Women Who Ride Whales: Publishing, Women’s Literature and Creative Writing from the South Pacific
Cathie Dunsford

Conch Shell playing followed by Maori Powhiri or welcome, Toia mai

Today I will talk about some of the background to getting women’s writing published in the South Pacific, some advice for any closet writers in this audience and then move onto discuss the writing itself. I’m happy to answer any questions and will leave plenty of time for this at the end of the session so that you get anything you want covered as well. I’ll begin with an overview from my book Getting Published, The Inside Story, to set the scene and you can imagine yourselves as writers while I do so!

Getting Published: The Inside Story seeks to respond to the most common questions asked by writers. This text is a response to all the questions asked by authors via our university writing classes and the publishing consultancy over the past twenty years, many of which are not covered in the manuals on how to get published. For years I sat on publishing panels at national and international book fairs with representatives from various areas of the publishing industry. The usual spiel would follow the same pattern where publishers would tell authors the depressing statistics that fewer than 1% of all authors approaching publishers would be published followed by all the negatives of what not to do when sending in a manuscript to a busy publishing house. It took decades for the industry to begin to address what could be done to ensure writers approached them professionally with a constructive response. I gave up depressing myself while sitting on such panels and decided to do something constructive about the statistics.

For many years I had listened to new writers saying how hard it was to break into the publishing industry. The statistics backed this up. You had to have a book published before you could even apply for a new writers grant in most arts council manuals around the world. You had to have at least one book published before most literary agents would take you seriously and want to represent you as they make their income solely from royalties of your books. The more books you sell, the more money they make, so they are less likely to take a bet on a new, as yet unproven author.

The lack of resources for new authors at that time was appalling. It was a no-win situation where you had to have a book published to apply for an arts council grant or get into an agency but who would help fund or help get you into a publisher so you could then make use of these resources? It was always hard for new writers to get into literary anthologies at that time because often editors would cut down on the hard work by approaching only known and published authors for new work for these anthologies. Hence the same writers became more and more well known while new writers were still struggling to get their voices heard.

It was clear to me then that the problem had to be approached from several angles. One was to establish a series of anthologies which would have open submissions. Books where established authors would be published alongside new authors, many of whom had never had anything published before. I knew that the known authors would help sell the books but that the new work, if well edited, could stand alongside the established writers with pride. At that time there were very few women authors being published, so it made sense to break into the market with this new strategy with anthologies of new and established women authors.

Publishers routinely warned me this strategy would not work. Nobody would want to buy new authors and few would ever buy a gender-based anthology. They were wrong on both counts. Over the next decade I co-edited five popular best selling literary anthologies using this methodology of getting new writers into print alongside established writers. I was deeply grateful for the established and award-winning writers like Fiona Kidman, Lauris Edmond, Keri Hulme, Sue McCauley, Elizabeth Smither, Shonagh Koea and many others who generously agreed to be published alongside new authors to support them into print. Had it not been for their gracious efforts, these anthologies might never have been so popular. Nor would so many new women writers have emerged in print and begun their careers with such support. I’m also grateful to the pioneering publishers who commissioned the books: Wendy Harrex at New Women’s Press, Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein at Spinifex Press, Daphne Brasell and Maureen Marshall at Daphne Brasell Publishing and Geoff Walker at Penguin Books. When publishers, editors and authors work constructively together, anything is possible.
Each anthology took at least two years of incredibly hard work as we had open submissions where literally anybody could contribute as well as invited submissions. While this was novel at the time, it has become standard practice for new anthologies now and new writers should always check writers’ websites and newsletters for calls for submission for new anthologies. This may well give you your lucky break into the world of publishing and lead to longer works such as novels being accepted by publishers. Authors such as Beryl Fletcher and Stella Duffy were published in these anthologies and have gone on to write novels which have been published in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and in translation in several European and Asian countries [see Dunsford Publishing Consultants: Published Authors List]. They are two of many.

So the lesson here is to start small and work your way up to a longer text. Many of our published authors began writing short stories or documentary articles for magazines and progressed to getting novels and non-fiction books published. On a similar note, it is best to focus on getting published within your own country and use this as a stepping stone before going international. Twenty years ago agents could sell new manuscripts by new authors at foreign bookfairs but now most publishers ask why the manuscript has not been published in the country of origin first.

There are of course famous exceptions, but all too often these are touted by the media so that new authors believe this will happen to them when it may actually happen to a miniscule percentage of the 1% who get published. That is not to discourage you, but to encourage you to begin small and work your way up. We’ve seen too many authors with potential burn out before even getting published because they were mortally wounded when rejected by overseas publishers before they even bothered to try publishers in their own country.

