Readings.com.au: Readings Recommends: Australian Studies

Panic

Panic (noun). A sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behaviour.

Australians see themselves as a relaxed and tolerant bunch. But scratch the surface and you’ll uncover an extraordinary level of fear.

Cronulla. Henson. Hanson. Wik. Haneef. The boats. …

Panic shows all of David Marr’s characteristic insight, quick wit and brilliant prose as he cuts through the froth and fury that have kept Australia simmering over the last fifteen years.

“Turning fear into panic is a great political art: knowing how to stack the bonfire, where to find the kindling, when to slosh on a bucket of kero to set the whole thing off with a satisfying roar … These are dispatches from the republic of panic, stories of fear and fear-mongering under three prime ministers. Some chart panic on the rise and others pick through the wreckage left behind, but all grew out of my wish to honour the victims of these ugly episodes: the people damaged and a damaged country.”—David Marr

After Words: Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches

A unique volume of speeches and occasional pieces written entirely by former Prime Minister Paul Keating.

Books of speeches are rarely published as a compendium of work by one person. After Words is unique in Australian publishing by virtue of its scale and range of subjects, and that all the speeches are the work of one eye and one mind: former Prime Minister Paul Keating. Each speech has been conceptualised, contextualised and crafted by Paul Keating. Subject to subject, idea to idea, the speeches are related in a wider construct, which is the way Paul Keating has viewed and thought about the world.

The speeches reveal the breadth and depth of his interests - be they cultural, historical, or policy-focused - dealing with subjects as broad as international relations, economic policy and politics. Individual chapters range from a discussion of J?rn Utzon's Opera House through to the redesign of Berlin, the history of native title, the challenge of Asia, the role of the monarchy, to the shape of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, and more.

After Words contains an analytic commentary on Australia's recent social and economic repositioning, in the minds of many, by its principal architect. The speeches, more often than not, go beyond observations, as Paul Keating sketches out new vistas and points to new directions.

For those interested in matters that go to the future of Australia and the world, After Words presents, unmediated, a panoply of issues which the policy mind and writing style of Paul Keating has sculpted into a recognisable landscape.

Paul Keating was elected to the Australian Federal Parliament in 1969. He was appointed Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia upon the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983. During the eight-and-a-half years of his Treasurership, he presided over the dismantling of the protectionist economic framework that had existed for a century. Opting for an open, competitive economic model, his reforms have since underpinned twenty consecutive years of low inflationary economic growth in Australia.

He became Prime Minister in December 1991, and led the Australian Labor Party to an historic fifth term of government in March 1993. As Prime Minister until 1996, he championed a clutch of seminal changes. These included the reorientation of Australia's strategic and trade relationships with Asia, laying down a framework for Australia's shift to a republic and the development of a major legal structure to return lands - for the first time - to Australia's indigenous people.

Darebin Parklands: Escaping The Claws Of The Machine

Darebin parklands, an urban bushland on the Darebin Creek, is well loved by the surrounding community – but that was not always the case. Only 35 years ago, the parkland was dominated by a municipal tip, was weed-infested, and destined for commercial development. Local people who had a vision for the land and the spirit to fight for it formed the Darebin Parklands Association. The book uncovers past events and perspectives on the landscape, and provides a micro-study into environmental and social change in Australia.

Dr Sarah Mirams is an historian specialising in environmental history. She has worked as a teacher, curriculum consultant, public historian and textbook author. Sarah is currently lecturing in Australian History at Monash University, Gippsland.

Maximum Security

Maximum security the toughest classification in the Australian prison system exerts a powerful fascination for us. Housing the nation's worst criminals, the so-called 'intractables', these facilities are settings of violence and despair. Just how rough are these jails within jails, and what's it like to be incarcerated in them?

From the brutal regime of colonial Norfolk Island to the sterile cruelty of Jika Jika and Katingal, James Morton, bestselling author of Gangland Australia and Shotgun and Standover, takes us through the history of these sinister places of punishment, which have been home to notorious figures like Mark 'Chopper' Read, Brenden Abbott and Russell 'Mad Dog' Cox. Infamous criminals, gang wars behind bars, riots, corruption, great escapes and brutal bashings and murders are all covered in this gripping and informed account.

Melbourne

Read our Q&A with Sophie Cunningham about Melbourne.

Sophie Cunningham writes a year in the city’s life, a year that takes us from the heatwave that culminated on Black Saturday when temperatures soared to 47 degrees to the destructive deluge of a hailstorm.

She walks through Melbourne’s oldest suburb to its largest market, she goes to the footy and to the comedy festival, she talks publishing and learns how to use a letterpress. Along the way she journeys deep into her own recollections of the city she grew up in, and tells stories from its history: the theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman, the Hoddle Street massacre, William Barak’s trek from Healesville, the Westgate Bridge Disaster, the high drama of the 1970 and 2009 AFL grand finals and the Market Murders of the sixties.

She strolls by Melbourne’s rivers and creeks while considering the history of the wetlands and river that sit at Melbourne’s heart. She clambers through the drains that lie beneath. For it is water – the corralling of it, the excess of it, the squandering of it, the lack of it – that defi nes Melbourne’s history, its present and its future.

Quarterly Essay 44: Man-Made World: Choosing Between Progress and Planet

Witnessing at first-hand the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference and wondering what went wrong, Andrew Charlton realised the truth of a colleague’s words: “The world is split between those who want to save the planet and those who want to save themselves.”

