Margaret Somerville Margaret Somerville i(A36123 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 9 y separately published work icon Singing the Coast Margaret Somerville , Tony Perkins , Canberra : Aboriginal Studies Press , 2010 Z1684363 2010 single work prose

'Most Australians live on the narrow coastal strip that fringes our island continent. For Aboriginal people a place comes into being each time it is sung, and it is through this process that places are learned about and cared for. These songs can be for all of us, in the places where Aboriginal stories are rapidly overwritten with grids of roads and towns.

Together Perkins and Somerville explore one coastal group's experience in maintaining the stories and songs of their country: Perkins' Gumbaynggirr homeland in mid-north coast New South Wales. These stories and songs are unique in their particularities, yet universal in their sense of knowledge, understanding and openness to sharing.

By taking up the metaphor of singing to capture a quality of voice, Perkins and Somerville show us how to share the land and its stories throughout Australia.' (From the publisher's website.)
1 Mudflats and Migratory Birds Margaret Somerville , 2006 single work essay
— Appears in: Island , Autumn no. 104 2006; (p. 18-22)
1 Remembering in the Contact Zone: Telling and Listening To, A Massacre Story Margaret Somerville , Tony Perkins , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Altitude , no. 6 2005; (p. 1-14)
1 7 y separately published work icon Wildflowering : The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur Margaret Somerville , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2004 Z1136240 2004 single work biography
1 Towards 'a Postcolonial Practice of Writing' Margaret Somerville , Fiona Probyn , 2004 single work interview
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 30 no. 1 2004; (p. 56-71) This 'interview' is a dialogue 'woven together after a few months of email exchanges with Margaret Somerville in 2002' (p.56). In the discussion Somerville 'elaborates on her navigation through feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist connections and disconnections, as well as her strategies for achieving an embodied sense of belonging in the Australian landscape.' (p.56)
1 5 y separately published work icon Body/Landscape Journals Margaret Somerville , North Melbourne : Spinifex Press , 1999 Z978863 1999 multi chapter work autobiography essay biography (taught in 1 units) 'Reading this book [sic] is like falling through a faultline, as we respond to poesis, both as poetry and as thought creation. The author [sic] entered the faultline at the 1984 Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp where urban women and Aboriginal women demonstrated agaist military bases. As she moved through the landscape of this and other very different places, she recorded her interactions: with Aboriginal women in the desert and in the mountains, and with white women in the tropics. It is a thoughtful challenge of all that we think. Margaret [sic] concludes with reflections on the architecture of love.' (Source: Backcover)
1 2 y separately published work icon The Sun Dancin' : People and Place in Coonabarabran Margaret Somerville , Marie Dundas , May Mead , Janet Robinson , Maureen Sulter , Canberra : Aboriginal Studies Press , 1994 Z1132811 1994 single work biography
1 1 Life (Hi)Story Writing : The Relationship between Talk and Text Margaret Somerville , 1991 single work criticism
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 17 no. 1 1991; (p. 95-109) Article deals mainly with the development of a collaborative methodology between the author and Patsy Cohen and the process of creating Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs.
1 Reflections on Ingelba Patsy Cohen , Margaret Somerville , 1991 single work criticism
— Appears in: Westerly , June vol. 36 no. 2 1991; (p. 45-49)
1 17 y separately published work icon Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs Patsy Cohen , Margaret Somerville , North Sydney : Allen and Unwin , 1990 Z361636 1990 single work life story Life history of Patsy Cohen; remembrances about five leading women in the Woolbrook/Armidale community in the late 1800s and early 1900s; oral history; Ingelba; Bora ceremony; min min lights; emphasis on continuing relationship to place; identity and kinship.
X