Books, short stories and articles

	When lives collide at the heart of the country, no one stays unchanged.   Read more about Love Like Water

All titles (except Love Like Water & The Way of the Birds)
are available as TALKING books!
They can be ordered from Louis Braille audio:
lba.sales@visionaustralia.org.au
www.louisbrailleaudio.com
PO BOX 295
Malvern Victoria 3144

Short Stories and Articles

Apart from writing books, I've written some articles, essays and short stories for publication. Following on are some extracts of these you might like to browse through. For the complete works you'll have to search libraries or bookshops for the original publication otherwise I'll be in trouble for doing editors and publishers out of the just rewards for their hard work.

BEDSIDE READING was recently written for the Victorian Reader.

With patience and friendship, Joy Murphy Wandin, Wurundjeri elder, has shown me where to begin to learn about the land I walk on and the tracks I follow. BRIDGING CULTURES was written with her permission and in honour of the extraordinary leader she is.

THE VINE grew out of a story told to Boori Monty Pryor. He was spending a week in residence at a secondary school.A teacher came up to him on the third day and gave him a poem. It told of a childhood love for an Aboriginal boy.

Where the teacher grew up, a relationship between her and the boy was out of the question, so she nurtured this love in her heart for 36 years without telling anyone. I was familiar with the kind of attitudes the teacher was surrounded by as a child from my experiences growing up in western Queensland.

Her story stayed with me until I could write something to honour it. When Caro Llewellyn, editor at Random House, invited contributions for her anthology, My One True Love, The Vine took shape growing out of the teacher's story.

Older women at the Melbourne City Baths led me to my first book, PUT YOUR WHOLE SELF IN. Soon after its publication, I was invited to write this essay, THIRTY-EIGHT. It was another opportunity to grapple with notions of ageing and draw together some of the truths I had learnt from the pool full of wise women.

How do you ever describe the process of collaboration? When it works it works and when it doesn’t the individuals move on. Isn’t that the truth?
Brenda Walker, novelist and creative writing lecturer, asked for an essay for her collection, The Writer’s Guide, that focused on questions of ethics and ownership that go hand in hand with collaborative writing.
‘WHOSE STORY?’ is my attempt to put words to some of the complexities of collaborating across culture, across gender, and with respect to friend and family relationships when you are writing fiction from fact and drawing fact from fiction.

US AND THEM AND THE OTHERS
I was invited by Regional Arts Victoria to write this essay as part of a critical analysis of their major arts project called ‘…such fertile ground…’. This project saw the installation of twelve giant visual images on the landscape of regional Victoria. These images were designed and created by artists and communities working together exploring notions of identity and belonging in Australia’s Centenary of Federation year.

copyright meme mcdonald 2002