This slim volume of essays is a pithy, poignant, humorous and sobering collection that gives a delightful insight into the life of the author and some of her escapades, as well as providing a glimpse of her own philosophy and her reflections on where the future of humanity is heading.

In the introductory essay, ‘A place in the sun’, we learn about Margaret ‘Mag’ Merrilees’ life as a lesbian feminist activist in Adelaide in the 1970s. She works in women’s health collectives, protests against nuclear energy and violence, plays in a soccer team called The Armpits and becomes part of a community: ‘a composting sort of process’.

While her mother laments, ‘Do you have to be on the wrong side of every fence?’, Merrilees gloriously laps up life while maintaining her rage against capitalism, unfettered development, fossil fuels and the patriarchs who profit from them. She describes her arrest in Alice Springs and subsequent night in the lock up after protesting against Pine Gap. She talks of the wrongs done to Indigenous Australians and advocates for truth-telling: ‘Truth has its own momentum’.

Her timely essay ‘Inconvenient’ delves into the current debate about protests. She reminds us that women only ever achieved the right to vote by protesting and by having ‘the guts to risk upsetting people’.

This feisty author goes on to describe other aspects of her life – dealing with menstruation and abortion, deciding not to have children, encounters with medical misogyny, the after-effects of war, the privatisation of services, the degradation of the natural world, the complications of ageing and the looming ‘slow-motion disaster’ of climate change.

An enlivening and heartfelt collection that tracks one woman’s lifetime of activism, Scared Angry Laughing manages to look both back with wisdom and forward with urgency.