Suzy Zail

SUZY ZAIL’S poignant collection of stories, All You Need is Love: Fifteen Journeys to Motherhood, is a portrait in words and pictures of fifteen Australian women and their remarkable journeys to motherhood.

The mothers who share their stories have a diversity of experience – whether single, married, gay, heterosexual, disabled, surrogate, adoptive, multiple birth or foster mother – they tell of a selfless yet fierce love for their children. Their experiences are studded with fear, insecurity and sadness, but also light, laughter and love.

Some women struggled to become mothers. Others fought to keep their babies alive. Some work, some stay at home. One mother cannot see her child, so she uses her fingers to feel for his smile. Another sees her children only on weekends, during prison visits. A woman with an adult son describes the pain of relinquishing her baby, and the joy at being reunited.

"I was privileged to sit in these women’s kitchens, meet their children and listen to their stories" says author Suzy Zail. "We talked of their earliest memories of wanting to be a mother, how they came to be pregnant, their efforts to conceive, how they coped with labour, their experience of motherhood, and how being a mother had changed them.

"Motherhood comes in many forms and yet what struck me more than these women’s differences were their similarities," she says. "Whether raising foster children, a child with a disability, or a child born of egg-donation, all share the same pride over their children’s achievements and the same swell of anger when their children are hurt or threatened."

All You Need is Love: Fifteen Journeys to Motherhood is a celebration of the joys and challenges of motherhood – a reflection of the diverse experience of women in 21st century Australia.

Suzy Zail, a mother of three, was born in 1966 in Melbourne, and has worked as a solicitor specialising in family law. After the birth of her second child, Suzy left the law to concentrate on writing. She has written for magazines and is the author of children’s books published in Australia, Canada and the U.S. Her father-daughter memoir, The Tattooed Flower, the story of her relationship with her ailing father, was published in 2006.

Sebastian Copeland

INTERNATIONAL AWARD-WINNING photographer and environmental advocate, Sebastian Copeland, witnessed and captured the accelerated devastation of the Antarctic ice shelf in 2006 and 2007. Antarctica: The Global Warning, to be published on 14 April, 2008 by The Five Mile Press, uncovers both the stark and awesome beauty of Antarctica, and the alarming evidence of the massive inroads that climate change has made on the continent.

Demonstrating that the fate of Antarctica foretells the fate of the Earth, Copeland’s photographs of Antarctica’s frozen landscape, glaciers, fields, fjords and wild life, illustrate this devastation.

"Scale and light. That is how I will remember Antarctica…" says Copeland. "I am awed by the raw power of nature in this surreal

environment, where mankind is dwarfed by such gigantic proportions."

On the destruction of the fragile and precarious landscape, Copeland says "Remotely and systematically, greed and ignorance are spoiling this extraordinary place, as global temperatures threaten the ice so crucial to the climate balance of our planet."

Green Cross International’s chairman, Mikhail Gorbachev and actor/activist Leonardo DiCaprio, also offer a broader understanding about global warming and what this remarkable continent means to mankind.

Additional perspectives come from global warming expert Stephen Schneider and Zac Goldsmith, editor of The Ecologist magazine, explorer Will Steger, National Geographic’s ‘Emerging Explorer’ David De Rothschild, aerial artist and producer John Quigley and Matt Petersen, CEO of Global Green USA.

Antarctica The Global Warning, large in size, glossy and verdant in colour, features over 100 images sometimes spanning two pages with some folding out to double their size.

International award-winning photographer Sebastian Copeland serves on the board of directors of Global Green USA, and is an affiliate of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross International. Copeland’s work has appeared in hundreds of publications worldwide.

"Sebastian Copeland’s stunning photographs are a stark reminder of what we stand to lose. He has ventured to the bottom of the world and returned with a message that we cannot afford to ignore."– Sting