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Anita Heiss

All things nice and puppy dogs’ tails

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October 2007, no. 295

Girls like books about friends and relationships. Boys like books about explosions and sport. Right? Like any generalisation based solely on gender, the answers are, invariably, ‘yes’; ‘sometimes’; ‘up to a point’ and ‘of course not’. This latest grab bag of junior fiction contains its fair share of ‘girlie’ books about friendship and ‘boyish’ books about sport. Thankfully, there are also some books to cater for other sections of the spectrum, including sensitive explorations of boys’ friendships and robust girls who trek up mountains.

Meg McKinlay’s Annabel Again (Walker, $14.95 pb, 143 pp, 9781921150104) lands us squarely in girlie territory. When Livvy’s best friend moves away, her world folds. With the best of intentions, her New Age mother hatches a plan to help Livvy forget about Annabel, as quickly as possible. But one year later, Annabel returns and Livvy believes things will be just the same again. But Annabel is distant and hostile, and nothing is the same. Can their friendship be resurrected? This book covers familiar ground, but the treatment of the girls’ friendships is refreshingly angst-free. This is a quick, humorous read that highlights both the strength and delicacy of friendship, and offers some sound advice about when not to listen to your mother.

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Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss

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June 2021, no. 432
Jane Sullivan reviews 'Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray' by Anita Heiss

There are two famous statues in the Gundagai area. One is the Dog on the Tuckerbox. The other is of two heroes, Yarri and Jacky Jacky, who, with other Wiradjuri men, went out in their bark canoes on many exhausting and dangerous forays to rescue an estimated sixty-nine people from the Great Flood of 1852.

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Growing Up Aboriginal In Australia edited by Anita Heiss

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August 2019, no. 413
David Haworth reviews 'Growing Up Aboriginal In Australia' edited by Anita Heiss

The late historian Patrick Wolfe did not pull any punches when he wrote that colonialism seeks to eliminate and replace the Indigenous cultures holding sovereignty over the lands and resources that colonisers wish to claim ...

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Paris Dreaming by Anita Heiss

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April 2011, no. 330

Having been ‘completely screwed over by men’, Libby Cutmore is on a self-imposed and inevitably short-lived ‘man-fast’. Although she loves her job at the (fictional) National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, memories of New York adventures with her friend Lauren (Manhattan Dreaming, 2010), and Libby’s own sense of exclusion now that her two closest ...

Macquarie PEN anthology of Aboriginal literature edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter

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May 2008, no. 301
Jaya Savige reviews 'Macquarie PEN anthology of Aboriginal literature' edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter

In 1938, the year of Australia’s sesquicentennial celebrations, trade unionist William Ferguson and former boxer John Patten helped to organise the first Aboriginal Day of Mourning and Protest on January 26; later that year, they co-wrote the pamphlet from which the above excerpt is taken, on behalf of the nascent Aborigines Progressive Association ...

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