Week 47/2025: A week of book launches
Week of 17 November 2025
This week I went to two very different book launches, one I had planned for a while and one at the last minute.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
A week of book launches
Palawa tunapri by Trish Hodge
Trish Hodge is a proud Palawa woman from Trawlwoolway people in the North-East of Lutruwita/Tasmania. She’s an educator with Nita Education, which delivers Aboriginal Cultural experiences to schools and other organisations.
I met Trish at a weaving and twining workshop she ran for Hobart City Council in 2019, and was really excited when I found out she was going to compile a book about traditional uses for native plants.
The book, Palawa tunapri, came out last month.
It was published by Fullers, who organised the launch on Monday night with Trish, Gina Chick, winner of the first season of SBS TV’s series Alone Australia, and ABC Hobart’s Ryk Goddard. Trish worked as the native plants expert on Alone, providing the contestants with vital knowledge about what they could and couldn’t eat.
Palawa tunapri is a culmination of over 20 years of Trish’s work in researching and documenting the traditional uses of over 350 native Tasmanian plants, which include as food, medicine and tools, as well as some spiritual and cultural uses. Trish has also included some historical references about some of the plants, as she used records of early white settlers to inform her research to supplement the traditional knowledge of her community. She noted that when she began this work, most of what was documented had been written by those early non-Indigenous people, but now it’s encouraging to see a lot more work from Indigenous voices.
Described as “a tribute to Aboriginal ecological wisdom and the enduring connection to Country”, the book has come from Trish’s love of the plants of Lutruwita and her passion for preserving the knowledge of her people. She says she left out many more plants than she included, so this is not the end of her work. She writes that she will keep going so that today’s community and future generations can also be knowledge holders.
What’s especially beautiful is that Trish wrote it for her people and for all of us as well so we might understand the Country we live on. She writes,
“you (non-Aboriginal readers) too are knowledge holders; we all have ancestors who have lived on Country somewhere in the world, somewhere in our past. We all come from Country and we are all responsible for caring for it.”
Yes, we are.
Sex, Gender & Identity: Trans Rights in Australia by Paula Gerber
Trans Awareness Week is held from 13-19 November to celebrate trans pride and to promote the voices of the trans community. The week ends with Transgender Day of Remembrance on 20 November. Here’s what I wrote about it last year.
Transgender Day of Remembrance honours and remembers people who have lost their lives to transphobic violence and discrimination, and it was an appropriate day for Paula Gerber to launch her book, Sex, Gender & Identity: Trans Rights in Australia.
The launch was held at Fullers, and featured Paula in conversation with two high-profile Tasmanian LGBTIQA+ campaigners, Rodney Croome and Martine Delaney. Paula is a law professor at Monash University and is an expert in human rights law and LGBTIQA+ people. I think she said this is her thirteenth book, and it’s the first one she’s written for a non-academic audience. (I was that person who sat down the back and took lots of notes.)
Here’s the promo for the book—which tells us why we need weeks like Trans Awareness Week and, distressingly, the day of remembrance.
These days, barely a week goes by without pointed media stories about the trans community, usually targeting trans women. They are likely to have a sensationalist headline and a salacious tone, and the writing is often ill-informed and vilifying. Favoured topics include women in sports, bathrooms, where prisoners are housed, and health care for trans and gender-diverse children and young people.
What tends not to be reported is the abuse, assaults and online hate that have become a daily experience for trans women, and the bullying that trans kids experience at school. Some of this is due to the ripple effects of the animosity spewed out by the so-called ‘leader of the free world’. From the early days of his campaign for a second term as US president, Donald Trump has had the trans community in his sights, and he now appears intent on denying their very existence. But a broader dynamic seems to be a deep-seated intolerance, if not loathing, of trans people in our society.
Why are trans people so hated? Why have they become contemporary ‘villains’ and the target of so much prejudice and bigotry? And most importantly, how do we change this? Is it possible to move from blaming, shaming and excluding trans people to respecting, protecting and including them? These questions are at the heart of Sex, Gender & Identity: Trans Rights in Australia, alongside the goal of increasing community-wide understanding of this much maligned minority.
It is, I think, a much-needed book, and very timely.
