The Australian landscape can instil fear and inspire awe – it is an ecosystem entirely its own. The picture of Australia evoked by Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ still rings true more than 100 years later. She is a land that is beautiful and terrifying, harsh just as she is nurturing. It is a contradiction that will feel familiar to any woman. The experience of womanhood – motherhood, love, heartbreak, grief, desire, becoming – rarely arrives as one thing. It is tender and devastating, expansive and suffocating, often within the same moment. Her Beauty and Her Terror brings together 100 contemporary Australian women poets turning to the landscape around them to make sense of that contradiction – finding in its extremities, subtleties and forms a mirror for the full and complex range of what it means to be a woman.
