Showing results by narrator "Janet Watson Kruse" in All Categories

Melbourne, 1927. The summer flowers smell like Christmas the night Zara Dickins meets Harry Holt. Zara is wearing a dress she has designed and made herself. White organdie over a short black slip, with black embroidery and a crimson taffeta sash. It is party season and the university crowd are celebrating end-of-year exams. Zara loves dancing with the boys and flirting with them, but it's a game to her. Nothing serious. Until Harry. He plans to be a politician once he finishes law. She, a fashion designer, if she can find a way to break out of the secretarial pool.

When writer Catherine Deveny faced the end of a 17-year relationship with the father of her children, she had no idea what lay on the other side of the months of tumult—she just knew she had to create space for a new life. But this wasn’t the first time Deveny had taken a plunge into the unknown or let go of conventional assumptions. In True North, she shares how she emerged from an oppressive Catholic upbringing in working-class Reservoir, found her tribe in Fitzroy’s share houses in the '80s and learnt to live life on her own terms.