Sian Prior
The Age

The work fits comfortably within the stylish non-fiction popularised by writers such as Dava Sobel, Helen Garner and Janet Malcolm.

Mary Rose Liverani
The Australian

I like writing that explores experience in a naked way. I particularly like it when the writer uses words with the fidelity of a harp string. This is a book about a young woman with an intellectual orientation to life who takes up boxing. I can honestly say I have never read anything like it.

Martin Flanagan
The Age

 

FEBRUARY 2009

Enza Gandolfo and Marty Grace
It keeps me sane: Women, craft, wellbeing
$29.95
978-0-9775047-8-7

This book is has its origins in the The Everyday Creativity of Women Craftmakers, a narrative research project exploring the roles and meanings of craftmaking in women’s lives. This research aims to document and communicate contemporary women’s stories of their engagement with craftwork; and to explore the links that women perceive between their engagement in craftmaking and their wellbeing. The research was funded by Victoria University and Spotlight Pty Ltd, a large Australian retailer of fabrics, wool and craft supplies.

In the book we explore the meaning of craft and craftmaking to women and the key themes that have emerged from the research including: creative and self expression, wellbeing, community and intergenerational links and pleasure and passion for the craft itself. There are 15 individual women and one group highlighted in the book with images of their craftwork and their stories and ideas about the meaning of craft to them.

OCTOBER 2008

Graham Perrett
The Twelfth Fish
$ 32.95
978-0-9775047-6-3

In the small rural Queensland town of Lawson, where the people are still reeling from the arrival of the 1990s and modernity, surfie teacher Lawrence Lalor is condemned to servitude by the Catholic Education League. From his veranda and the pub, he quickly learns the secrets of life in the bush.

While Lawson is just another ‘dead- kangaroo-on-the-side- of-the-road’ country town with its streets named after saints, Lawrence is quick to learn that beneath its simple surface, it is a town of depth and deception.

Drunken mistakes, accidental friendships, adultery, love, murder and the arcane practice of fish counting lead Lawrence to the discovery that courage and dignity are more rare than precious. Lawrence Lalor’s journey through Lawson – the jewel of the west – gouges a scar on his emotional landscape that will stay with him forever.

The author

Born in St George, Queensland in 1966, Graham Perrett was the seventh of ten children. He’s been counting the numbers ever since.

In 1985, he received a diploma for teaching with which he taught for three years in Darling Downs and far north Queensland and for a further eight years in Brisbane.

In 1993, Graham was awarded with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours through the University of Queensland and completed his thesis on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He began his law degree in 1995 and completed it in 1999 through the Queensland University of Technology. During the same year he became a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Queensland.

After working with the Queensland Independent Education Union as an organiser Graham was admitted as a Senior Policy Advisor with the Queensland Government. He was the ALP candidate for Moreton in the 2004 Federal Election and was elected to the Commonwealth House of Representatives in November 2007.

Having played in a band – Once I Killed a Gopher with a Stick – throughout his teaching days, Graham remains a keen fan of music and literature and also enjoys writing and bushwalking. He now lives in Southern Brisbane with his wife Lea and son Stanley.

• Graham Perrett interviewed on the ABC Radio National Book Sshow 14 October 2008 (8.3meg podcast available)
• Graham responds to questions about The Twelfth Fish
• Bringing Poetry to Parliament
• Review: 'Land Rights Core of New Book'
• Saturday Reads with Ian Jay (Brisbane ABC radio)
• Comment by Rosemary Sorenson in the Australian 11 October 2008
• Prose from the Pollie's Pen: Review in the Australian

Sue Dodd and Enza Gandolfo
Inventory: on op shops
$ 29.95
978-0-9775047-5-6

I op Therefore I am
(blog site response to Inventory)

Op shops are places of mystery and adventure that inspire ‘treasure hunting’. They are ‘museums’ displaying cultural artifacts – objects, clothes, books—that often bring back lost memories. They are places that trigger many emotions—including nostalgia, longing and passion. Op shops are crowded with narratives that are lined up on shelves, piled into boxes, hanging on racks—lost personal and cultural narratives waiting to be told.

There has been very little written about op shops in Australia—hardly surprising as op shops are predominantly staffed by volunteers, the majority of them women over 65; they are run by charities who are inevitably more focused on the programs run with the money raised by these shops; and they tend to be frequented, though this is changing, predominantly by those in the margins—single mothers, the unemployed, the elderly and others whose limited income means they cannot afford to buy from commercial retail stores.

Yet most local shopping centres have an op shop or two and they have been part of our communities for over 50 years. Sue Dodd and Enza Gandolfo, have spent several months in op shops interviewing volunteers, staff and customers. Inventory: on op shops tells the story of that exploration. It is polyphonic work– textual, visual, and performative—that explores the role and meaning of op shops to individuals and communities.

The original project, Op Shopping: More than Retail Therapy, was a collaborative arts project that utilized a mixed-media and multi-disciplinary approach. The project was funded by Arts Victoria through the Art for Communities program and supported by Victoria University and the Living Museum of the West. The exhibition opens 13th September 2007 at the Living Museum.

