Gutsy Girls by Josie McSkimming
Biography, UQP, $34.99
Josie McSkimming has raided her big sister’s personal diaries to tell the intimate inside story of Dorothy Porter, arguably the most electrifying Australian poet of her generation, who died in 2008 aged 54. It’s part biography of the brazen, queer writer of verse novels such as The Monkey’s Mask and What a Piece of Work, and part memoir, charting how Porter’s counsel and subversive poetry inspired McSkimming’s escape from the clutches of evangelical Christianity.
The result is a story of sisterhood, sexual infatuations and a family terrorised by its volatile patriarch (the infamous Sydney barrister Chester Porter); and a resounding up-yours to churchmen, “the Big Boys of Australian poetry” and social mores. – Janine Israel
We Speak of Flowers by Eileen Chong
Poetry, UQP, $24.99
I hate being told what to think and how to feel. I’m energised by writers who dare me to participate, who demand my full-hearted attention. Enter Eileen Chong. Her new poetry collection, We Speak of Flowers, is a collaborative project: 101 fragments that can be read in any order. It’s a work to be shuffled and reshuffled; unmade and remade. A hymn to connection. And it’s no gimmick.
Chong writes of her ancestors here – of history and its unbearable weight – and her fragments mimic the way that memories form and fracture. It’s an honour, and a delight, to be invited in. – Beejay Silcox
A Piece of Red Cloth by Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
This riveting novel based on Yolŋu oral history – a pioneering collaboration between three Yolŋu knowledge holders and novelist Leonie Norrington – takes the reader inside a coastal Arnhem Land community in the 1600s, at a point of crisis. Relationships with traders from Makassar (present day Indonesia) have soured under the influence of Dutch merchants, who ply the Yolŋu with alcohol and opium while seeking access to children – forcing the female elders to take matters into their own hands.
As we watch the situation unfold with dread, we also experience the everyday joy of Yolŋu life, the strength of culture and the wonder of their cosmology. – Dee Jefferson
Joan Lindsay by Brenda Niall
Biography, Text, $36.99
If Joan Lindsay is known to contemporary readers, it is as the author of the classic Australian novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, published in 1967. What is surprising about Brenda Niall’s engrossing biography of Lindsay is how little of it is devoted to that novel, published when its author was 71 years old.
This book is as much an account of a mid-century marriage as it is a portrait of an artist at work – and upon reading it, it seems remarkable that Picnic at Hanging Rock was written at all. – Catriona Menzies-Pike
You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson
Fiction, Affirm Press, $24.99
Sean Wilson’s short novel explores dementia and memory. Grace is an elderly widower who, after a dangerous incident, is moved to a nursing home. While struggling to come to terms with this change, she is preoccupied with memories of her life. Many of these recollections, from her childhood and adolescence, are deeply painful.
Wilson uses flashbacks to tell the story about a young woman finding a sense of self. The unspooling of this identity in the present means You Must Remember This is at times an uncomfortable book, but Wilson’s writing is always engaging. – Joseph Cummins
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
Memoir, Hachette, $32.99
Geraldine Brooks and her husband worked side by side, “symbiotic” first as foreign correspondents, then as authors – before, in the thick of their writing and family life, Tony Horwitz died suddenly at 60.
Memorial Days passes between the US and Australia: the months after Horwitz’s death, made more painful by the sterile inefficiencies of American bureaucracy; and Brooks’s trip several years later to Flinders Island, searching for solitude in nature, and a ritual space for her sorrow. She is a practised storyteller and her ease with a sentence brings lilting momentum to the well-trod terrain of literary grief. – Imogen Dewey
Hand Dyed Designs: A Guide to Dyeing Textiles with Plants
How-to, Hardie Grant, $39.99
This guide to home fabric dyeing will have you raiding your organic waste bin in pursuit of that smug feeling you get when someone asks where you got your new tie-dye cami: “I made it myself, thank you – with onions.”
Author Katie Ellen Wilkins is the owner of slow textiles company Studio Tinta, which began selling items made with natural dyes in 2018. Her beautifully designed book has tips for storing, steaming and straining various foods and plants (including avocado pits, black tea and eucalyptus) to extract their tinting powers. Of the 18 projects she shares, the one I’d most like to see in the wild is the purple logwood sprinkled T-shirt, which looks like you lost in a violent paintball fight but in the most fashionable way. – Emma Joyce
