[Farah Farougue, Sydney Morning Herald, July 24th 2010]:
A well-dressed woman with well-dressed vowels sits in a hotel lobby and recounts the day she dropped a rhetorical bomb at an anti-Vietnam War rally.
A crowd had gathered at Sydney University and the woman, then just 20, strode to the podium. Her hands trembled; securing a spot as a female speaker had been a tough negotiation. But she had something potent to say to the men assembled in this place in 1970.
”… I’m told ad infinitum that I’m a woman, I’m a second-class citizen, and I should shut up right now because my mind’s between my legs. I say you think with your pricks …”
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[Jose Borghino, The Australian, July 23rd 2010]:
Anthologies have always been risky propositions, endangered species like their bastard cousins, the so-called “little magazines” that survive on the smell of a Literature Board grant and the saintly doggedness of the very few.
Now that the internet is messing with our reading habits so that we (supposedly) can’t focus on long novels like we used to, maybe our attenuated attention spans and need for novelty will be a good thing for anthologies such as these – short texts by various hands with a vaguely unifying theme.
In the case of Wordlines, that theme is purely personal: these stories were chosen by Hilary McPhee. At the vanguard of literary publishing since the glory days of McPhee Gribble in the 1970s and 80s, she had a stint as chairwoman of the Australia Council in the 1990s and was briefly editor of the dearly departed online news site NewMatilda.com.
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