Marele Day

Susan Bradley Smith

Fay Knight

This anthology celebrates 10 years of the Byron Bay Writers' Festival, with contributions from twenty-four leading Australian writers who have also appeared at the Festival. Writers include Kate Grenville, Peter Goldsworthy, Christopher Kremmer, Anita Heiss, Roger McDonald, Nick Earls and Thea Astley, and topics addressed range from the deeply personal to the powerfully political. At a time when discussion can be read as sedition and free expression is increasingly muted, writers' festivals are important forums for independent intelligent discussion, something the Byron Bay Writers Festival has provided from its inception. Writers address the things that matter to them, as writers and as Australians, and contributions range from essays to short stories and a poem. Like the Festival itself, the anthology is by turns (and sometimes all at once) passionate, considered, witty and intellectual and provides a fascinating overview of Australian writers today.

10 Years of the Byron Bay Writers Festival

Making Waves

Elizabeth Schafer

Playing Australia explores the insights and challenges that Australian theatre can offer the international theatre community. Collectively, the essays in this book ask what Australian drama is, has been, and might be, both to Australians and non-Australians, when it is performed in national and international arenas. Playing Australia ranges widely in its discussions and includes analysis of Australian practitioners playing away from home; playing with Australian stereotypes; and the relationship between play, culture, politics and national identity. Topics addressed in this diverse collection include: whiteness, otherness and negotiations of Aboriginal and Asian identities; Australian school and college drama; the discourse of Australian professional theatre magazines: Aboriginal Shakespeare; Australian drama and Australian cricket; the marketing of Australianness in Germany; the international successes of Tap Dogs and Cloudstreet. New histories of Australian theatre are offered and practitioners whose careers are reconsidered in detail include high wire-walker Ella Zuila, playwright May Holt, suffrage worker and playwright Inez Bensusan, classicist Gilbert Murray, and commercial playwright Haddon Chambers. With contributions from authors as diverse as Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington and leading post-colonial critic Helen Gilbert, and interview discussion with Cate Blanchett and Tap Dogs producer Wayne Harrison, Playing Australia seeks to pay tribute to the complexities of Australian theatre experiences, to reassess Australian theatre as a significant force in the international arena and to challenge traditional thinking on what Australian theatre can be.

Australian Theatre and the International Stage

Playing Australia

Postnatal depression, a recognised and sometimes severe disorder, is estimated to affect approximately 10-15% of new mothers. White both antidepressants and lifestyle changes can reduce the severity of symptoms, many sufferers find themselves too busy or inexperienced to seek timely help, while still others struggle to find long-term, effective treatment. With astonishing honesty and why humour this memoir documents one woman's horrific experience of postnatal depression and the therapeutic process that followed. More than simply an account of illness and recovery, this book also asks important questions about the patient/practitioner relationship, and examines how love and marriage can survive parenting seriously ill children. Candid and informative, this memoir is essential reading for clinicians, general practitioners, mental health professionals, nurses and midwives. It is also highly recommended for anyone affected by postnatal depression - patients and carers alike. `What happened might have destroyed Susan's career and rendered her seriously dysfunctional For a time, that is exactly what occurred. But Susan did what Dante did, what intellectuals and artists have always done, she observed the dark places with an acute and unsparing eye, she analyze, she wrote her way out.' From the Foreword by Janette Turner Hospital `Friday Forever is a gift for anyone who has struggled with the illness caused by depression, anyone who has wanted to help a family member or friend, any health professional who wants to have a better understanding of the patients experience of illness and anyone who simply wants to know more about what it means to be human.' From the Foreword by Jill Gordon

Memoirs of Madness

Friday Forever

The Screaming Middle is a memoir of a very strange year, the year of turning 50 for one woman who forgot to have a party. This confessional verse novel takes you on road trips, into psych wards, into the chambers of marriage and through epic failures, brilliant ideas and back to kingdoms of chaos and castles of hilarity. There’s a lot of bitching and loving, a lot of fights and great nights. It’s Orwellian in its frank and unforgiving expedition through life’s daily hardships and glories. If you thought you needed Little Golden Books when you were young then think no more about trading up to the solid gold of The Screaming Middle: the novel cure we all need.

Susan Bradley Smith

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