Something Paula talked about early on was the hating on trans people and why this might be happening.
She suggested ‘proximity’ as one reason. While most of us know gay people, less than one per cent of the population is trans or gender diverse, so we’re less likely to know a trans person. And often if we don’t know people, we rely on the media to tell us about them. And, Paula said, the problem with this is that the mainstream media doesn’t present a balanced view. As the book’s blurb says, they focus on the sensationalised stories—the bathrooms ones or the women’s sport stories—and they don’t report on the horrific treatment many trans people are subjected to and they don’t focus on presenting trans people as people who have families, lives and stories.
Paula wrote the book to help the 99% of people who aren’t trans to educate ourselves, because we aren’t getting this information from mainstream media. And it’s essential that we do educate ourselves in order to be a good ally for the trans community. There’s a lot of information out there and it’s easy to find. What is sex, what is gender, what is an intersex person, why is it incorrect to say there are only two sexes, why is a person’s external appearance not a good indicator of what gender they are, or indeed what sex they are. (And, why do we even care what gender someone is? It’s nothing to do with us!)
What does the medical evidence say? Paula said our laws and our attitudes should be based on this, not on ideological hatred and a fear of people different to us. The medical evidence tells us that sex is a spectrum that is influenced by chromosomes, biology, hormones and anatomy. In other words, trans and gender diverse people are part of the diverse spectrum of humanity.
This means it’s not as simple as the proponents of the sex binary would have us believe—there are documented cases of women discovering they have XY chromosomes, one of which Paula mentioned in her talk and in the book—so it’s important that we arm ourselves with facts, not sensationalist clickbait. Paula also stressed that it’s not the role of trans people to educate us.
So with that in mind, Minus 18 is a good place to start.
Transcend Australia has a list of resources, and Working It Out is a great resource for Tasmanian news and advocacy.
Finally, this is a recent article Paula wrote for Monash University that touches on some of what she talked about in the book.
Habit tracker
Existing habits
- Go outside first thing (7 days): 6/7
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 6/7
- Hip exercises (5 days): 7/5
- Walk (7 days): 6/7
- Carry a notebook with me when I walk (7 days): 5/6
- Thinking time (4 days): 3/4
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 2/7
- 9.30 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 4/6
- Evening routine (6 days): 7/6
New habits
- Set timer for morning planning (5 days): 0/5
- Work shutdown (5 days): 0/5
- Days out of 30 I have got up at the alarm: 3/3
About this last one, you might remember a few weeks ago I wrote about the book Tiny Experiments by Anne Laure Le Cunff. The idea is you make a ‘pact’ to try something for a period of time and see what you learn from it.
It’s very simple.
I will [thing] for [time].
So, after never being able to get out of bed on time, despite putting the alarm on the other side of the room and making it a really annoying sound, I decided to make it an experiment:
I will get up when the alarm goes off every morning for 30 days.
On day one (Friday), I was actually excited to get out of bed to turn the alarm off and tick a day off.
And no, I didn’t go right back to bed. That, friends, is a win!
Summary of the week
Some positive things
Obviously the week of book launches, but besides that:
Being the only person at my Pilates class on Saturday morning.
Going for a photowalk on the Bridgewater Bridge with my sister.
We wanted to see the old bridge before it was demolished. It’s already started and it was fenced off so we couldn’t walk on it. We could, however, walk on the new one.
This week I learned
Sewerage = the pipes
Sewage = the stuff that goes through the pipes
Thanks, contestant Liz on Hard Quiz.
I also learned a lot about the history of the five Bridgewater bridges.
This week I noticed
A bus driver’s really cool tattoo. It was like an entire forest on his arm.
All the plovers on the causeway at Bridgewater.
What’s making me think?
In his book The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek describes the “infinite mindset” as thinking about the second and third order effects of our decisions—it means taking responsibility for later impacts of decisions we make today.
This reminded me of the Seven Generations Principle that guides decision-making in many indigenous cultures.
Reading
- The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
- Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
- Vagabond by Tim Curry
- Sex, Gender & Identity: Trans Rights in Australia by Paula Gerber
Watching
- Hard Quiz
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘Enlightenment’
- Frankenstein (2025)
About The Author
