Munya Andrews, author of Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, is speaking at the University of Notre Dame in Broome on 23rd June. Munya's talk will be part of their Barrgana Lecture Series – each year the university does a series of lectures on various topics around the subject of the Kimberley and Kimberley life.
Contact the Broome campus on 08 9192 0600 for further information.
Hijabs and motherhood seem to be high on the news agendas this week. Last week The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen questioned Western women's concerns with dating, marriage and motherhood over supporting the struggle of Muslim women, writing on two very different films: Sex and the City 2 and The Stoning of Soraya. Seemingly the only thing they have in common is that hijabs are seen in both - used to very different effect, as you can imagine. In suburban Melbourne, sisters Seyman and Ebru Yagci are doing their bit to bring a bit of glamour to Muslim dress, with their store, Sorayya Designs, as featured by Dewi Cooke in Saturday's Age A2: 'Putting the hip into hjiab'. Over in France meanwhile, "latter-day Simone de Beauvoir" Elisabeth Badinter is offending and delighting in equal measure with her book Conflict: The Woman and the Mother. Due out in English next year, the book questions the return to "naturalism" and idealised concepts of motherhood. Her advice: "...to listen to your own desires and know that no one knows the secret of good motherhood" sounds pretty sensible to us. Read Emma-Kate Symons' article.
Susan Hawthorne, author of last year's Earth's Breath, will be giving two readings in San Francisco this month.
Solo event at The Sitting Room, 16 June
Susan will be giving poetry reading, discussion on feminist publishing and more. The Sitting Room is a semi-private library devoted to women's writings and a community center for writers and reader.
Getting Real editor Melinda Tankard Reist has written a blogpost on Maggie Hamilton's new book What's Happening to Our Boys?. Maggie contributed a chapter to Getting Real entitled, "The Seducation of Girls: The Human Cost".
Ariel Salleh, editor of Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice, has a new article up on On Line Opinion about Labor's proposed resource tax. Ariel asks, 'Could Labor's proposed resource tax open the door for a “green new deal” or even “a new social contract” for Australians?'
Not that one woman can, but that every woman can 
