Witness

Anne Summers on fifty tumultuous years. Anne Summers – trailblazing feminist, journalist, commentator and author – has often been the nation’s conscience with her insightful and powerful writing on the past 50 years of Australian and American society and politics. In Witness, an illuminating first-ever collection of Summers’ reportage, essays, interviews and articles, we meet Cate Blanchett and Robert Caro, Germaine Greer and Monica Lewinsky, Faith Bandler and Rosie Batty. Summers revisits the vindictive politics of the Julia Gillard era, the unexpected legacy of Malcolm Fraser and the way John Howard upended the agenda for women’s equality. She explores the Mexican patron saint of drug runners, the terrorist bombing of an Ariana Grande concert and the women who marched against rape in war on ANZAC Day. And she reflects on the death of her mother, finally providing a headstone for a violent grandfather, sharing her name with a chain of sex shops and why she couldn’t throw out her swinging '60s wedding dress. In a collection as varied and deeply considered as her own life, Summers tells the stories of the people, issues and moments that have shaped our past and are key to understanding today’s tumultuous world.