Terri-ann White
Terri-ann White has been published since the late 1980s, taught writing in the community and universities, and previously been an independent bookseller. Her books include a collection of short stories, one novel, three anthologies, and she has been published widely in journals and anthologies. She has an abiding interest in expression and takes great pleasure in collaborative work with other thinkers and artists, especially in the forms of the visual arts and performance. She is currently Director of UWA Publishing.
Bookseller Terri-ann White surveys the publishing scene in Perth and Fremantle, for several decades now torn by a battle for funds but recently showing encouraging signs of optimistic development.
Since 1975 and the establishment of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press, the writing community of Perth has benefited enormously from the focus and support it has offered. Whether individual writers have be ... (read more)
During my reading of Susan Varga’s first work of fiction, Happy Families, I was drawn back into the fields of family and emotion as offered in the two recent American films: The Ice Storm and Six Degrees of Separation. Each of these works hard at tracking the intricacies of humans connecting and communicating, the tectonics of family and emotional landscapes. Happy Families shows us, up close, m ... (read more)
The task of reading these three books together provided more than I was anticipating. Their perspectives of decades of Australian society and writing practices cover the past, the personal and the politics. The writers come from three different generations (born 1903, 1923, 1940), and represent particular writing intentions or schools, certainly different genres. The connecting thread, probably th ... (read more)
Andrea Goldsmith’s second novel, Modern Interiors, is about a family, and marked out by its goodies and baddies. This is a moral novel about capitalism and the choices open to people within its system. Goldsmith uses outrageous caricatures to represent the baddies – those seduced and corrupted by the family’s damned money. And all of the goodies have an interest in and strenuously pursue the ... (read more)
Marion Halligan’s new novel has as its centrepiece, shiny and assertive, flagged by its title, a dress made with loving care but, nonetheless, improvised just so that the fabric will go far enough. A dress that Molly Pellerin wears to a party at the laundry where she works, an event that becomes a defining moment in her life, the dress a legacy, offering an image of Molly as dazzling, beautiful, ... (read more)
Early on in her long and billowing narrative, Eureka Jones makes a promise to us:
Listen, I will make the clouds rain stories for you ... I will try to revive for you this time of liquid possibility when the valleys were brimful with our love of elsewhere, a love stronger than any atmospheric process, a love which turned the mountains sapphire blue.
This novel, Delia Falconer’s first, take ... (read more)
Performances by Batsheva Dance Company involve more than movement and choreography. Behind each production is a philosophy, markedly different from the vocabulary, tics, and motifs we expect from choreographers. Ohad Naharin has introduced a revolutionary aspect to the company to which he has belonged for forty-one years (he has been artistic director since 1990). This feature, the system and lang ... (read more)
Unsurprisingly, each of Sylvie Guillem’s six performances of Life in Progress in the Sydney leg of a world tour sold out. She will soon retire as a dancer after thirty-nine remarkable years. Unsurprisingly too, her program was edgy and contained two brand new works. Sylvie Guillem doesn’t rest on her laurels, and this wasn’t an anthology of her ‘greatest hits’. During her career, Sylvie ... (read more)
The world première in Perth of a new work from a Broome-based performance company was an event of considerable note. Twenty-one years of productions made in West Arnhem Land and then in Broome turns conventional wisdoms upside down in Australian terms. Many people still hold that sophisticated cultural work is made in cities and that regional or remote places yield up worthy or folksy work that b ... (read more)