Fifty Years: Stories of Women's Lands Australia Volume 3

BOOK LAUNCH

Please join us to help celebrate this auspicious occasion !
Drinks and nibbles @ 2.30pm, book launch @ 3pm.
Sunday 10 December 2023
The Women's Library Newtown
All welcome.

Land is life, sisterhood is powerful.

Hot off the press, this is the final volume of stories in a Trilogy of stories of Women’s Lands in NSW, Australia, collected and published by curator and Land woman Sand Hall.
Since 1973, the Lands have provided a place where adventurous and non-conforming women could be. A refuge, a place to learn, a sanctuary.

Sand writes: I’ve enjoyed gathering these stories though when I started in 2016, I didn’t know one book would lead to three.
For years, Land women have talked about the need to write our stories, particularly as some women and girls from the early days have started dying. We don’t want to be invisible to herstory or to women who might appreciate the Lands, but over the decades, publicity or interest from the media has generally not been accurate, kind or welcome. Self publishing has allowed us to tell our stories in our own words. I am delighted that this book, and the whole Trilogy, have enabled us to collect and share some of our stories in a practical and creative way. In this volume, 25 women contribute stories, poems, photographs, and artworks, spanning five decades, four Lands and different generations.

A story from a woman new to the Mountain starts the book, one from a woman who was part of the beginning 50 years ago, concludes it. There are so many adventures and stories, involving so many women, over so many years. Over the decades, thousands of women, from all around the world, have had a sense of connection with these Australian Lands. Springing from the Women’s Liberation Movement, our experiences also have an important place in the social history of the Hippy, Peace, New Age, Environmental and Alternative Health Movements, and I hope the stories remain accessible in libraries and to historians and researchers, particularly lesbian historians.

While some of us who have lived on the Lands have indigenous heritage in our family trees, most of us have not grown up in First Nations communities and are from settler cultures, so it is important to most of us to acknowledge that these Women’s Lands are also Aboriginal lands: always were, always will be. We, Women’s Lands women, are extremely fortunate to be title holders in whitefella law, but we acknowledge that First Nations people have not ceded Australia to colonial takeover. Hopefully the Treaty-making processes will be the way forward for proper recognition of our real history and a justly shared future.

Volume 3 and a limited number of Volumes 1 and 2 will be available for sale (great presents!)