Böcker av Jane Miller

Australia introduced professional education for social workers thirty years later than much of the developed world. It joined an international movement to set up the new profession and was helped by the well-established American and British social workers. As Australian social work education approaches its centenary in 2029, it is clear that much of the history of the profession has been forgotten or is merely shadowy memory, layered with gossip, cliché and stereotypes rather than facts. Verl Lewis, social work educator and historian, was right when he said that understanding their own history is essential for social workers' self-understanding and self-awareness. Who are the social workers today, and where have they come from? Are they doctors' handmaidens, because of their origins in almoning, or do their connections to the Settlement movement make them radical drivers of change? Perhaps their origins in the Charity Organisation Society mean that they are agents of social control. There is some truth in all these assertions, but the story of Australian social work education is both more complex and more nuanced than this. For Social Betterment tells, for the first time, the history of Australian social work - a story of a fight for standards and the tenacity of a group of women (and a few men) who were determined to improve care and conditions for those most vulnerable in our community. It also reflects on why the rights of women and First Nations peoples were overlooked for so long, and examines the future challenges for social work in Australia.

A herald of desire, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller’s Paper Banners catalogs the intimate experiences that create a life, hoping that “what will survive of us is love.”A herald of desire, suffering, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller’s Paper Banners “say the cosmos/ isn’t hostile/ yet strangles a dove /with one hand.” Against this angst, Miller steps outside of history to contemplate voices of love, aging, and artmaking. Many poems are addressed to family members, friends, and young poets, or pay homage to familiar figures taken by time or tragedy, including Virginia Woolf, Osip Mandelstam, and the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. In clear, short lines, these poems harken to ancient banderoles, or pennants, which announced rallying cries on the lances of knights and mottoes on the flags of ships. Here, Miller’s Paper Banners are made of images of the American Southwest and scrutinize its political and physical landscape. Like skywriting streamed in white smoke, this collection bears its message on the wind, its words addressed to anyone. As Miller catalogs the intimate experiences that make up a life—friendships, loves, dreams, our human connection to the environment—Paper Banners becomes a hope that “what will survive of us is love.”

Jane Miller loves poetry. In these provocative and deeply insightful essays, she unpacks the work of giants like Adrienne Rich, Paul Celan, Marina Tsevetaeya, Osip Mandelstam, and Garcia Lorca alongside painters such as Caravaggio and Paul Klee, as well as ancient Chinese music and techniques of the contemporary poem.

For the past four years Jane Miller, author of Crazy Age: Thoughts on Being Old, has been writing a column for an American magazine called In These Times. Her beautifully observed pieces about life, politics and Britain open a window to her American readers of a world very different from their own.'Her erudition is both dazzling and lightly borne, the personal often illuminating the political . . . Miller's is a welcome, necessary voice - readable, informative and entertaining' Times Literary SupplementJane Miller, author of the acclaimed Crazy Age, has for the past few years been writing a column for an American magazine based in Chicago called In These Times. Now, these beautifully observed pieces about life, politics and Britain, which opened a window for Americans on a world rather different from their own, are collected and published for the first time for her British readers.'Miller is a fantastic companion' Viv Groskop, Telegraph

In this remarkable book, Jane Miller writes about the experience of being a daughter and a sister, about the intensities of family life and the illuminations that come from the last days of parents.