By FIona Capp
You Don’t Belong Here by Elizabeth Becker
PICK OF THE WEEK
You Don’t Belong Here
Elizabeth Becker, Black Inc, $32.99
Reporting on the Vietnam War was a tough gig in itself. But the three women reporters featured in this heady history were also fighting a war against prejudices of their colleagues, the military and society in general about women’s fitness to report on war. While from very different backgrounds, French photographer Catherine Leroy, American journalist Frances FitzGerald and Australian reporter Kate Webb were gutsy mavericks who kept a low profile and went their own way. Leroy jumped with paratroopers to shoot a major airborne offensive, Webb was captured by the North Vietnamese and survived to tell her tale and FitzGerald sought the bigger picture behind the frontline. All brought a fresh lens to the war and never lost sight of the unfolding human tragedy beyond the politics.
Design. Building on Countryby Alison Page & Paul Memmott
Design. Building on Country
Alison Page & Paul Memmott, Thames & Hudson, $21.99
Much of this enlightening, inspiring work looks at how Indigenous structures were, in pre-colonial times, inseparable from the seasonal movements of communities and the resources available for shelter, food, tools and medicines in local environments. While Western architecture and design has been largely functional, decorative and expressive of individual tastes, in Aboriginal culture, these practices are seen as part of a larger, holistic and cosmological scheme. As Alison Page puts it, the built environment in the Indigenous world view is “an extension of our creation stories”. All structures and human-made objects are sung into existence in a way that “reinforces our connection to Country and our ecological responsibility for it’.” A perfect template, says Page, for future sustainable design.
The Women’s Doc by Caroline De Costa
The Women’s Doc
Caroline De Costa, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
“The first thing I saw was the tiny anus, winking at me from between two miniature buttocks that were rapidly turning blue.” From this eye-catching opening, Caroline De Costa draws the reader into the life-and-death drama of bringing babies into this world as she reflects on the changes in obstetrics over the past five decades and her own experiences as a obstetrician, mother of seven and activist for women’s reproductive rights. Her activism began early, when she was a medical student in Dublin helping run a small smuggling service in intra-uterine devices because contraception was illegal in Ireland. Although her stories capture the arc of her adventurous life, her main focus is the women she has cared for and their joys and sorrows, along with the urgent social issues that she confronted in her work.
How Stella Learned To Talk by Christina Hunger
How Stella Learned to Talk
Christina Hunger, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
We all talk to our dogs and they talk back with a twitch of an ear, a tilt of the head, a bark, a sigh, a raised paw. How would our communication improve if dogs could use words like us? Speech pathologist Christina Hunger was helping children with language development delays to use a communication device that uttered words for them, when it occurred to her that this approach could be applied to her new puppy, Stella. And so she taught Stella to press buttons, each with a recorded word that correlated with actions, desires and basic feelings. While Stella’s ability to put words together to communicate is intriguing, I was left with mixed feelings about the extent to which this experiment assumed the superiority of human language, turned Stella into a performing seal and diminished her quintessential dogginess.