Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri woman from southwest New South Wales. She has published a book of poetry Dark Secrets (2010), which won the Scanlon Prize, and a book of stories, Purple Threads (2011), which won the David Unaipon Award.

Excerpt from Cambria Press Publication
Giving This Country a Memory (Chapter 3: Jeanine Leane)

“The white settler home was a site where white femininity was sharply demarcated from white masculinity. It was this differentiation that marked white men and white women as “civilised”. Idealised white femininity was domestic, nurturing and pure, while white masculinity was worldly and competitive. White men were citizen soldiers, providers and pioneers while white women were exemplars of sexual purity. The Australian patriarchal white family was based on this unequal complementarity. As the poems in Dark Secrets demonstrate, the category of white women’s idealized femininity and sexual purity comes into being through its differentiation from the excessive, dangerous bodily fertility of Aboriginal women.” (p.104)

Giving This Country A Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia by Anne Brewster is part of the Cambria Australian Literature Series, headed by Susan Lever.

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