Celebrating Lesbian Feminist Voices in Australia

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PO Box 168, Brunswick East, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3057

ABN: 87 500 460 848
phone: 03 9387.6610 email: dykebooks2008@gmail.com

website: dykebooksinc.com

Dyke Books Inc is a not-for-profit, community based lesbian feminist self-publishing house based on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung County in Naarm Melbourne Australia. Dyke Books was variously established in 1976 / 1984 / 2008 with the aim of publishing writing by, for and about Lesbians because as Lesbians we need to have control of our own writing and how we choose to have it published.

We acknowledge and pay our respects to all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of this island continent now known as Australia.

And in particular the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nation on whose Lands these books ere written and publishedin Bulleke-bek, Merri-bek, Naarm.

We pay our respects to the Elders past and present. We Acknowledge Sovereignty, Land Rights and the right to Self-Determination.

We support the Uluru Statement from the Heart:Treaty, Truth Telling and Voice to Parliament.

And humbly and respectfully, with gratitude and in solidarity thank the First Nations people for allowing us to live, work and playon their stolen Lands that were never ceded.

Always Was and Always Will Be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lands, Seas, Airs and Waterways.

Lesbian Books

The Womyn’s Revolution

Jean Taylor

The Womyn’s Revolution, a novel by Jean Taylor, Dyke Books Inc 2026; paperback $30 plus postage in Australia $10, also available as an ebook.

The Womyn’s Revolution is set in the heady days of 1973, at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Melbourne, Australia, and at a time when lesbian feminists were starting to make their presence felt.

It tells the story of two 16 year olds, Kieren and Tess, who are friends at the beginning of the book and lesbian lovers by the end of it. These young womyn are still at school when they start to learn the hard way about how womyn are oppressed and what they can do about it by becoming involved in various WLM activities and womyn’s activist collectives.

This book also describes Kieren’s relationship with her academic mother, Gene, and Tess with her Greek mother, Rhea, as well as some of the aspects of Melbourne culture at that time. And includes short stories written by Kieren who imagines herself as a writer some day, to illustrate and expand on the themes in the main story.

Lesbian Despatches from Skala: Summer 2024 by Jean Taylor, Dyke Books Inc 2025;
paperback $30 plus postage in Australia $10, also available as an ebook.

The great adventure, travelling to Skala Eressou on the island of Lesbos in Greece to spend the month of August enjoying the sun, sand and sea and the company of any number of Lesbians from round the world. When Ardy and Jean heard that the documentary, Lesvia, by the world-renowned filmmaker, Tzeli Hadjidimitriou, was having its premier screening in Skala, they immediately started booking their accommodation and flights to ensure they didn’t miss out. As this book attests, while Ardy didn’t actually Swim to the Rock she still had the best time floating and bobbing in the Aegean. Jean discovered that here was another book in the making as she handed out free copies of her 1984 book, Sappho’s Wild Lesbians. And seeing Lesvia with Tzeli, the international Lesbians and the local Greek people in Skala’s open air cinema, was wild.

Anthologies: Celebrating Lesbian Feminist Voices Around Australia

Food For Radical Thought: A Lesbian Guide to All Things Edible From an Australian Perspective edited by Jean Taylor, Dyke Books Inc 2025;
paperback $30 plus postage in Australia $10; also available as an ebook

First Nations people in Australia survived for thousands of years before the Invasion and at the same time maintained the Land and waterways as well as the flora and fauna in an ecologically balanced way. We of the dominant culture wrecked everything in a little over 200 years because we needed to grow and eat the foods we were used to, eschewing bush tucker which has only recently and minimally become part of our diet. The Lesbian contributors in this anthology have covered a great deal of ground and uncovered many different and creative thoughts around food. With plenty of colourful illustrations to support these themes and more.

Just a Gran Havin’ a Splendid Time: Australian Lesbian Grandmothers Anthology, Edited by Jean Taylor, Dyke Books 2023;
paperback $30 plus postage in Australia $10.

The idea for an Australian Lesbian Grandmothers Anthology was inspired by the fact that of all the topics that have been written about by, for and about Lesbians in Australia
there was not a book especially dedicated to the immense joys and the inevitable vagaries of being a Lesbian Grandmother.

This book, Just a Gran Havin’ a Splendid Time, covers a wide range of emotional responses and highlights the joy and life-changing experiences that inevitably occur for Lesbian Grandmothers from the time their first and subsequent grandchildren are born.

We follow these lesbian grandmothers through the ups and downs of coming to terms with what it actually means to be a lesbian grandmother and note the changes in these unique relationships as the grandchildren get older. And finally appreciating that the grandchildren have grown up to be responsible people and how much having a lesbian grandmother in their lives has broadened their understanding and knowledge of the world around them in a positive way.

These stories will also bring back memories of our own grandmothers, give us invaluable insights into what it means to be a Lesbian Grandmother in this day and age and will also serve as positive role models and demonstrate ways in which we can all nurture and care for the vulnerable children in our society that can only be of benefit to us all.