Some authors will counter this with the argument that their genre area is international and not national. All great stories are international because they are relevant and interesting to the human condition, whatever your genre area. A well-written and well-edited book, where time has been taken to polish the work and to write from a unique and interesting angle, is always going to succeed over an ill-conceived project where little time has been devoted to the work. Sometimes you may be writing in a genre and with a structure that has not yet been recognised universally. This was the case when publishers turned down Keri Hulme’s powerful novel, the bone people – [Keri’s preferred spelling of the title].

The rejection letters showed a lack of understanding of the structure she was using or the audience or concepts of the book. [from private discussions with the author].  Some editors felt Maori did not read and the book was only for a Maori audience therefore it was not worth publishing. Others could not handle the way the author delved deep into the mind of the child abuser, refusing to let the audience get away with dismissing him because he was an abuser. This was long before the general public debates on abusers who had been abused were widely known. Keri was an author well before her time and she was rejected for this, despite her book being supported by a collective, Spiral, in Aotearoa-New Zealand and going on to win the largest literary prize globally, the coveted Booker Award.
The bone people was not rejected for literary reasons. It was rejected initially because the publishing industry and editors did not have the breadth of knowledge or vision to recognise a book of brilliance that was beyond the depth of their cultural or gender experiences. They did not want to believe that a pipe-smoking white-baiting rogue author from the West Coast of the South Island of Aotearoa-New Zealand could or would be capable of writing a work of such genius. Authors were supposed to go through the literary academies and emerge triumphantly out the graduate door, preferably white and male at the time of the bone people. That was who writers were. See Beryl Fletcher’s fascinating memoir: The House at Karamu for further elucidation on literary attitudes of the time. Once published, the bone people was embraced by readers. It sold over 25,000 copies locally before it was short-listed for the Booker. Then on the heels of the Mobil-Pegasus Prize it sold another 30,000 copies in Holland and over 15,000 in the USA in the Lousiana University Press edition. It was a book waiting to happen.

The story of the bone people should be superb inspiration for all writers throughout the world. It shows that publishers do not always get it right, that small publishing collectives can be successful in getting an author known and eventually winning the largest literary prize in the world, that writers do not all have to be male and white to succeed. In fact many writers from previously marginalised cultures are receiving major awards today. It shows that an author may have a stunning vision that is not recognised by the publisher and that does not mean it is not worthy of being printed, let alone winning an award; that an author may be experimenting with a radically new structure that differs from those previously known but which works for the book and which should be retained.
Much to Keri Hulme’s credit, she refused to let in-house publishing editors touch her manuscript other than minor copy-editing. I recall long debates at sessions of the New Zealand Book Editors Association [NZBEA] and at overseas bookfairs with editors about the bone people. Most of them would have reduced the book to half its size and cut out the most interesting parts. It would have been a pale imitation of the true beast had they got their pinking sheers anywhere near the novel and I am eternally grateful Keri had the courage to stand up to them. That act of courage changed the face of New Zealand and Pacific literature and literature globally. It opened the floodgates for authors from all cultures and genders and from isolated islands on the globe to dare to imagine they could write, that they could be acknowledged for their vision and that they did not need to have a J.K. Rowling marketing department behind their book to succeed.

In fact, JK never had that initially either. She was another author widely rejected by publishers before the Harry Potter books made it into the mainstream when Bloomsbury had the hutspah to publish them. Bloomsbury Books have a reputation for taking a bet on risky books and that has made them stand out from publishers who took a safer path. Now they are laughing their way to the bank while heaps of kids have been drawn back to reading because of their and JK’s vision. Long may such publishers and writers flourish!

It takes courage as well as talent to survive as a writer. You have to be willing to fly high and fall low. But if you really want it, you will succeed. It is vital to plan well and make sure your safety net is secure before diving off the platform, or you may not get up again. And that would be a tragic loss of talent to a publishing industry that needs you. As the shrinks say: feel the fear and do it anyway!
Having covered an introduction to writing and getting published and some of our work in the South Pacific, I’d like to focus on the work of a few women writers from the South Pacific. The best introduction for you all is the catalogue for Spinifex Press, the largest publisher of women’s books in the Southern Hemisphere, a copy of which is available online at http://www.spinifexpress.com.au I’ll talk about some of the writers here whose work has really touched me deeply and which you might want to read.

