Edition 10
Family Politics
- Published 6th December, 2005
- ISBN: 9780733316722
- Extent: 252 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
The gap between the lived reality and the public image of the family is greater than ever.
Family Politics goes behind the political rhetoric about families and explores the more complicated reality.
Moving memoirs, revealing stories and insightful analysis delve into the small politics of individual families and examine the political challenges that arise when family is centre stage.
The compelling writing in Family Politics resonates and challenges the idea that all happy families resemble one another.
In this Edition
Childfree by choice
I START THIS article with a disclaimer: my wife and I are childless by choice. I'd like to say we came to this decision through noble motives ... a deep concern about overpopulation and its impact on the environment, for example. But that wouldn't...
In Pleasantville
Sitting on the stepTHE ACCENT GAVE her away. I asked: "How long have you been here?" Twenty years, she said, an English-Australian who always feels divided. "My children grew up here and they don't want to go back. They've been over there, they hated...
My friend the fridge
RECENTLY, I HAD a series of unsatisfactory encounters with a disembodied voice. I was living in the United States at the time and I used to phone Australia using a pre-paid phone card from the US Postal Service. It was good value. I could...
Families on the frontier
When I met Maree Inggall in the foyer of her Sydney hotel, she had travelled from Melbourne to the clinic of Sydney IVF for the third time in as many months.[i] The purpose of the first visit was a general consultation. The second was for...
Time for an amnesty
IN 2002, A young Russian mother still breastfeeding her baby was separated from the child and locked up in the Villawood detention centre. The image of a woman being taken from her infant and being put under threat of imminent deportation was shocking and...
Decades of panic
FAMILY LAW IS hot. If it isn't the subject of the latest television current affairs program, newspaper editorial, opinion piece or Quarterly Essay, it's being reviewed by yet another committee, or re-engineered by yet another government policy initiative. This essay attempts to explain why family law...
All their families
IN JUNE 1988, my mother became younger than my youngest child. It was night-time when the phone call came. I was in the middle of the dinner chaos and children's homework mixed with the usual evening competition over television programs. The voice on the...
Hannah Ross visits
SOME THINGS CAN be absorbed from a manageable distance, yet if I run from them memory runs with me.A stern paternal grandmother, and of stern stuff; the only survivor of a quartet of grandparents who had contributed genes but no living monument in known shapes...
Private life of a public man
Eulogy delivered at Donald Horne's funeral, September 21, 2005. I HAVE TO confess that my first meeting with Donald was less than auspicious. It was at a history conference during the morning-tea break. I was standing around and Donald was nearby – engaged in conversation...
Lying for Bruce
SOMEONE IS HAMMERING on the door with hard knuckles. Or maybe a fist. The back door slams and I hear footsteps hitting the gravel fast. I sit up quickly in my bed to look out the window and catch the back of my father...
Coming home
How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la, la!That every boy or gal,That's born into the world aliveIs either a little LiberalOr else a little Conservative...– Gilbert and Sullivan RECENTLY, I WAS asked how otherwise intelligent people could dislike George W. Bush and John Howard so...
The ugly cousin’s visit
WAS THIS WHEN it began? I was talking to my father on the phone. I was in Australia and he was in England. I was giving him some personal news when he suddenly broke in and said "Bye!" just like that, and hung up....
Small candle flames
WHEN I WAS four I had an urgent desire to go to Sunday School. I believe I nagged my parents about this. They didn't mind the idea but had no desire to take me. They'd been married in St Augustine's Church of England and...
The story my mother tells me
I started going to yoga classes in the hope that the physical preparation would make the birth a little easier. I spent a lot of time watching the other women, the new arrivals who barely showed any signs of pregnancy, lying next to the old hands who only had a matter of days to go. We were like lemmings walking towards the edge of the cliff. I was somewhere in the middle and that was where I wanted to stay, but there was no way of halting this horrible progression towards being the most pregnant one, the one who didn’t turn up next week, the one who just disappeared.
Gift of the gods
Yvonne and I spent a lot of time on the phone over the next few days. And the news I received was – to say the least – staggering. My daughter was a clinical psychologist, married with two young children. Suddenly, out of the blue, I had become a grandfather.
Distance between worlds
A COUPLE OF years before her death, I took my great-grandmother, Gabi, to St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne. She'd developed cataracts on both eyes and was finding it impossible to play bridge."I haff a present for you," she said when I arrived at the door...
The ballad of Frank and Hazel
EARLY IN THE summer of 1978, I drove from St Kilda to my home town of Eildon in rural Victoria for the single purpose of saying hello to my father. I arrived in the early afternoon, gave my stepmother a kiss and walked out...
Wedding baggage
WE ARE A gay couple considering getting hitched. Many intimate relationships of course already come with this tradition of public affirmation: gifts and ribbons and cake and speeches follow solemn vows between a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others, for...
Into the second generation
BANANA PLANTS GROW like people. A white banana corm planted beneath the soil can give life to endless generations of banana plants. The corm sprouts into a pseudostem, a stem composed of leaf sheaths. A flower stalk grows from the top of the corm...
For the good of the nation
DURING THE 2004 Budget Lock-up, Federal Treasurer Peter Costello made one of those remarks that serve to encapsulate an entire policy debate. Discussing Australia's ebbing birthrate, he said: "You know, if you can have children, it's a good thing to do. You know, you...
Paradise
Selected for Best Australian Stories 2006IN THE BEGINNING there is Eden. We all move into the same house. It is a new house. All the houses in this suburb are new. They look alike, too. Our neighbour's house is just the same as ours...
Object lessons
One: The dollDO YOU REMEMBER the smell of a doll's plastic body and the pinkness and the hardness of the doll against your belly as you pressed yourself close to it for the comfort? Or were you the kind of girl who refused the...
The legacy of Rita Marquand
Selected for Best Australian Stories 2006THE FIRST RITA Marquand oil painting I ever saw was at a garage sale on the sloping lawn of a huge old house in Launceston a few years ago. Ever since I was a girl at art school I...
Sean
I CROSSED THE front lawn and saw that my father's ute still wasn't in the drive. I kicked a piece of broken tail-light along the cement and into bushes that lined the fence. It was from his ute. He had backed into the mailbox...
Featured Contributors
David Whish-Wilson
David Whish-Wilson is a novelist, short-story writer, book reviewer and essayist. His two most recent novels, Line of Sight...
Robert Hillman
Robert Hillman is the author of five books, including the award-winning autobiography, The Boy in the Green Suit (Scribe...
Georgia Blain (1964–2016)
Georgia Blain published numerous novels, short stories and essays, with her work often being short-listed for major literary awards....
Katherine Wilson
Katherine Wilson is a freelance journalist and former co-editor of Overland.
