By Hellai Gul In May 2018, Ruby Hamad wrote an article published in Guardian Australia that received enormous backlash and support. The piece highlighted a phenomenon experienced all too often by women of colour: white woman tears. Hamad suggested that there is...
By Jean Tong Being a POC playwright is automatically getting defensive when you receive an email out of the blue asking you to write about The Experience of Being a POC Playwright, specifically. I considered trying to write a thoughtful, emotional piece about...
By Nour Haydar In 2015, I was shocked by the news of 17- year-old Masa Vukotic’s murder at the hands of serial sex offender Sean Price in Doncaster. A fortnight later, my mother’s picture hit the front page. My mum, Salwa Haydar, was murdered a month before my...
This piece was performed at Legacy Books, FWF18 Sydney. When I was seven years old, my second grade teacher made a ‘book’ out of the first short story I ever wrote, called Tilly the Witch. After typing the manuscript on a manual typewriter (hey, it was the 80s), she...
By Melissa Cranenburgh I think about this a lot. How, as we get older, the things we choose to read (hear, see) push us about like someone floating on a backyard pool, in just the right season, at a warm – but not too warm – time of day. Encouraged – gently, this way...
By Nina Funnell In October 2017, the #MeToo hashtag went viral after Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano urged other women to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault on Twitter. Within three days, the hashtag had been translated into 85 languages and today,...
By Ruth Quibell Photo: Pixabay For many women, home is a provisional place. This has long been true. Violence, dispossession and poverty are not new. What is recent is the increase in the number of women over the age of 55 experiencing housing stress, insecurity and...
By Kylie Maslen Photo: Instagram Angela Pippos writes in her book on sexism in sport, Breaking the Mould, that ‘sport is an important part of the feminist movement.’ However: Gender inequalities in sport – which are just as (if not more) sweeping as those faced by...
By Denise George Often, only disparate and fragmented traces that remain of women’s lives in Australian history, and this makes telling their stories difficult. Some stories are minimal accounts, others neglected, many erased completely because of a lack of sufficient...
Kerryn Goldsworthy reflects on women and fiction. When I was a little girl at primary school in the 1960s, my sisters and I and all the other kids from outlying farms would be picked up by the school bus at the farm gate every morning, and dropped off there every...
I discovered feminist literature as a young adult by accident. What I was actually looking for was descriptions of girls kissing girls. Detailed descriptions. Preferably with instructions in the footnotes. The first lesbian kiss I ever read in a book was in first year...
By Stacey Farley Image: pexels.com At parties when asked what I do, I smile and say ‘write romance novels’. I don’t inwardly cringe like I used to. I’m not proud to admit that I used to worry about the judgment strangers made about my career choice, but this writer...
