Readings.com.au: Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2009 Non-Fiction Shortlist

Drawing the Global Colour Line

"[This] is a pioneering account of the transnational production of whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A work remarkable both for its international breadth and for its sensitivity to local particularity, it is a model for the new global history. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds expertly and imaginatively reconstruct how leading white intellectuals and politicians in Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain fought demands for racial equality and jointly invented new doctrines of racial superiority to justify the maintenance and, in some cases, the reinvigoration of white privilege in every part of the world that Britain either controlled or in which it had once deposited its settlers. A powerful and sobering history, incisively and elegantly told."

Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

American Journeys

Only in America, the most powerful democracy on earth, home to the best and worst of everything, are the most extreme contradictions possible. In a series of journeys in 2005 and 2006, acclaimed author Don Watson set out to explore the nation that has influenced him more than any other. Travelling by rail gave Watson a unique and seductive means of peering into the United States, a way to experience life with its citizens: long days with the American landscape and American towns and American history unfolding on the outside, while inside a tiny particle of the American people talked among themselves. Watson's experiences are profoundly affecting: he witnesses the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; explores the savage history of the Deep South, the heartland of the Civil War; and journeys to the remarkable wilderness of Yellowstone National Park. Yet it is through the people he meets that Watson discovers the incomparable genius of America, its optimism, sophistication and riches - and also its darker side, its disavowal of failure and uncertainty. Beautifully written, with gentle power and sly humour, American Journys investigates the meaning of the United States, its confidence, its religion, its heroes, its violence and its material obsessions. The things that make America great are also its greatest flaws.

The Henson Case

The Australian Prime Minister called them 'absolutely revolting'. Their removal from a Sydney art gallery was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as a 'Victory for Decency'. Cate Blanchett and members of the arts community claimed charges laid over them would affect Australia's cultural reputation.

Only now do we have the opportunity to hear the full story behind the Bill Henson photographs, which grabbed national attention in May 2008 when 20 images were removed from an exhibition and the photographer was investigated for child pornography.

David Marr, author of Dark Victory and the award-winning biography Patrick White: A Life, examines the pornography/art debate with exclusive interviews with Bill Henson, members of the NSW police force, child abuse campaigners and important figures in the Australian arts scene.

House Of Exile

In 1933 the prominent author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger were forced to flee Germany, finding refuge in France and later, in great despair, Los Angeles. There Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich dies in 1950. Prior to their death they formed a unique clique of friends in exile, crossing paths with the likes of Joyce, Brecht, Kafka, Schwitters and Woolf. House of Exile is a unique work, pioneering a new literary form - the collective biography. This book is a must for all interested in the literary landscape of the 20th century and those with interest in the Bloomsbury, Algonquin set. National reviews expected.

Doing Life: A Biography Of Elizabeth Jolley

Although she started writing early in life it was not until her fifties that Elizabeth Jolley received the recognition her talent deserved. She won The Age Book of the Year Award on three occasions as well as the Miles Franklin Award. She has won the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for both fiction and non-fiction. Elizabeth Jolley is one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors and has been awarded an honorary doctorate (Hon. D. Tech.) from the Western Australia Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) and an Order of Australia Medal. The array of wild characters in her fiction—misfits and those on the edge of society—can also be found in her remarkable life. Brian Dibble was given complete access to the writer’s private papers and has spent more than a decade travelling the world to write this lyrical and readable biography.

Van Diemen's Land: A History

'The most significant colonial history since The Fatal. In re-imagining Australia's past, it invents a new future.' - Richard Flanagan

'The first ecologically based social history of colonial Australia, showing how wallabies led to liberty, and the bush became a true home for desperate men. A brilliant book and a must-read for anyone interested in how land shapes people.'-Tim Flannery

Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen's Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life. In Van Diemen's Land, James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo-skin and living off the land. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land. This is their story, the story of Van Diemen's Land.

Gough Whitlam: A Moment In History

This moment was not his alone, nor could it ever have come about without him…Gough Whitlam turned to Graham Freudenberg, touched him lightly on the shoulder, saying, 'It's been a long road, Comrade, but we're there', and walked out to meet the spotlight

Acclaimed biographer Jenny Hocking's Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History is the first contemporary and definitive biographical study of the former Labor Prime Minister.

From his childhood in the fledging city of Canberra to his first appearance as Prime Minister (playing Neville Chamberlain), to his extensive war service in the Pacific and marriage to Margaret, the champion swimmer and daughter of Justice Wilfred Dovey, the biography draws on previously unseen archival material, extensive interviews with family and colleagues, and exclusive interviews with Gough Whitlam himself.

Hocking's narrative skill and scrupulous research reveals an extraordinary and complex man, whose life is, in every way, formed by the remarkable events of previous generations of his family, and who would, in turn, change Australian political and cultural developments in the twentieth century.

Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History is a magnificent biography that illuminates the path that took one man to power.

The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island

The story of a death, a policeman, an island and a country

'The country's finest work of literature so far this century. A haunting moral maze, described with such intimate observation and exquisite restraint that I kept pausing to take a breath and silently cheer the author. in her tale of the fatal collision between two 36-year-old males, black Cameron Doomadgee and white Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, Hooper . . . has produced an Australian classic.' ROBERT DREWE, THE AGE

'Hooper followed the case and its main characters for two and a half years, and she does their complexity a remarkable justice . . . Extraordinary.' ALISON McCULLOCH, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

'A gripping, heart-stopping piece of true-crime reportage . . . Deserves the widest possible audience.' BRIAN SCHOFIELD, SUNDAY TIMES (UK)

'The book is everything it should be: a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man's death, interwoven with the brutal history of Palm Island and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology . . . It is The Tall Man's triumph that Hooper finds the common humanity in the accused and the accuser, the police officer and the street drinker, theliving and the dead.' MARK DAPIN, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'The north has chosen to reveal itself to Chloe Hooper.' PAUL TOOHEY, WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN

For more information visit thetallman.com.au