There’s a Category-4 cyclone approaching the Queensland coast, Cyclone Ului. It is currently on track to hit the coast on 20 March. If it does, it will be four years to the day since Category-5 Cyclone Larry hit the Queensland coast at Innisfail.

And in the last few days, Fiji has been so devastated by Cyclone Tomas that the country has been declared to be in a state of catastrophe.

I was there for Cyclone Larry and it was no easy experience. The winds began to blow late at night and only three hours later it was strong enough for all the electricity to go out. It was the last of the electricity for a whole month.

It’s the aftermath of a cyclone that hits hardest, because although the cyclone itself is scary, the drudgery of the cleanup, the day-after-day of mess, the skeleton trees, the garden plants uprooted, the leaf matter pasted on every surface, the roofing and guttering strewn hundreds of metres from where it should be – these are the things that wear you down during the day. And at night, in come the nightmares. You wake already exhausted from battling your own demons and the demons of trauma.

I didn’t think that I was in any way traumatised by the experience until I started to document it. Months afterwards I was still responding to TV reports of cyclones in far flung places and though the level of emotional noise has reduced, I’m far more hypersensitive to these things now than I was before Larry.

So when I hear that Tomas has left behind catastrophe in Fiji, and that Ului is waiting to pounce on Queensland, I too am getting ready to respond.

With climate change, such events will increase in frequency and in intensity. One of my readers, Jordie Albiston, said that the book of poems that arose from my experience of Cyclone Larry, Earth’s Breath, reminded her in its intensity of the Victorian bushfires. Climate change will bring more bushfires as well.

What will we do, when it’s too late to argue about whether climate change is on its way, and we are all half traumatised by our latest experience of severe weather events – whether it be cyclones, bushfires, flooding, tidal surges or blizzards? It isn’t just the science we need to investigate, it’s the human response. Will it make us more in tune with nature? I think that’s unlikely. Will it raise the pitch of emotional wobbliness? Probably. Will it increase levels of crime, disorientation, dispossession, homelessness? This sounds extreme even to me. But if I were to multiply my experience and be subjected to events such as these more often, I can see what might happen.

This weekend on ABC’s Radio National you can hear the sounds of the cyclone I recorded, hear me read from Earth’s Breath. It’s on Poetica, 3 pm, 20 March, four years to the day after Cyclone Larry.

To listen to the podcast go to Poetica.

For more information on the book go to the Spinifex site.

Today’s blog is dedicated to Jan Gladys who died 8 March 2010

As author Finola Moorhead writes:

In the publishing industry indie publishers are often overlooked. This appears to be very different from the way indie music producers are regarded. I’ve noticed that the media when it talks to indie music producers or indie film producers has a kind of regard that is unusual towards publishers.

Maybe I just don’t know enough about what goes on in the background – all the emails, phone calls, networking that goes on. Whatever the case, let’s look at indie publishing.

I’ve been in publishing for more than two decades, most of it as an independent publisher. In the 1980 and 1990s there was a thriving English-language independent feminist publishing scene in USA, Canada, NZ, UK, India and Australia. There were also similar publishers across Western Europe.

Feminist publishers used to make up a substantial proportion of the independent publishing world. These days, in the English-language world, only India can claim a thriving network of feminist publishers. The feminist publishers in other English-speaking countries can be counted on the fingers of one hand. We used to meet annually at the Book Expo in America – with at least 50 publishers and more than 200 booksellers. Globalisation, and the advent of superstores saw an end to many of these businesses who were not only publishers and booksellers but also hubs of communication within feminist communities.

European feminist publishers held out a little longer because the juggernaut of the English-language system took longer to have its effects. German publishers often bought rights from those publishers – and so like a caterpillar it slowly digested the energy.

Independent publishers – among them feminist publishers – are necessary because they tend to take on risky books. They feel passionately about what they publish about what they publish – and mostly their loyal audiences feel just as passionately.
Indies do not engage in bathplug publishing – that is, the same product in different colours because for most of them content, production values, and editorial relationships are all extremely important.

In the world of digital publishing, the same passions and energy will drive independent digital publishing. While there are new skills to learn and some new ways of doing things, ePublishing will only be as interesting as the imaginations of those engaging in it. Indeed, it may open the door for new kinds of marketing that depend on connection to communities.

Welcome to the Spinifex Press website generation 5.0. Our first website was up with a complete list of titles in late 1995, and we were the third Australian publisher to have an active website (after CSIRO Publishing and Lonely Planet). Over the years we have upgraded our website along with technological shifts. From plain HTML to using frames to using CMS, PHP and MySQL with each new move our website has become more and more interactive and useful – to customers, booksellers, authors, researchers, festival organisers and a host of people who would not otherwise know about our authors and their fabulous books.

In 1996, we set up an interactive website book interface. By today’s standards the interaction was minimal, but it allowed us to experiment with reader reactions to Suniti Namjoshi’s novel, Building Babel. This novel is an allegorical discussion about how culture is created and how internet culture might develop. Called the Babel Building site, it included poems, drawings, music and reflections by readers. It has been archived by the Pandora Archive at the National Library of Australia.
Many Spinifex authors have helped us traverse the new digital terrain: Dale Spender with her groundbreaking Nattering on the Net (1995); Rye Senjen and Jane Guthrey with The Internet for Women (1996); Beryl Fletcher’s novel, The Silicon Tongue (1996) and Suniti Namjoshi’s Building Babel (1996). These books were followed by the anthology CyberFeminism (1999).

In mid-2006 we decided to take the chance and leap fully into the digital era. We began working with ValueChain to begin converting our files so that we would be able to sell our titles as eBooks. We have steadily increased the number of titles and are now increasing the platforms available as well at the Spinifex eBookstore.

We started early with eBook development and have learned a great deal in the process as well as contributing to national discussions about the way forward. Finally, eBooks are the new big thing in Australia, except that not many companies are yet actually selling them. Spinifex has been doing so for three years, yet we have trouble getting airspace about our pioneering endeavours.
We are pleased to be launching the fifth generation of our website. We want to keep in touch with our readers wherever you are. We also want to help authors and readers connect and we love hearing from you via our Spinifex Facebook. You can follow news announcements on Twitter and soon you can subscribe to our News page via RSS and check out many authors’ personal sites and blogs via their bio pages.

Susan Hawthorne will speak at the APA’s Digital Revolution Symposium on Feb 15.