Böcker utgivna av Ginninderra Press

Half-caste is what the bullies call her, like she isn't complete, but the taunts are the least of Velvet Brown's problems. A disloyal friend, a long distance romance which is no longer working, a crazy colt that has to be ridden and a hidden threat which is slowly being revealed, pose far greater challenges. Velvet must quickly fine tune her abilities to save herself, and the ones she loves, from death or worse. ';A compelling world of an insightful teenager with a keen sense of adventure, an instinctive bond with horses and a spellbinding mission to pursue.' Joanna Campbell, UK award-winning author of Tying Down the Lion and Estuary RoadPraise for The Journey of Velvet Brown: ';A pacy exciting ride through a book layered with crime, special abilities, mystery and horses.' Paddy O'Reilly

';This day we were going to let the horses go. They'd been working for a while and it was their turn to have a spell. Old Alf Turner came down there watching the blokes tying their horses' legs up. And he seen me get my horse and bring him up just drop the reins on the ground and the horse waiting down there while I went and got the hammer and the chisel and the rasp to just pull the shoe off.Then he seen me pick the horse's leg up pick it up and just hold it while the horse was standing there. And he was thinking, ';Hey, what's this bloke! Hey! He should tie his legs up.' And he called out to me, ';Hey! He might turn and kick you!'';No,' I said. ';He be right.'And I just took the horse's shoe off and he just standing there with his head down and I was there holding his leg up. Old Alf Turner got the biggest shock and he gave me the job of breaking horses after that, because the other blokes' horses still wild. They can't touch a horse or the horse would kick them or something. But mine, mine were just quiet with me straightaway. That's why he gave me the job breaking in horses. Horses I got to like horses. They liked me, the horses, straightaway.'His former jockey, and later boss, Ian Rankin, once called Marty Dodd ';the kindest man who ever lived'. This is Marty Dodd's remarkable story, told in his own words.';As an Anangu child who was forcibly removed and as a parent who single-handedly parented seven children, Mr Dodd fought the odds to become the winner of horse races and an even bigger winner in life.' Dr Irene Watson, Tanganekald woman, lawyer, activist and academic';From exploitation to independence a story of resilience that needed to be told. Marty Dodd's experiences and philosophy make a worthwhile addition to the growing literature of Aboriginal autobiography.' Christobel Mattingley, AM, DUnivSA, editor/researcher of Survival in Our Own Land

In this wise, witty and moving story, fifteen-year-old Lucy arrives from inner-city Melbourne to live on a farm in the early 1980s. Wandong hosts the second largest truck and country music festival in the southern hemisphereand nothing else.';It is rare to find a story that takes us into that liminal territory of adolescence with such force and such heart. Desire, disappointment, betrayal and forgiveness written in libretto, an ode to the tumult of coming of age.' Gabrielle Carey, co-author, Puberty Blues

The concept for this book grew while I was commuting between Sydney and the NSW Central Coast, camera and journal close at hand. Misty reflections and images of the countryside, as in the cover photo, are like dream images in the labyrinthine mind, in half sleep, stirred by the motion of train or coach. This concept was intensified by a long train journey in New Zealand, in 2011, expressed in the poem ';Memories of the Waikato, NZ', when I retraced a journey and rewrote a poem from when I was a student at Waikato University, NZ. Now I live in Australia, on the NSW Central Coast. I returned to study, graduating with a BA from GU, Queensland, in 2005. I have travelled in the UK, Spain, Italy, Canada, India, USA and the Caribbean, among other locations. My day job has predominantly been in roles assisting the unemployed and residents of public housing. I have worked in the lonely tower of a super-rich magazine company, selling subscriptions, but this ran contrary to my visions as a writer. I have remained a wanderer and writer at heart, camera and journal at hand along the way.