Enza Gandolfo is a lecturer in Professional Writing at Victoria University. Her short fiction, essays, autobiographical pieces, reviews and academic articles are published in a variety of literary magazines and journals including: Overland, Tirra Lirra, Hecate, Outskirts, Going Down Swinging, TEXT, JAS Review of Books, and Australian Women’s Book Review. Recent publications include: ‘The Robust Imagination’ in TEXT 2006 and ‘Fiction Making: A dialogue’ in Art-Based Research: a proper thesis? Edited by Elaine Martin and Judith Booth 2006 Common Ground Melbourne

Sue Dodd has developed an artistic practice that incorporates simultaneously performance, video and installation. Her performances and video work are an acutely post-modern reflection on contemporary life. Dodd is part of the performative group Gossip Pop (with Phil Dodd) which employs an amalgam of performance and video to create a simulacrum of pop and celebrity culture, and serious performance art. Gossip Pop utilizes sampling, displacement and deconstruction in the tradition of beat poetry, feminist performance and karaoke. Dodd has performed and exhibited in widely in Melbourne and throughout Australia. She has recently returned from a residency in China. Sue is currently lecturing at Victoria University and completing Phd research in Creative Arts at RMIT.

Glenn D'Cruz
Class Act: Melbourne Workers' Theatre 1987-2007
$ 39.95
978-0-9775047-3-2

Review in Age

The Melbourne Workers Theatre is one of this town’s great successes. Not only has it nurtured talent […] it has also expanded a long way from its origins. It is a tribute to the strength of Melbourne’s theatrical tradition that this company is thriving as it begins its 16th year.
Robin Usher, Arts Editor, The Age, 5 May 2002

With a few notable exceptions, middle-class themes and middle-class personnel dominate professional theatre in Australia. Melbourne Workers Theatre (MWT), which celebrates its twentieth anniversary in 2007, has redressed this imbalance by creating high quality theatre that represents the lives of the most disadvantaged members of our community. In short, the company has made a major contribution to Australian theatre culture by giving voice to marginalised Melburnians including people from impoverished backgrounds, indigenous communities, various migrant groups and persecuted minorities like asylum seekers.

Class Act celebrates the Company’s artistic achievements and successes over the last two decades through interviews, essays and high quality images of key productions. It recounts its history, its evolving relationship with the embattled trade union movement, and its on-going engagement with working class, indigenous and migrant communities.

Class Act is more than a history of a theatre company. It documents a particularly turbulent period in Melbourne’s history that witnessed consistent attacks on trade unions, asylum seekers, aboriginal and working class people by state and federal governments, and the forces of globalisation. In an era when the very concept of ‘class’ has been discredited, Melbourne Workers Theatre remains committed to principles of social justice and revels in using theatre as a form of political activism and protest.

The book contains new interviews with founding members of the company and key artistic personnel, including Patricia Cornelius, Irine Vella, Andrew Bovell, Andrea James, Julian Meyrick, and Christos Tsiolkas. It also includes production images drawn from the company’s extensive archives, and essays that document the company’s history and analyse its landmark productions such as Who’s Afraid of the Working Class, Yanagai Yanagai, and Tower of Light.

Mark Phillips
Radio City: The First 30 Years of RRR
0 9775047 1 9
$ 39.95

see feature article in Age on RRR and Radio City

It's been proven by some of the greatest observers and researchers in the world that the secret to the economic and business success of a city is its creative heart. Whilst businesses at 101 Collins Street don't even fucking know it, the reason why they are succeeding is because up the road in Nicholson Street is a radio station that is beating a heartbeat through this city that is unique in the world.
James 'Hound Dog' Young

We are not a would-be commercial station and our presenters should not be would-be disc jockeys. We should offer a real alternative to the inanity of high-powered and raucous commercial presentation.
Sue Mathews, the first station manager of 3RRR-FM

Over the course of three decades, 3RRR-FM has become an indispensable part of Melbourne’s cultural fabric, a vital hub of the city’s renowned music and arts scenes and an independent voice among a chorus of repetition.

But it wasn’t always so. Born in 1976, the product of an experiment in public radio just as the DIY spirit of punk music was hitting the streets, much of Triple R’s existence was fraught and surrounded by chaos.

Released to coincide with Triple R's 30th anniversary this November, Radio City is the unvarnished history of Australia’s most innovative and successful community radio station, a jewel in the junk heap that has spawned talent like Greig Pickhaver, the Coodabeen Champions, Kate Langbroek, John Safran, Lawyers, Guns and Money, and Leaping Larry L.

Uncovered are the behind-the-scenes tales of crisis, fighting and perpetual money struggles along with the back stories of the much-loved program presenters who have called the station a home.

Melbourne journalist Mark Phillips spent two years piecing together the previously untold story of how Triple R came about and developed its unique ethos and ground-breaking style. In the process he learnt a little more about what makes Melbourne tick.

A vivid account told in the words of those who were there and chock full of illustrations, Radio City reveals how community radio holds the key to discovering alternative music, films, arts and political topics that would otherwise be left in the dark.

