After some glitches the print (paperback) version of Revolutionary Baby is now available. You can purchase from Amazon.com.au or place an order online with Booktopia. Or go to your local bookstore and order a copy to pick up in person, to save postage.

What is it about? Revolutionary Baby is a collection of fictional stories about the changes people had to make to their thoughts, beliefs and expectations from the mid-twentieth century onwards. It takes a collection of different characters, women and men, younger and older, and explores aspects or ordinary lives in the moments of transformation, when people had to confront their expectations from the past and change the way they looked at their options in the present and the future. All the stories and the characters in them are entirely fictional, but many aspects reflect my own experiences growing up in the 1960s, being a student, a mother, an academic, a traveller, an onlooker and participant in the many transformations swirling about us. The stories reflect an Australian history, culture and awareness, although they are not all set in Australia and the presence of “overseas” looms large.

As a preliminary quote for these stories, I was drawn to the words of Gil Scott-Heron, now an almost forgotten figure of Black American consciousness in the sixties and seventies.

“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.”

Listen to his achingly powerful poem/song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, from 1971, readily available on Youtube.