Key amongst these is Zohl de Ishtar who wrote a wonderful book compiling interviews with indigenous women of the Pacific, in their own words, called Daughters of the Pacific http://www.spinifexpress.com.au I feel this book is a terrific place to start to learn more about indigenous women from the Pacific region.

When Daughters of The Pacific was launched by Spinifex Press at the 6th International Feminist Bookfair in Melbourne, July, 1994, a few people asked why such a crucial Pacific text came from the pen of an Irish-Australian author and not from indigenous women themselves. You have to read this book to find out and you need to know the history of Pacific Island colonisation, the lack of resources and presses and the strong existence of oral traditions, to begin to piece together the jigsaw of oppression that mostly northern hemisphere nations have inflicted on Pacific Island nations.

Where this book differs from others is Zohl de Ishtar’s awareness of the political issues involved in the huge task of trying to write what has never been recorded before: and that is the holocaust of nuclear experimentation and dumping of nuclear waste that has been going on in our Pacific Islands for decades. She uncovers what has been carefully hidden from most affluent nations for years and in so doing, honours the words of indigenous Pacific women, some of whom have endorsed this book as a life line by providing a forum and a context for indigenous women to speak for themselves.
Many of us who live on Pacific Islands, whether indigenous women and/or anti-nuclear activists, have known some of these stories, but never before has such a convincing pattern of deliberate nuclear destruction combined with racist oppression and colonisation been so openly and expansively revealed as in this text. When touring USA from 1983-7 as a Fulbright Scholar and Pacific anti-nuclear activist based at UC, Berkeley, I used the position of my privilege to lecture on the nuclear holocaust in the Pacific. At that time, there was little written material and I relied on oral stories told me and information gathered from indigenous Pacific and writers’ conferences. I especially remember trying to explain the issues to a class taught by Trinidad academic, Jacqui Alexander, at the largely Jewish Brandeis University in Boston. Even this audience had trouble seeing the links between their own history of being oppressed and that of the nuclear holocaust affecting indigenous Pacific people. It was here that I realised our oral stories and testimonies were not enough, that we desperately needed written material for people to continue the work, go deeper into these experiences, not see them as isolated incidences of colonial oppression.

So I celebrate the painful journey that has brought this book into our consciousness and the way Zohl de Ishtar has honoured matriarchal indigenous traditions by allowing Pacific women to speak for themselves. She and Spinifex Press have provided a crucial forum for getting these voices into the widest possible context, which could not have happened with the smaller, locally funded, often one person presses in the Pacific.

I have always maintained that tourism in the Pacific Islands is intrinsically linked with racist exploitation. The author sees it as her responsibility as an Irish-Australian writer to reveal and comment on this perspective, and to use her participation as a way for others to take on the due responsibility for acknowledging and stopping the nuclear holocaust that has been going on in the Pacific for decades and is continuing under our noses today.

The supporting preface from Hinewirangi Kohu [Ngati Kahungunu, Ngati Ranginui], Maori author from Aotearoa/New Zealand, asserts: “We, the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Ocean, who live on our huge oceans and land mass, see the destruction first because most of us live on the nuclear front line...We are alive because Zohl de Ishtar [and others]...stayed on our lands and experienced our struggle to survive...because women all over the Pacific are working...talking, sharing their struggles.”

It is vital to understand the nature and power of storytelling or talkstory in the Pacific to comprehend the honouring of this tradition that the book continues. Zohl de Ishtar and Bridget Roberts [from Greenham] took over thirty flights during 1986-7 throughout the Pacific listening to stories, recording the actual words of indigenous women in Belau, the Marshall Islands, Guam, the Northern Marianas, Hawai’i, Fiji, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Tahiti-Polynesia. The pattern of colonisation and nuclear destruction is seen not just as isolated incidences of oppression but as part of a deliberate, patriarchal, military objective which was largely so France, America and other nations could extend their military power into the Pacific, exploit the islands for tourism and displace and eventually erode indigenous cultures so that the islands would in the end become lucrative playgrounds for them. What they forgot was that they were destroying the very uniqueness of these islands, culturally as well as physically, and that what they’d be left with was a seething nuclear wasteground which nobody would want to visit or be able to live on.