The this photo is of one of the founding members of Dyke Books Inc, Ardy Tibby, and the founder, writer and publisher, Jean Taylor, at a Matrix Guild Lesbian Literary event in 2022 where they were selling or giving away books by Emily George, Long Breast Press Inc, Dyke Books Inc and Jean’s book, The C-Word, published by Spinifex Press; photo by a friend.

Biography

Jean Taylor was born in Naarm Melbourne Australia in 1944 and raised on a dried fruit vineyard in country Victoria where she was educated at state schools and left at the age of 16 to move into the Nurses Home to start training to be nurse. Pregnant at 17, married at 18 and with two children, a boy and a girl by the time she was 19, Jean continued nursing until her third child, a daughter, was born and tragically died three days later when Jean was 22. The following year Jean stopped nursing altogether, got a job as a waitress and while her two children were at kindergarten, Jean started hand writing, and after two years completed, her first novel.

When her children started school in 1969, Jean went back to studying part time over three years for her Matriculation certificate while still waitressing in the evenings and painstakingly typing up her first novel during the day. She was accepted as an undergraduate at La Trobe University in 1972 to study humanities, mainly English and Philosophy, was voted onto the SRC, joined the University Women’s Liberation Group and volunteered to learn how to cut and paste and lay out Rabelais, the student newspaper. Jean also contributed poems, articles and mainly short stories she’d started writing, was pleased to see them in print with each issue of Rabelais and started hand writing her second novel, Elspeth Brown. Before she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1976, Jean worked as the Student Welfare Officer in the Admin Department for a couple of years, which enabled her to buy her own small single fronted terrace house till she resigned at the beginning of 1977 to go overseas for twelve months taking the overland route through the fascinatingly wondrous countries of South East Asia and through the Khyber Pass to the stimulating familiarity of Europe, writing short stories about womyn’s lives whenever she had the chance.

In the meantime, Jean joined the local Conscious Raising Group in 1972 and became involved in the activities of the Women’s liberation Movement, started writing poetry, broke her tibia and fibula while riding her motor bike to uni in 1973, was in plaster from toes to thigh for eight months, her marriage broke up, she moved out of the marital home still in plaster and on crutches after a bone graft operation and by the end of the worst year of her life realised she was in love with her best friend who’d come out as a lesbian.

Having had more than her fair share of rejection letters for her novels, Jean decided to start self-publishing her own writing and put out her first small volume of poetry, Emily George, in 1976. This was so personally satisfyingly that she went on to published a book of short stories, Woman, in 1978,followed by the novel, Elspeth Brown, in 1979. After Jean fell in love with a womyn in her writing group shr finally came out as a radical lesbian feminist at the end of 1979 when they became lovers. After they’d moved in together in 1980, Jean wrote Loose Women and self-published The Accident, based on her broken leg year, in 1980, all under the pseudonym of Emily George and printed by the local feminist printers, Sybylla Press.

After that there was no stopping Jean from continuing to write, safe in the knowledge that she could self-publish her own work. It wasn’t till her second 12 month long trip to Europe in 1983, financed by working as a conductress and then a driver on the trams in Naarm in 1982, that she decided on the name Dykebooks and a logo while she was sleeping and hanging out for ten weeks with the international community of lesbians on the nude beach in Skala Eressou on the Greek island of Lesbos. The novel Jean wrote based on that incredible experience, Sappho’s Wild Lesbians, was the first book published under the Dykebooks name and logo in 1984. Followed by two more books that same year, Much Madness, and Loose Women, based on her two years as a paid worker at Matilda Women’s Refuge she helped establish with government funding in 1978; Always Start Your Car with Two Bells in 1985, Merri Lee and Dinner’s Ready! in 1986, Afternoon Suburb and Anna 1987, plus plays, short stories, a small non-fiction book, If Anybody’s Friend be Dead in 1990, The Journey 1991, another poetry book in 1994 for her 50th birthday, as well as several unpublished novels still in the pipeline.

It wasn’t till after Jean started writing the first book of the The Archives Trilogy. Brazen Hussies, in 2002, that she decided to incorporate Dyke Books Inc in 2008 to again self-publish her own non-fiction books, Brazen Hussies 2009, followed by Stroppy Dykes in 2012 and Lesbians Unite in 2016; and a collection of her writing published in Australian periodicals, What are Dykes Doing? in 2019.

This photo shows Ardy and Jean, two of the founding members of another community based, not for profit, lesbian feminist publishing group, the Long Breast Press Inc collective, 2005 – 2025, at the book launch outside on the verandah of LBP’s 7th publication, Walking to the Edge, Lesbians Are Everywhere: An Australian Lesbian Travel Anthology, in 2020 during a window of opportunity in the midst of the rolling COVID19 lockdowns in Naarm; photo by a friend.

Herstorical Classics

Brazen Hussies: A Herstory of Radical Activism in the Women’s Liberation Movement in Victoria 1970 – 1979, Jean Taylor, Dyke Books Inc, 2009;
paperback $30 plus postage in Australia $10.

