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Lillian's Eden

Cheryl Adam

The Happiness Glass

Carol Lefevre

The Coral Battleground

Judith Wright

Anticlimax

Sheila Jeffreys

Invisible Women of Prehistory

Judy Foster with Marlene Derlet

Making Trouble: Tongued with Fire  by Sue Ingleton

One of things I always tell writing students I learnt from Frank Moorhouse. Frank used to say to Always go to the party. As in: literally accept the invitation. Because something might happen at the party. It might not. But it might. Whereas if you don’t go to the party, nothing will definitely happen. Nothing could demonstrate this more serendipitously than when years ago, Sue Ingleton, the legendary actress and comedian, was playing the role of sports editor in the tv drama series Mercury, set in the offices of a broadsheet newspaper... As she tells it:

I gazed up at my fake Sports Editor Reference Library on the shelf above my fake desk. The Australian Biography of Sport called out to me. I took it down, a heavy tome which immediately fell open at a page drawing my gaze to the name: Harriet Elphinstone Dick – a champion swimmer who emigrated from England in 1875 with her friend, Alice C. Moon. Perhaps I smelt the ocean, but I swear I heard a seagull’s cry as a familiar ritual shudder went through my bones alerting me to the fact that these two women were calling to me from that place beyond the grave.

Read more of Joanna Murray-Smith's wonderful notes from the Melbourne launch of Making Trouble on the blog here.