In the Land of Squats

When a young Australian couple, Liz and Matt, arrive in London to find adventure in a new world, they are very soon inducted into the squatting community. Set in the late 1970s in pre-Thatcher London, at a time of the anti-establishment punk movement, radical feminism, economic disparity, and armed conflict in Northern Ireland, these are volatile times, ripe for activist revolution.

Determined to keep her eyes and mind open to the world in all its raw beauty and brutality, Liz comes face-to-face through her work and her own life experience, with the stark reality of male violence. To survive, she must access deep inner resilience that becomes both her strength and her vulnerability.

Influenced by evolving feminist perspective and activism, Liz strives to find her role and voice in a world where increasingly she feels in every way out-of-place. As her heart disengages, she must find a way to reconcile her past before she can embrace the choices for her future. Only then will she know her own identity and feel an integrated sense of self in the world. This leaves her relationship, friendships and even her work in a continual state of flux and jeopardy.

In a chequered landscape of love, betrayal, sexual ambiguity, violence, rebellion, activism and self discovery, Liz emerges to put together the fragmented pieces of herself in this autobiographical account of three years in 1970s London as she emerges to find her own identity.

Each of the twelve chapters in this book highlights a story theme and a related poem.