Knitting : A Novel

It’s been ten months since Jack died and his widow, Sandra, a tightly wound academic is pretending to get on with her life. She continues to perform her duties, and appears to be functioning well, but inside feels she is covered in ice cold glass.

Knitting is the story of what happens when Sandra meets Martha, her polar opposite, when they both stop to help a man in distress. While Sandra's grief has constrained her spirit, Martha - who lost her husband years before - appears to wear her grief lightly.

Sandra’s talent for the domestic arts lies in studying them; Martha is a brilliantly gifted knitter, a self-educated artist. When Sandra persuades Martha to help her mount an exhibition of retro and contemporary knitting, the two women’s lives tangle into each other, with astonishing ramifications.

The Chairman: The Life of Garnett Wilson
OAM

Ngarrindjeri elder Garnett Wilson was born at Raukkan, South Australia, in 1928. At the age of twelve he suffered a serious injury which, exacerbated by European negligence, developed into a painful and permanent disability. Tough family love turned him away from bitterness and self-pity towards a lifetime of achievement and service.

Garnett Wilson was the first Aboriginal woolclasser in South Australia. He was an inaugural member and long-standing chair of the State’s Aboriginal Lands Trust, the first Aboriginal land-holding body in Australia. He served as an executive member and acting chair of the National Aboriginal Conference. He also chaired the South Australian Aboriginal Heritage Committee. In fact, he chaired so many committees, he came to be known as simply ‘The Chairman’.

The Chairman is Garnett Wilson’s auto¬biography, recorded by Anne Bartlett. Colleagues, friends and family have added their voices to the telling, setting the story of a remarkable elder statesman in his wider social and historical context.

ISBN 1 74097 048 9

The Aboriginal Peoples of Australia

For more than 40,000 years Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples lived in harmony with the land, gathering food and hunting animals. But Aboriginal life changed forever in the 1700s when Europeans came to stay.

Discover how these early inhabitants of Australia began to fight for their rights and how modern Indigenous peoples are working hard to revive and preserve their rich and ancient heritage.

ISBN 0 8225 4854 2

Daisy Bates

Who was Daisy Bates? The easy answer is that she was a white woman who lived with Aboriginal people and studied their language and customs. But who was she really? What was she like on the inside? Why did she leave her husband and son and go to live in the bush, dressing carefully every day in her gloves, long skirts, stiff collars and high heels? What motivated her to work for years with complete dedication, living only in a canvas tent in the heat and the dust and with the flies? And what did the Aboriginal people think of her?

ISBN 1 86391 749 7

Publication in Anthologies

“Magpie” in Iron Lace, Bartlett, A., Keneally C., Kinloch Williams, L., & Johns, G., (Eds), University of Adelaide, Adelaide 1998.

“Dinner for Two” in Forked Tongues : a delicious anthology of poetry and prose / edited by Rebekah Clarkson [et al.] Wakefield Press, 2002.

“Picnic Goodnight” in Party Walls, South Australian Writers’ Festival 2003.