Hecate articles from May 1993

Hecate archives from May 1993

Women and the current Queensland state government.
May 1, 1993... In November 1989 a Labor Government came to power in Queensland for the first time in thirty two years. During the election campaign Labor leader, Wayne Goss, publicly committed himself and his party to a range of legal and policy reforms...

Vapours. (short story)
May 1, 1993... It arrived nearly six months after her mother died, a small brown cardboard box which rattled when she shook it, and smelt musty and motheaten, like her mother. She cringed at the guilt which sprung to the surface as she unwrapped it. There...

The feminist history group goes to the berks.
May 1, 1993... Introduction As a context out of which I write, I want to invoke both the |linguistic turn' among historians and the |new historicism' among literary critics. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg encapsulates one North American version of...

Biddy the Baglady in Gumnut land. (poem)
May 1, 1993... Dear Mister Lizard, kind Mister Lizard, will you help me find my babies? enquired Biddy, the tearful baglady. There are a million gumnuts on this goddam tree, I've pulled the caps off hundreds and I can't find the bloody things: dear little...

Biddy takes pink gin to the country dance. (poem)
May 1, 1993... The world's gone to seed, you know. It's covered with white silk floss and the setting sun rafts like a fire ship, like a red flaming catastrophe into the banks of the foaming silk, slick and sleek of it and there's blood of the sun in the...

The girl who drowned her dolls is offered silkworms. (poem)
May 1, 1993... The silkworm has stopped eating, her velvet cream body grown turgid and pythonesque. Yesterday she rose up and began with her first four pairs of legs to describe large and confident circles in the air, extruding from her homely glands the...

Spider-Lily. (fiction)
May 1, 1993... In the hour before the Aladdin lamp is lit, I am at the kitchen window watching the spider lilies open. If I could paint the way I wanted, I would paint this picture: behind me in the kitchen, my mother is putting wood on the fire, peeling...

"Watch the white women fade": aboriginal and white women in the Northern Territory, 1870-1940. (attitude of white women to the Aboriginal women in the northern regions of Australia, Miriam Dixson's 'The Real Matilda')
May 1, 1993... Some years ago I read in Miriam Dixson's The Real Matilda, in the chapter "Models for Female Identity Formation in a Frontier Land": Sexual jealousy goes some way towards explaining the cold indifference most of our own...

Her aloneness. (poem)
May 1, 1993... Her aloneness is a tiny, tiny nut. So small she cannot see it. She cannot touch it. She touches my heart like it is a big ugly rough plank or a fat beetroot. Up in her verandah she is finally alone. I cannot touch her tonight. The wind...

The Aloe Vera farmer. (poem)
May 1, 1993... I always wanted to farm aloe vera in the highlands of New Guinea, she said. those lush fields of green, die leaves of the plant petals in themselves, soft and cool, splurting thick liquid onto the hand like a woman cumming the sun...

A body of language. (poem)
May 1, 1993... I close my mouth and open my matter denial my dictionary starvation my syntax western culture the con text you place me in this time it is your turn to chew it over the false obscenity the female fact my sentence your science my...

Star crossed lovers. (poem)
May 1, 1993... Juliet was an impulsive child who spurned the eminently sensible choice of her parents because of a crush on a pretty gallant who was notable only for his fickleness and lack of sense. She died before she had time to notice....

Dear Miss Dix. (poem)
May 1, 1993... I am a lousy lover and they say that I need all the practice I can get and yet I keep on having to say . . . I'm sorry I've lost the place Well, maybe if we start again . . . It looked a lot easier on a diagram. Ooops! You'd better show...

The jewelled castle and the moat of flowers. (short story)
May 1, 1993... Once upon a time there was a girl called Christobel who felt sick. She felt the sickness rising up from her belly to her throat, continually pushing upwards, growing bigger, making her retch and gag. But nothing came out. After a while the...

Australian feminist literary history: around 1981.
May 1, 1993... Around 1981 is the name of Jane Gallop's "institutional history" of academic feminist literary theory in the United States.(1) In this article I want to raise some questions about the difference it has made to be doing feminist literary studies...

In here. (short story)
May 1, 1993... My boyfriend sits still in a chair watching me. I am stretched out across the bottom comer of the bed with a pillow over my face. The chair creaks as his body moves forward, he says please Gerry please. I am straining to pretend that I am alone...

The witch. (poem)
May 1, 1993... The Witch You have chosen him again, the same man, exact to the imprint of his hand on your cheek, your white skin red with broken vessels, the disorder of blood. There is a stain where the other one left, and this one darkens it,...

Moths. (poem)
May 1, 1993... Once I watched grey-winged moths beat their dusted bodies against the night window. The yellow light made of the glass a black mirror I saw my eyes and pale watching face trees tossing ragged branches against a ragged sky. outside - storm,...

Cycle. (poem)
May 1, 1993... I something's cooking. all our layers peel off like an onion, complete with tears. i cut my vegetables with knives; we cut each other with kisses. when the heat is on, all our fears start boiling; i suck off steam, breathe out like a...

The Australian girl catches the first feminist wave.
May 1, 1993... In a recent article, "|The Best Career is Matrimony': First Wave Journalism and the |Australian Girl,'" Sharyn Pearce explores different journalistic representations of "the Australian Girl" in the twenty years following Federation.(1) This...

Break-up beach. (short story)
May 1, 1993... Cordoned off by an eight lane highway, a bluestone wall, and then surrounded again by heavy industrial buildings, is the beach that I had planned for our stop. On the map it looked like the perfect romantic site - long sprawling beach...

Women walk home. (short story)
May 1, 1993... In brief, uncertain light and early morning cool the women I converged, stepping out of the alleys and shadows cast by stone buildings, huddling in small groups at the meeting-place. The disused mosque, which caught the first full light, was...

Canticles for Cyprus. (poem)
May 1, 1993... Remember mornings east of Greece windows dreaming open-eyed, giving back the sea, the sky: silk screens steeped in water, fight; old villas, islands among trees festooned...

Salamander, Larnaka. (poem)
May 1, 1993... Beneath the bougainvillea's arid brilliance a sombre note, half muted by the brashness of the tourist age: I catch its rage in bronzes of anonymous boy-martyrs in city squares, padlocked mosques and monuments of conquerors defaced. Old Lamaka...

A conversation with Mudrooroo. (interview with Mudrooroo, Australian Aboriginal literary expert) (Interview)
May 1, 1993... In June 1993,. Janine Little spoke with Mudrooroo about poststructuralisn, the politics of gender, race and class, and the implications of these questions for contemporary Black writers in Australia. Mudrooroo elaborates upon, and modifies,...

An anecdote a day keeps analysis away: gendered relations of power and an 'academic spoof.' (views of Terry Eagleton on modern novels)
May 1, 1993... Terry Eagleton has argued that the burgeoning genre of the |campus' or |academic' novel usually features certain culturally significant family resemblances, the shifts and variations that those relations imply notwithstanding. These generic...

Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night.
May 1, 1993... In a scathing criticism(1) of the effects of white colonisation on the lands and lives of black South Africans, Sindiwe Magona parallels the fencing of the land and its effects with the effects of the commercial skin lighteners that replaced...