| Editorial
This issue of AWBR is the first electronic issue.
It is also, I regret to say, my final issue as editor. I have
overseen the often endangered fate of the magazine since 1980
and would like to take this opportunity to thank the many women
who have worked directly and extensively with me in its production,
and especially, Michele Grossman, Katie Hughes, Jeannie Rea, Heather
Nix, Janis Laming, Julie Hunt, Susan Rees-Osborne and Glenys Crozier.
To all the other helpers also, many thanks.
The last ten years have seen the magazine develop under the auspices
of Victoria University and then, when there was a danger of the
magazine disappearing, Hecate, a journal with a formidable
feminist history of endurance and survival, stepped in. The magazine's
continuation is due to that generous intervention by Hecate's
editor, Carole Ferrier.
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Several of the
reviews by younger women, in this issue, pointedly comment on the
tendency of “baby-boomers” to outstay their welcome: now
seems a good time to go, as the magazine takes on its new electronic
persona! While not agreeing that “the older generation”
has little to contribute - and it comes hard to think of oneself
as “older generation” - I do agree that a review magazine
benefits from fresh perspectives and new directions. I hope that
the magazine will go on into 2001 and beyond under a lively “post-boomer”
(but not post-feminist) editorship.
This issue brings a range of material characteristic of the magazine's
desire to be eclectic rather than exhaustive in relation to Australian
women's writing in 2000. The three popular genres of romance, science
fiction/fantasy, and crime, are all discussed. There is also some
consideration of fiction for younger readers by Margaret Steinberger.
Terry Whitebeach offers two reviews and a review article on areas
of Indigenous women's writing: writing for children, and a new book
about Indigenous women in the university system. Another academic
woman is celebrated in Donna Dwyer's review of the Melbourne headmistress,
Dorothy Ross, while Joy Damousi reviews a Western Australian collection
on women, leadership and activism. A sample of the very large, and
ever-increasing new fiction from Australian women is reviewed. Sylvia
Martin offers an elegiac review of Judith Wright's autobiography.
In mourning the passing but also celebrating the life of Judith
Wright, let us also take some time to think of Helen Daniel who,
sadly, died recently. Helen, the energetic and determined editor
of the Australian Book Review, was not a fellow-traveller
of feminism and, indeed, expressed impatience with anything she
thought of as ideological bigotry: an occasion for some heated arguments
when we did travel together to an Indian reviewers' conference in
1994. However, her generosity and her commitment to intellectual
engagement kept alive ABR as a forum for Australian literature
in a very sparse reviewing desert.
I thank the contributors of this issue, and all earlier ones, and
wish the magazine a healthy new future.
Barbara Brook |
AWBR is indexed in AUSLIT, Feminist Periodicals and Alternative
Press Index
Address for future correspondence regarding subscriptions, contributions
and other related issues:
Hecate, PO Box 99, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia,
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