Winged Steampunk

Lithgow Ironfest is a glorious celebration of creative anachronism once a year in this coal-mining town just beyond the Great Dividing Range. Ironfest started with blacksmithing and now embraces steampunk, jousting, Napoleonic era reenactment, robots, Dr Who, birds of prey, archery on horseback, a medieval village, steampunk Samurai, WWII soldiers, a mariachi band and things impossible to name.

 

Australian Literature Month on Reading Matters

Here’s a guest post by Elizabeth Lhuede on the Reading Matters blog on Australian Women Writers. It’s gratifying to be mentioned in the company of so many other wonderful writers. This story of Lhuede’s is astonishing though…

‘I assumed it would be easy to find books to read, but when I asked my local library staff for recommendations, I was stunned that neither of the two (female) library assistants on duty could name one living female Australian author. The author they did name, Elizabeth Jolley, was one of the few I’d read as an undergraduate. Other authors I knew were all either dead, of an older generation, or expatriates, many of whom had achieved recognition for their work outside Australia, including Shirley Hazzard, Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Thea Astley and Janette Turner Hospital.

Where were the books by authors of my own generation and younger?’