Appealing to Triple R listeners and those interested in the history of alternative culture alike, Radio City is the riveting story of how a radio station became part of a city’s soul.

But mum . . . It’s educational!

Sean Scalmer
The Little History of Australian Unionism
0 9580794 7 1
rrp $9.95

Fiona Capp's review from the Age
Rowan Cahill's review from Workers Online

One of the reasons a good number of Australians don’t know their own history is the failure of publishers to publish good, readable histories in a form and price that makes them accessible to all. Sean Scalmer’s, The Little History of Australian Unionism is published with this in mind.

A compact, complete and up-to-date history, The Little History of Australian Unionism tells the story of the development of Australian unions over the past 200 years.

With the support of 13 Australian unions, including major sponsorship by the ETU and CFMEU, the book is aimed at everyone interested in the history of Australian society and the formation of its values and institutions and particularly at students of history as well as unionised and yet-to-be-unionised workers, old and young.

Scalmer provides a history of trade unions that is clear, accurate and engaging. He records their achievements, explains how they were won, and provides an invaluable context for the urgent defence of the union movement.

Priced at $9.95, and printed in pocket-sized format, The Little History of Australian Unionism is an affordale and portable lesson in the history of a movement that is vital to the future of a decent and compassionate Australian society.

Sean Scalmer's incisive and engaging account shows how trade unions have made a vital contribution to the improvement of workers' lives and a fairer Australia. He provides invaluable support in the present struggle to maintain the rights of unions to organise and represent workers.
   The history of trade unions is more than a record of sacrifice and achievement; it is an account of the lessons of that experience, and a precious resource in mobilising support for the union move-ment as it responds to the present attack on their very rights to organise and represent workers.
   Professor Stuart Macintyre

click here for author interview

Adam Muyt
Maroon & Blue: Recollections and Tales of the Fitzroy Football Club
0 9580795 9 5
$39.95

In 1996, the Fitzroy Football Club, the Roys, played their final game of AFL football after more than a hundred and ten years in the competition.

Maroon & Blue is a social and oral history that captures the rich story of the Roys in the words of those who played for, supported and loved the club. It celebrates various aspects of the club’s roots, culture and traditions, captures the passion and joy for all things Roy, and offers heartfelt observations on the sacrifice of the club at the altar of corporate AFL football.

Lovingly crafted from hundreds of hours of interviews and archival research, Maroon & Blue features the words and voices of: Paul Roos, Jonathan Brown, Chris Johnson, Martin Pike, Bill Stephen, George Coates, Ron Alexander, Jamie Cooper, Bill Jacobs, Greg Champion, Barry Dickins, Martin Flanagan, John Blackman, Peter Temple, Jas H. Duke, Ken Morgan and many more.

About the Author Adam Muyt became a Royboy when he moved from Sydney to Melbourne in the early 1980s. Along with the joys of following them, he, along with all Fitzroy barrackers, suffered terribly through their final years. Since 1997, he’s barracked for the Brisbane Lions and is thankful he was there at the MCG to witness each premiership of their triple flag triumph, particularly as he was surrounded by lots of other Royboys and Roygirls. Adam now lives in Canberra and works in native vegetation management. He is the author of Bush Invaders of South-east Australia, undoubtedly the only weed book to feature footy references and people weeding in Fitzroy jerseys. He will always be a Royboy.

Fitzroy Reds Football Club, as part of its commitment to celebrate community football in the heart of Fitzroy, is proud to support the publication of this memorial to the people who loved and love the Fitzroy Football Club.

A.L. McCann 0 9580795 6 0 rrp $29.95

This is a novel of ideas, ideas that are fascinating and troubling. The writing style is that rare combination, punchy and elegant. You can smell the suburbs – the asphalt, the boredom and the beer breath. There is a truth in the friendship between Martin and Julian. It is honest, funny and bitter. It is a real story of the petty betrayals that so many of us have committed but are too scared to write or talk about. So we make up lies.
  There’s a lot going on in this novel and we bloody need that; it doesn’t disappear into thin air the way so much writing does these days.    Christos Tsiolkas

The best novels speak the truth, literally or figuratively, and Subtopia resonates with the stuff. A bitter truth, sure, but one that needs airing. Subtopia is astutely observed and neatly delivered. Full of intelligence and sensitivity, this is the best Australian novel I've read in quite some time. Sacha Molitorisz, Sydney Morning Herald

The precariousness of mental states is frighteningly imagined by McCann. Subtopia – which takes on so much – has the courage of its ambitions, and realises most of them. Its range makes most contemporary Australian fiction seem parochial. The momentum is nervous, hurried, but sustained to the last words: Julian's benediction for his lost companion, “already long gone, perhaps never really there”. Intelligently alert to the politics, literature and failed beliefs that inform his novel, McCann's is a name to be watched.    Peter Pierce, The Bulletin

Andrew McCann (A.L. McCann) has published extensively on British and Australian literature in a wide range of local and international journals.

 

 

 

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