Daughters of the Pacific is a plea to any sane reader to see that the military and racist objectives which inspired the colonial oppression benefits nobody in the end. Once readers have heard stories that are familiar to many of us after Nazi Germany, and some of us living in the South Pacific, of cruel experimentation that resulted in “jellyfish babies”, born without limbs, sometimes with two heads, grotesque results of nuclear testing in the Pacific, islanders taken from their spiritual homes which were then used for nuclear waste disposal and covered over with concrete, making the waste diffuse out into the Pacific waters below; once you have heard how some Pacific men colluded with boys from the enemy nations in their quest for westernised wealth and greed, or were tricked by nuclear experts to get much needed resources, stolen from them by the colonisers in the first place, you will wonder why you never knew of these stories earlier. But as we now realise from those who declare they did not know what Nazism was really doing, this ignorance is no excuse for not questioning, not acting, not reading this book.

The radical nature of these testimonies is that they come from women who hold the matriarchal ancestral power of the past in their hands and the balance of our future survival also. These women did not sell out, like some of their menfolk, and their speaking out here shows their power as survivors, in the deepest sense of that word. As Binatia Iakabo from Kiribati states: “Men have always had their say, so it is about time women talked about their lives.” Daughters of the Pacific is an antidote to the patriarchal dominance of colonial powers over our islands, and globally.

Chailung Palacios, from the Northern Marianas [Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific] asserts: “Our spirit is beginning to grow up, become very strong. That’s why we are here to tell you this nuclear madness will not just stop in the Pacific.” In so saying, she throws the challenge out to all of us, both here in the Pacific, and in the wider world, to listen carefully to these stories. Some northern hemisphere readers may wonder what this book has to do with their survival in the 21st century. Think again. What if such a voice had come to you in this form during the holocaust, documenting the death camps as the nightmare was taking place? Would you set it aside as irrelevant? Would you want that on your conscience for the rest of your life?

Do not think that this book will immobilise you. Quite the opposite. By stressing the power and strength of matriarchal indigenous traditions and the contemporary empowerment of indigenous Pacific women against a huge and dominating presence like the US or French military, the economic collusion of other western and European nations, the inability of the United Nations to stop the Pacific holocaust, this book is inspiring in its challenge to all readers to wake up and take notice, to see the wider implications of colonisation by death and destruction.

Daughters of the Pacific stresses the vital links between indigenous Pacific peoples, the mythology, the spiritual power of the land, the oceans, the importance of us all working together, indigenous and others, for our communal future survival. We can take heart from the victories that do come, such as the long and often bitter struggle against the US military in the Marshall Islands. As Darlene Keju-Johnson puts it: “We are only small – very few thousand people out here on tiny islands, but we are doing our part to stop this nuclear madness. And although we are few we have done it! Which means you can do it too! But we need your support. We must come together to save this world for our children and the future generation to come.”

What stands out after reading the book is the empowering words of indigenous Pacific women from the nuclear front line, as Hinewirangi so aptly describes it. It is thus entirely appropriate that an Irish-Australian, one from both outside and on the periphery of this world, takes the responsibility to bring these stories to a wider audience. As the author states: “The Pacific is wrapped in a veneer of silence that has masked the Pacific peoples from those of us who live outside the region, and for most of us who live on its edges.” Yet we, in the Pacific, make up one third of the world in the size of our island circumference. Our oceans are our survival and once they are destroyed by nuclear waste, as is happening now, we will all die and so will those of you who eat our kai moana [shellfish] and choose to remain ignorant or believe the lies of the travel brochures. Tourism is collusion, is racism, until you have faced these issues.

When writing Manawa Toa: Heart Warriors, detailing the indigenous women’s Peace Flotilla which protested and along with others, helped stop French nuclear testing in the Pacific, I felt I was writing a fictional companion book to Zohl’s Daughters of the Pacific. I was focusing on the issues in relation to colonisation in Tahiti and the Ma’ohi Resistance Movement from a women’s perspective, but these issues are similar all over our Pacific Islands and all too often are not represented in the literature. Where they are, I celebrate this fact of our combined survival.

Recently, Selina Tusitala Marsh edited a fantastic book of Pacific writing, Niu Voices, where many indigenous women’s voices from the Pacific are represented. I’ll give you an overview of some of the writing from that book here and how it came into being. Since it was published only a few months ago, this really will be a good starting point for many of you interested in Pacific writing as well as my own novels which record indigenous women’s struggles against colonisation in the Pacific and celebrate the strength of our lives also.

As Teresa Teaiwa, founding member of the Niu Waves Pacific Writers Collective [1995] says, in Niu Voices, “The word “niu” has two meanings in Pacific languages. It most commonly refers to the coconut, the ancient and enduring tree of life in most island environments, but in the pidgin ‘Niu’ also means new, novel or different.” In the original Niu Waves collection of Pacific Writing, published by University of the South Pacific, 2001, an inspiration for this current collection of work, the introduction stated:  “Coconuts were amongst the first life forms to settle and anchor themselves on the islands of Oceania….the sea too is part of who we are and so are the waves that convey a sense of fluidity, movement and limitless possibilities.”

