'Jeanine Leane and I met in the Spring of 2022 to plot this interview over coffee. Jeanine has a quick, ferocious intelligence that moves associatively, while her fingers make languid circles in her hair. She is fine-boned and extremely upright. The day we met, she wore a fitted, double-breasted greatcoat with military detailing that flared at the waist. She told me she picked it up in Cambridge, England, on a day she was there as an invited speaker. After the talk, she said, while walking along the rigidly manicured paths of the Cambridge campus, she stopped to gesture at a flowering bush and was instantly policed by a porter, one of those grounds-guards in bowler hats who keep non-fellows from walking on the grass. ‘Do you know what day it is?’ Jeanine said to the porter. ‘It’s invasion day today, in so-called Australia. I’ll point at any flower I please.’' (Introduction)
'Autobiographies by Aboriginal Women writers have gradually emerged for almost three decades now. Varied and interesting experiments are visible in the life-writing form by Aboriginal writers. In an attempt to write accounts of their own life and experiences, Aboriginal writers have employed different narrative techniques and methods. This chapter is a case study of life narratives by two contemporary Aboriginal women writers Jackie Huggins (Auntie Rita) and Jeanine Leane (Purple Threads.) The focus is on the different methods of writing while “recalling the past”. Interestingly, these narratives create “matriarchal spaces” of expression being written by women who are recalling either their mother’s experiences or Aunties’ stories. The chapter makes an attempt to relocate this idea of history from a feminist perspective.'
Source: Abstract.
'Although Australian indigenous poetry is often overtly polemical and politically committed, any reading which analyzes it as mere propaganda is too narrow to do it justice. By presenting the verse of Alf Taylor collected in Singer Songwriter (1992) and Winds (1994) and discussing it in the context of the wider social and cultural milieu of the author, my essay aims to show the thematic richness of indigenous poetic expression. Indigenous poets have, on the one hand, undertaken the responsibility to strive for social and political equality and foster within their communities the very important concept that indigenous peoples can survive only as a community and a nation (McGuiness). On the other hand, they have produced powerful self-revelatory accounts of their own mental and emotional interior, which urges us to see their careers in a perspective much wider than that of social chroniclers and rebels.' (Publication abstract)
'Purple Threads, by Jeanine Leane, embodies country. Images of the land are physically and emotionally evoked in the individual stories that make up this short story cycle, running through the stories as delicately as strands of purple wisteria and as powerfully as the Murrumbidgee River flows and then surges through the countryside where they are set. In this article I aim to demonstrate how two features of the short story cycle - the independence and interrelatedness of the stories in the cycle, and the longer story within the cycle - help to convey the multifarious connections people can have to their country, family and the places they call home.
Leane draws on her own experiences to articulate formative incidents in a young girl’s life that explore what it meant to be an Aboriginal girl growing up in central NSW in the 1960s and ’70s. The development of Sunny’s cultural and ethnic identity is inseparable from her relationship with country, nurtured by her Nan and Aunties’ love and respect for the land, and challenged by a Dorothy-esque journey that carries her far away to a foreign country in search of family, and back again to the place she feels most loved and secure.
'This article thus explores the importance of country in Sunny’s growing awareness of her identity, and forms part of a broader project on the representations of women’s lives in the short story cycle.' (Publication abstract)