It was an act of simple kindness for an Australian couple to take two Czech refugees from post World War II Europe into their working-class home. They could never have foreseen the tensions these sophisticated Europeans would create, or the life-changing impact they would have on their teenage daughter. A Promise of Peaches explores sympathetically the culture clashes of 1950s immigration, not unlike those of today, and shows with sensitivity the unfolding of adolescent sexuality.';A Promise of Peaches is a thoughtful and deeply compassionate examination in verse of female adolescence and cultural tensions in Melbourne in the early 1950s. Valerie Volk has the reader sympathising almost equally with all her main protagonists, despite the steadily mounting conflicts between them. Mutual incomprehension between and within the ';old' Australians and the ';new' is dramatically portrayed and its climactic resolution persuasively drawn.' Geoff Page';I read this manuscript in one sitting, without pause, a testimony to its readability and its inherent interest A verse novel has proved ideal for the task: the work is compressed and the form suits the intensity of the subject The climax, when the adolescent Claire begins her sexual awakening in response to Viktor, is handled with tact and expertly delineates the responses of the two. The triumph of the novel is this respect for all the main characters even Irena, who could be a standard ';femme fatale'.' Thomas Shapcott (Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing, University of Adelaide)

Ethan is 14 and running wild. This is Sumatra, Indonesia. Land of jungles and volcanoes. And heart-stopping traffic and cheap beer and clove cigarettes. The rules from home don't seem to apply here and Ethan's having a ball. Ethan's party is Jon's worst nightmare. He's only 19, but he knows he has to do something. You can't just let your little brother drink whenever he feels like it. Not when you're the adult. Not when you're the only one in charge.

Bill Cotter's poems and stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines throughout Australia. He has won a number of literary awards, including the International Library of Poetry competition, the Maryborough Golden Wattle Festival poetry competition and the Melbourne Shakespeare Society's sonnet competition. His work has also been recorded, published and read over the ABC. Some of his poetry, depicting issues of conservation, has also been on display in the Sale Regional Gallery and the East Gippsland Gallery in Bairnsdale. He has conducted a number of creative writing courses for adults and children. He has, in addition to the writing of poetry, an interest in the oral presentation of verse to an audience. Ginninderra Press has published eight books of his poetry, a collection of short stories and a short play for voices exploring the tragic journey of Burke and Wills.

';This first book is packed with clear-eyed veracity, offers a shining resilience, personal insight and shared comfortwe are enjoined, a chorus.' Les WicksFew poets express the meeting of nature and emotion as tenderly as Susan McCreery. Her poems open with images of nature and draw the reader in to scenarios of such heartbreak and love it is at times hard to surface. The sparkle of a boy playing in the surf, the metallic sound of betrayal on a Greek island, the humidity of a summer's night part physical, part longing for what has been lost. Among these gentle poems are suggestions of violence, of politics, of alienation, all held in a lacuna, waiting for that southerly to bring the pressure down.

Sometimes dramatic, sometimes delicate, always to the point, Tessa Bremner's collection of short stories presents a very poignant view of the lives of her characters and their struggle to have their voices heard above the noise of cultural sensibilities. In her storytelling, Bremner draws on a lifetime in theatre to make her characters three-dimensional and all too real.

It is through the creative arts that we can place ourselves inside the experiences of others and feel the many-dimensional nature of humanity. Though poetry may be considered as a ';gentle art', it can be uncompromisingly powerful and demanding. The poetry in this collection is an anthem to the experiences forged through travel, family and viewing nature as a spiritual awakening. Demands are placed on the ready to see the world and human interactions not as random selections but actions that carry the burden of cause and effect as dictated by man. In this, the reader can journey with the author in a parallel dimension where the wonder, empathy and pathos created in these poems have the ability to transport, so enabling the reader to revisit their own personal journey and see that adventure anew. It is indeed a consummate skill of the poet that can transmute the reader into the poet's world and find the journey familiar to their own. - Fay Forbes

Betty McKenzie-Tubb has been scribbling since youth, beginning with contributions to the Sydney Morning Herald and to the ABC radio programme The Argonauts. She was Ancona 49 and wrote regularly to ';Anthony Inkwell'. Degrees in Education and Arts have helped nourish her writing. She spent most of her working life as a teacher of the deaf, for whom the door to literacy is sometimes difficult to open. She is grateful to Montaigne, the father of the personal essay. Reading his works and those of contemporary essayists has been a source of great pleasure and inspiration.';Betty's musings are hugely entertaining. They range from the sublime to the ridiculous. These bright rays of self-deprecating wit embrace perceptive observations of our mixed-up world.' Jen Gibson

One summer's day, thirteen-year-old Kirsty-Lee comes home from school to find her father has left them. This novel explores the ways in which she comes to terms with this and the subsequent changes in her family. Zenda Vecchio is an award-winning writer whose numerous short stories have been published in a variety of literary journals and magazines. Becoming Kirsty-Lee is her second novel for adolescents.