New, novel, different. Fluidity, movement, limitless possibilities. Surfing on the back of that exciting first collection, Niu Waves, in 2001, Niu Voices [2006] lives up to all these predictions encased in the shell of niu.

As editor of some of the first collections of women’s writing in Aotearoa, Australia and the wider Pacific region from the 1980s onwards, which spanned into five volumes published by New Women’s Press through to Penguin, I know the huge work involved in taking writing workshops and hui and building confidence in new writers to explore their tentative voices until the work is ready to be published in a collection. Back in those days, we had no arts council support for the work. So it is with huge joy, and a deep knowledge of the hard work involved on the journey to this collection, that I greet and celebrate a truly innovative body of new work by contemporary Pacific writers based in Aotearoa.

Editor, Selina Tusitala Marsh, comments in her afterward on the differences between the first Niu Waves collection based in Fiji and Niu Voices, where the Pacific voices are located/dislocated on these islands of Aotearoa. The feeling of being ripped out of warm islands and being thrown onto wind ravaged shores like those of Poneke, Wellington, are reflected many times in this volume. This becomes a metaphor for the difficulties in negotiating the spaces between those Pacific and Aotearoan waves, some carrying the writer forward, some hurling him/her up on this strange shore. There are even some faint echoes here of Allen Curnow’s poetry where the child lands upside down on these shores and has to negotiate from a strange and foreign place. That could be explored further.

But this volume immediately stands out from other literary voices. Despite the struggles in negotiating a waka through unknown seas, these navigators, unlike their ancestors, do not always have the inner knowledge of the stars, the seascape, the landscape and they have to make new maps for the mind and the senses. They are negotiating multiple identities. This is where the collection becomes fascinating and the writing truly evocative.

One of the main features that entices us is the wild and wonderful humour that laughs out from the page husks. The choice to begin the collection with Taria Baquie’s work is a clever one. Few readers could resist the outrageous humour spicing the moving struggles just below the surface.  Siataga’s Fugue maps a different territory where fugue is seen as a “loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with the flight from one’s usual environment” [Oxford Dictionary] and dissassociative fugue, characterised by “sudden, unexpected travel away” from work or home along with memory loss. Like a musical fugue, the story works on several layers at once. This is part of a much longer work and I look forward to seeing the final manuscript. Like so many other writers in this collection, Siataga is a new voice with huge potential.

Karlo Mila’s Four Poems and Sione’s Wedding throws the taiaha to the Pacific Boys to get their act together and challenges them on excluding the girls, in a long line of exclusions leading up to the film, or using them as island stereotypes: “Riddleme ree/can you tell me?/ How does a wet/dream island girl get/to wear white/at Sione’s wedding? Where are the girls?/ Same old roly-poly roles/dusky maiden in her little lavalava/fertilising the taro patch/and the mum in her mumu/modern day Mary/her afro like a halo/hands clasped in prayer/for the sins of her sons.” The women writers in this collection more than make up for the stereotypes in Sione’s wedding. They are wahine toa, and not afraid to say it!

There is not only a novel, but a film latent in the extract from Priscilla Rasmussen’s The Return, telling the story of German Samoans interred on Somes Island in Wellington Harbour during the war and linking this to the narrator’s own feeling of being ripped from her warm island sands to these cold, blustery shores. A potential novel and film is also simmering in Marisa Maepu’s A Requiem for a Dream, where the narrator is visited by Robert Louis Stevenson in a series of moemoea and this relationship takes over the real life one.

Palagi make a huge distinction between fact and fiction, fiction and non-fiction, but the scintillating navigation of the word bifobology by Christina Tuapola makes a mockery of these colonial distinctions, as so many stories in this collection do, by implication. This is a terrific word play where the colonised redefine the terms, again a theme of this collection. Naila Fanene’s The Islander negotiates, with skill, the painful territory of being the outsider in a school setting, so familiar to so many of us.

