Local, Personal, Ecological Not Always Logical 

Shiel Street Press exists to nurture soulful thought and expression about everyday things –issues of the neighbourhood, affairs of the heart, stories of the un(der)sung, and whatever other good stuff we can get our hands on.  The local and the personal should always be connected to the larger social and the ecological worlds that make them possible.  We are committed to human solidarity and natural flourishing as much as self realisation.  We are no easy friends to the status quo.  Conventional wisdom and the constructed world around us seem to be leading our species to social and ecological default.  Though warm of heart, we cast a cold eye on anything that refuses the idea, indeed necessity, of alternatives to the current human dispensation. 

Shiel Street Press was born in the tumult of the Covid pandemic in 2020.  Ordered to lockdown for the first time in living memory, the people of Melbourne were, like much of humanity, forced to confront the frailty of human life and of the systems we have created to support it.  There were brass linings in the cloud.  Lockdown caused many of us to newly appreciate our immediate surrounds including the people we live with at home and nearby.  The quietened traffic brought bird song (ok noise) and the natural world it reports back to our ears and minds – perhaps even our hearts.  The time seemed ripe, here in North Melbourne, to found a new press committed to human expression that was local, personal, ecological if not always conventionally logical.