';It's rare to receive a collection of poems that explore the possibility of rhymes in their form. These poems wear their rhymes lightly, and with grace, as they make their way through moods and movements, through the passions and anxieties of contemporary life.' Jen Webb';Here is a sublime collection of poetry, allowing us to reflect on humanity, in its nakedness, tenderness and brutality, carrying us from elegy, dirge, lament to triumphant symphony, from the minor fall to the major lift, with the well tuned dissonances and harmonies of the pen of John Passant.' Mili Cifali, songwriter, composer, performer from the duo The Awesome';This is a collection of work for our times, sometimes bleak, hard, gritty; but indignant, mobilising and marching against the bombs and profits of injustice. With politically charged insight and humanity, these poems reflect on what is, and softly invoke reflections on what could be, shedding light on the unformed future that we make.' Tom Griffiths, Associate Professor of Comparative and Critical Education, University of Newcastle

The smirks on their faces and that rubbish-bin needle. Her eyes and nose streaming tears and gunk, and that sleazebag's hands all over her. So give him what he wanted after what he and his mongrel friends did to her? Bitter tears welled up again. ';No,' Jackson muttered to herself. ';No way.' There was enough anger, stubbornness and pride in her now to do this, ifLocked up in his solitude, Pete felt lonelier than he ever thought possible. A wave of panic hit him. Jumping out of bed, he groped for his torch and burst out the back door. There were diversions out there: the moon, wavelets lapping, stars falling across the skyBoth of them fleeing the outside world, eighteen-year-old Jackson and reclusive Pete meet on the remote east coast of Flinders Island. Unfortunately, the place is not remote enough.

Seven stories, six unique settings, many divergent themes and characters.Seventeen-year-old Jacob returns to Bali in ';Surfing for Wayan'. Once terrified of surfboards, he's there to surf wild for four people, including his brother killed in the 2002 Bali bombing. In ';Summits', Lhotse speaks by cell phone to her father who's dying in a blizzard on Mount Everest. Three months later she walks up Nepal's Everest Track to view that mountain and share her thoughts. A young Afghan reflects on the event that spurred him into becoming a suicide bomber in ';Remembering Nurila'. In ';Tunnelling Cu Chi' a Tasmanian boy, a Vietnamese-Australian girl and an American war veteran meet on a tour of Vietnam's infamous Cu Chi Tunnels. Each is there to resolve their Vietnam War issues.In ';Another Door' a friendship develops between a panic-struck girl going for her first driver's licence and an old widower who's obliged to renew his licence annually. During the bombing of Baghdad a young Iraqi-Australian boy struggles to make sense of media headlines in the prize-winning ';Sandy Heads'.After his granddad dies in ';Fishing Manhattan', a boy learns that places change and it's important to love what you have. For readers of ages 12 to 112.

Blood flows on the war-torn streets of Masar e-Sharif. To try to cope with that, and barbarous Taliban rule, Soraya illegally reads and attends a secret girls' school. But when her mother is killed in a missile attack, all Soraya's girlish dreams and aspirations appear to be crushed forever. One night, her father mentions a cousin living in the rich country of Australia and tells her she will be going there. To give hope to their family, her captive brother's note says, she must journey to that beautiful, peaceful land of Australia. The first thing she will notice, the people smuggler informs her, is how hospitable Australians are. They will wave and shout their greetings, and helpful officials will be at the dock to assist her. Towards God is the journeying, Muhammed says to her as she leaves for Islamabad airport. So Soraya dares to dream again. Wouldn't you?