Works

Signora Bella’s Grand Tour

Lesley Synge’s exquisite poems capture the musicality and rhythms of Italian life. With humour, gentle irony and a poet’s insight, Signora Bella’s Grand Tour is as lovely as the small alphabetised stones our poet collects on Italy’s ancient shores.  Veny Armanno

 I’m looking out onto the sparkling ocean and reading your evocative poems. Such longing and joy and melancholy in your words! Brings back distant but poignant memories of my own experiences in the land of passion! Thank you so much for making my morning so richly textured. Filled with the thoughts of Italy I shall sit with a coffee and muse some more. Sieglinde Karl-Spence

 Buy Signora Bella’s Grand Tour at State Library of Queensland HERE https://www.shop.slq.qld.gov.au/

the sea would type a book for me

if only i could find

an alphabet of stones

When Giuseppe Met Jackie

Winner Ravello Tales Award 2018

 ‘many precise and elegant surprises’

‘an excellent reconstruction of the Ravello setting in the 60s’

Comments by competition judges

Free download of novella HERE https://www.visitravello.com/ravellosense/index.php/ravello-tales-award/ravello-tales-2018

It’s August 1962 – the summer that Jackie Kennedy famously takes a vacation in Ravello. Also visiting the medieval village are the reclusive cousins of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the famous novelist of Il Gattopardo from Sicily. The three aristocrats – poet Lucio, botanist Giovanna and photographer Casimiro – are here too. As they visit the sights, the trio try to remain aloof from ‘Jackie fever’, keeping in mind their dear departed cousin Giuseppe. The spectacularly beautiful clifftop village is really turning on the hospitality for the American president’s wife, led by the mayor and the handsome Gianni Agnelli. Like it or not, the trio cannot escape.

Wharfie

featured in ‘Home: A Suburban Obsession’, an exhibition of State Library of Queensland

 ‘Deserves to sit alongside Bert Facey’s A Fortunate Life’

The Queensland Journal of Labour History

 ‘Destined to become a classic of Australian working-class memoir’

Maritime Union of Australia newsletter

 ‘An outstanding example of history … a “people’s history” ’

Queensland Teachers Journal

 ‘a rewarding chronicle of working-class family life’

Social Alternatives

 ‘… relates the work experience particularly well, describing the art of labouring and the hazardous nature of working cargo’

Labour History Journal

 Buy the life story of an Australian waterside worker HERE   

https://www.shop.slq.qld.gov.au/books-all/queensland-history/Wharfie

  Come lunchtime, we ‘holders’ – the men stowing the cargo in the hold – were on our way up to the weather deck of a fruit ship to eat in the sun. First on the ladder was a big wharfie, a real larrikin, and the last bloke that I would have expected to panic. As we approached the ’tween deck, he gasped and said in a strangled voice, ‘I can’t keep going.’ I was the man below him and put my shoulder to his buttock and heaved him up. He was still in a panic, still in a mess, so we had to bundle him onto a tray and winch him ashore. I went with him on the tray as we swung over from the ship to the wharf. He never worked down in a hold after that. He just couldn’t face it any more.