Brazen Hussies documents the actions, conferences, collectives, publications and demos as well as the stories of feminist activists who took an active role in the WLM in the 1970s. The book also traces the innovative shifts of consciousness and the social and legislative changes that were instigated in Victoria as radical feminists fought long and hard for Women’s Liberation. It also includes some of the actions the Aboriginal and Islander people too to challenge racism.

Stroppy Dykes: Radical Lesbian Feminist Activism in Victoria During the 1980s, Jean Taylor, Dyke Books Inc, 2012;
paperback $30 plus postage in Australia $10.

The 1980s was a busy time for radical lesbian feminists, socialist feminists and radical feminists who organised conferences, published magazines, wrote books, established activist collectives, went on marches, were in solidarity with Aborigines and Islanders, demonstrated, formed womyn’s bands, worked in womyn’s refuges, set up phone information and support services, ran workshops, attended art openings, supported fundraisers and cultivated many other activities too numerous to mention.

Lesbians Ignite! In Victoria in the 1990s, Jean Taylor, Dyke Books Inc, 2016; paperback $30 plus postage in Australia $10, also available as an ebook.

This book documents the activities of lesbian and feminist activists in the 1990s in much the same way as Brazen Hussies and Stroppy Dykes did for the 1970s and 1980s respectively.

All three books cover most of the actions, conferences, marches, publications, musical and theatrical events that were organised during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in Victoria and elsewhere and provides a comprehensive overview of lesbian and feminist political activism. Several lesbian and feminist activists were interviewed by Jean or wrote their own stories and these were included in all three books to compliment and add to the documented evidence of these vibrant years.

What Are Dykes Doing? Collected Non-Fiction, Jean Taylor, Dyke Books Inc, Melbourne 2019; paperback $30 plus postage in Australia $10, also available as an ebook.

A compilation of all the articles, essays, book and performance reviews, obituaries, events and periodicals, that Jean Taylor wrote about and had published in many of the Australian lesbian, radical feminist, gay and general publications, including the Women’s Liberation Newsletter, Lesbian News, Lesbiana, Lesbian Network and Rabelais, during the years 1973 – 2019

Revisit beloved narratives or discover essential works that have shaped and continue to enrich lesbian literature from our not-for-profit publisher.

Thank You

This Dyke Books Inc Website was set up in 2006 to be an on-line presence for lesbians and other readers to find out about a self-publishing phenomenon that has been around since 1976 and is this year celebrating 50 years of continuous self-publishing of lesbian poetry, short stories, novels and plays plus non-fiction anthologies and herstorical documentation.

We will not be selling any of these books directly from this website. Instead, as we have always mainly relied on the numerous book launches we have organised over the past 50 years to sell our books in person, we will continue to do so. Please note that all of the paperback books for sale are $30.00 each plus $10 postage in Australia and that as noted above some ebooks are also available with Links provided on request for both local and overseas readers.

However, if any of these books take your fancy and you’d like to buy one for yourself or as a gift to a friend, we recommend you either buy a copy at the bookshops which have been gracious enough to carry our books for many years and if they don’t have a copy handy you can always order one in and buy it that way, as follows:

Readings Bookshop, 309 Lygon Street, Carlton

Hares & Hyenas, Victorian Pride Centre, Fitzroy Street St Kilda.

Brunswick Bound, 361 Sydney Road Brunswick.

Or indeed any discerning local bookshop, if you order it, can send the order to Dyke Books Inc at dykebooks2008@gmail.com, and we’ll make sure it gets to you in due course. With many thanks from us for your interest and for spreading the word about our Lesbian publications.

Likewise, to save money you could order these books from your local Library and if they’re willing to carry it and they contact us to buy a copy for their shelves, we’ll send them a copy for you to borrow.

Dyke Books Inc’s publications are on the shelves of libraries and discerning book shops, DB’s archives are stored in the Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives at the University of Melbourne and are quite naturally to be found in the bookcases or just hanging out at many Lesbian and Feminist households around Australia.

A special shout out and many thanks to BookPOD which is Australia’s one-stop services provider for self-publishing authors. They offer typeset, cover design, printing, editing and much more… BookPOD does all the typesetting and organises all the printing and binding for Dyke Books Inc and without whom these publications would not look so beautiful: https://www.bookpod.com.au

Thanks too to the Lesbian community whose support over these past many decades has been much appreciated, attending book launches, buying books, contributing to Anthologies and generally being our most enthusiastic readers.

The money from every purchase of a Dyke Books Inc publication goes towards the next published book so we can not only keep these Dyke Books in print but we can publish even more books by and about Lesbians for your reading pleasure and for the benefit of the Lesbian writers who can then see their written work in print, sometimes for the first time.

You can contact Dyke Books Inc at any time through one of the following contact addresses to buy a book or two directly from us by calling into HQ and or paying by direct debit. Just let us know whatever is convenient, we’d be only too glad to hear from you.

PO Box 168, Brunswick East, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3057
Land Line: 03 9387.6610 email: dykebooks2008@gmail.com

Next Book: More Than a Room of My Own by Jean Taylor