Tusiata Avia warns us to be aware of the religious police and the palagi woman in the street who picks you out from the crowd. Both come from the same husk.
Cherie Barford’s superb piece, Our Stories are Within Us, echoes the importance of carrying our stories with us wherever we go: “Our stories are within us. You’ll find them encoded in genealogies, embedded in our hearts, imprinted on our minds. They migrate with the tongues that tell them…”

Cherie Barford’s words sum up the power of this collection and the vital importance of keeping this wave of Pacific Voices flowing, in books, in performances, in films, in fiction, in poetry, in art, in sculpture, in gossip and talk, every place where the journeys can be navigated. They are already surviving in us, as she states: “But truly precious stories, those that hold sacred truths within them, can never be lost. They are kept intact by the universe itself. They exist beyond everything we can touch and name. They are in our blood, and like red hibiscus burnt by frost, recover and reveal themselves again. These stories are so powerful that only the pure of heart can carry them between worlds and survive. They change lives and their coming is signalled by the stars.”

The challenge now is to provide as many outlets as possible for the multiple voices that come from our mixed Pacific heritages. Selina Tusitala Marsh sets this challenge in the opening of her terrific story, “Afakasi pours herself afa cuppa coffee”: “That was it in a coconut shell. But how to flesh it out? To scrape out the meat? To flake out the metaphor, imagery, symbolism and a message?”
Niu Voices has grounded the waka in Aotearoa. The journeys from here, navigating new identities in these islands and between all our islands, looks to be as fantastic and memorable as all the navigations, past and present, where our words speak to each other about our differences and our similarities, our dreams and our aspirations, our continual rebellions against the forces of colonisation in all their myriad forms.

No longer will any of us be silenced by colonial forces and their literary clones like Afakasi, in Marsh’s story, before she began her first new sentence: “Afa’s thoughts cowered under the shadow of her pen about to trek the unexplored terrain of her paper. Its whiteness mocked her. But hasn’t that always been the case? The brown edges of her newly inked words mock her. Hasn’t that always been the case? She liked the sound of that first line.”

Niu Voices makes space for those first lines, first stories, that cast their nets out over the seas, will draw new writers, new artists, new voices into the flow, negotiating those spaces between the brown and white places inside and outside of us. This is long overdue. In the 1980’s, after we’d begun the collections of women’s writing and Maori voices were entering the literary scene, I suggested an anthology of New Zealand based Pacific writing to New Zealand publishers. Many of them laughed, said these were oral cultures and it would never happen. They said similar things of Keri Hulme’s the bone people. Maori come from an oral culture [true] and do not read [false]. How wrong could they have been? It has taken a long time for this anthology to emerge but the waka has been launched and nothing will ever stem the flow of the coconut milk waves, the wash of these innovative ancient/new voices on our shores. The coconut tree is well rooted in Aotearoa and here to stay. Let’s hope Creative New Zealand continue to support the workshops, the series, writing festivals and publications, moving our words back out into the Pacific, the world, and the cross-fertilisation of our creativity in all forms of media.

I was recently one of three keynote speakers at the first ever Asia-Pacific Writer’s Forum in Melbourne, November 2005, where we met some of the very best writers from all over the region, some with print runs of 500,000 to one million copies. The themes of this anthology speak to the issues raised by so many of us at this ground-breaking conference, whether Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Japanese, Aboriginal, Maori or Pacific Island and all the other cultures present. Many Asian writers were surprised to find we shared so many issues and keen to establish closer contact with Pacific writers. Mohit Prasad, one of the writers in the first Niu Waves collective and anthology, has facilitated further contact and sharing of our cultures through work at the University of the South Pacific. Let’s keep the journey we began in Melbourne alive. Take the opportunity now and order this book online today: http://www.huia.co.nz

There are many other women writers from the Pacific [and Unity Dow from Botswana] with a huge range of issues covered in their fiction and non-fiction works. I will read you a few samples describing these books from the Spinifex Press catalogue and comment further on the books in my own words. After this, there may be many questions burning within you which you’d like answered.

1. The Word Burners, Beryl Fletcher, p. 53…and her further books
2. Wild Politics, Susan Hawthorne, p. 50, The Falling Woman, p. 15
3. Cowrie Novel Series, Cathie Dunsford, Manawa Toa p. 28, Cowrie p. 9, The Journey Home, p. 24, Ao Toa, p. 3
4. Far and Beyon’ – Unity Dow, p. 16 and Juggling Truths, p. 25
5. Holding Yawulyu: White Culture and Black Women’s Law – Zohl de Ishtar, p. 21, Daughters of the Pacific, p. 12.

You can see a fantastic range of the best women’s fiction from the Pacific region in the Spinifex Catalogue online: http://www.spinifexpress.com.au. You should also check out Magabala Books for Aboriginal work and Huia Press for work by Maori authors on line by googling them.