Liz Hall-Downs – December 15 2019

International Human Solidarity Day – December 20

A day to celebrate our unity in diversity and encourage new initiatives for poverty eradication.

Photo: Meg Geering

Liz is a writer, reviewer, editor and musician. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, Certificates in radio production and sound recording, and has completed a Multi-camera Production for Public Broadcast Groups course at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). Liz has been a  Contributing Editor for American poetry e-zine, The Drunken Boat, a manuscript assessor for the Driftwood Agency and performance poetry winner of two Slams. Her published works include six volumes of poetry; short stories; articles on building sustainable eco-dwellings; and an e-chapbook on disability. A sufferer of severe rheumatoid arthritis, Liz built a home with fellow musician, husband Kim Downs, from their combined disability and carer’s pensions and is among only 13% of disability pensioners to own a home either outright or with a mortgage. She is currently working on a memoir and blogging at lizhalldowns.com where she is making her poetry publications available for free download.

My Arthritic Heart
Post Pressed, 2007; ISBN 9781921214004
“My Arthritic Heart is an autobiographical illness narrative which deals with my experience of living with the chronic, auto-immune disease Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), with which I was diagnosed at the age of 20. The pain and disability RA causes has taken so much from me personally, affecting my lifestyle and the ability to be self-reliant. It is, as a fellow sufferer once ruefully said, ‘the disease that just keeps on taking’. I have written these poems, not only for myself, but as a gesture of support for all sufferers of chronic illnesses who so frequently feel alone, misunderstood and hopeless as they battle to fit into a society that defines individual worth in purely economic terms. It is my hope that this collection might begin, just a little, to chip away at the community’s ignorance and intolerance of this, and so many other, chronic conditions by demonstrating their devastating effects on the livelihoods and lifestyles of so many young (and young-at-heart) people.” – Liz Hall-Downs

Girl with Green Hair
Papyrus Publishing, 2000; ISBN 9781875934324
“The poems in this book represent my published output over the past decade, with a few additions. It is a diverse body of work that covers a period of personal change that saw me leaving my native Melbourne and moving north, first to northern New South Wales, and then to South-East Queensland, in search of a more relaxed and rural lifestyle. Also in this period I toured the midwest of the USA as a performance poet, an experience which inspired ‘The American Poems’. This collection contains stories, observations, musings on events, and responses to the mostly everyday things that have moved me personally. At times there is anger, as well as joy, and for this I make no apology. Life’s like that.” – Liz Hall-Downs
‘There is grace and wit, pathos and humour and the poet’s incisive video-camera eye writ large, in delicious combination with sparsity of language and stylistic elegance.’ – Douglas Broad,  The Westender