In this groundbreaking essay, Charlton discusses the rift that will shape our future: progress versus planet; rich versus poor. In recent times environmentalists have argued with mounting force that the growth of human activity on our planet is unsustainable. We are, they claim, on a collision course with destiny. But, the developing world counters, environmental threats, dire as they may be, are not the only challenges we face. Indeed, these can seem a distant danger compared to the daily tragedies of life in slums and villages.

Across the globe, economists and environmentalists vie over who has the right response to climate change, population growth and food scarcity. In Australia, this battle has plunged our politics into one of its most tumultuous periods. In Man-Made World Charlton evaluates some of the proposed solutions –renewable and nuclear energy, organic and genetically modified food – and argues that our descendants will only thank us if we find a way to preserve both the natural world and human progress.

“Progress has its price. Each step of human advancement has left a footprint on the planet. Today our two defining challenges are managing climate change and eliminating global poverty. In Copenhagen we learned that these challenges are inseparable.” —Andrew Charlton, Man-Made World

This edition of Quarterly Essay also includes a piece by one of Australia’s leading writers, Richard Flanagan, entitled The Australian Disease: On the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom.

Correspondence

This issue also contains correspondence relating to the previous issue QE43 Bad News by Robert Manne. Correspondence relating to QE44 Man-Made World will appear in the next issue.

About the Author

Andrew Charlton was senior economic adviser to the prime minister from 2008 to 2010. During that time he served as Australia’s senior official to the G20 summits and the prime minister’s representative to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. He previously worked for the London School of Economics, the United Nations and the Boston Consulting Group and received his doctorate in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of Ozonomics (2007) and Fair Trade for All (2005), co-written with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Ocean To Outback: Cosmopolitanism In Contemporary Australia

Some of the most enduring conflicts and tensions that have bedevilled Australia in recent years stem from notions of nationality and citizenship, ethnicity and migration, community and place.

Vigorous debates about multiculturalism, national identity and the meaning of terrorism still ignite tension and divide. Cosmopolitanism offers our best hope.

In Ocean to Outback eleven authors use the concept of cosmopolitanism to address concerns that continue to confront us. Writing from specific locations, each essay explores the possibilities of cosmopolitanism as an ongoing political project and considers the implications for Australia’s sense of connection to the wider world.

Bringing The House Down

The only thing that kept me sane, well reasonably sane, during 20 years hard labor was the hilarious things that my erstwhile colleagues became involved in. Not every pollie was as witty as Gough Whitlam, Jim Killen, Jim Cope, Mick Young, Paul Keating, Fred Daly or Peter Costello but we all got into absurd situations on occasions - usually by accident. Recording them for posterity has been a service of unalloyed joy and a million laughs. Bringing the House Down is not a book about the Left-Right or the Centre. The only test for a story's inclusion is - is it funny?

The Ballroom: The Melbourne Punk And Post-Punk Seaview Ballroom

The Ballroom is a brutally frank memoir of what has become known as one of the most pivotal, fascinating and influential periods of Australian musical and cultural history. The story is illustrated with original flyers and candid photos, some never before seen or published.

Pop Life: Inside Smash Hits Australia 1984-2007

From 1984 to 2007, Smash Hits became the biggest selling pop magazine in Australia. It had more fizz than a bag of sherbet and millions of teenages were hooked on its mix of song words, interviews, posters, letters and Bitz.

This is the unofficial insider's guide to that pre-internet pop phenomenon, written by three former Smash Hits writers and editors It's the story of both the greatest pop publication on the planet and a generation of Australian pop fans. It might just be your story too!

Claire Isaac, David Nichols, and Marc Andrews worked as writers and editors of Smash Hits Australia in the 80s and 90s.

Claire was the unabashed fan who went on to find a home for her exclamation marks as editor of OK! magazine and is currently deputy editor of Woman’s Day; David got into pop journalism quite by chance, enjoying the experience almost in spite of himself. He went on to become an academic and author of The Go Betweens and The Bogan Delusion; while Marc was the young gay Queenslander who found identity in the pages of Smash Hits and went on to become a writer and contributing editor for DNA magazine and assistant editor at Mediaweek.

Australians Volume 2: Eureka to the Diggers

Bestselling author Thomas Keneally brings to life the vast range of characters who have formed our national story, in the second volume of a unique history of Australia.

In this companion volume of Thomas Keneally's widely acclaimed history of the Australian people, the vast range of characters who have formed our national story are brought vividly to life. Immigrants and Aboriginal resistance figures, bushrangers and pastoralists, working men and pioneering women, artists and hard-nosed radicals, politicians and soldiers all populate this richly drawn portrait of a vibrant land on the cusp of nationhood and social maturity.

From the 1860s to the great rifts wrought by World War I, an era commenced in which Australian pursued glimmering visions: of equity in a promised land. It was a time of social experiment and reform, of industrial radicalism and women's rights. We were a society the world had much to learn from, or so we believed. But as much as we espoused we were a special people and celebrated a larrikin anti-authoritarianism, we retained provincial objectives that saw ultimate respect for society's structures. There was no Australian revolution.

With a rich assortment of contradictory, inspiring and surprising characters, Tom Keneally brings to life the people of a young and cocky nation. This is truly a new history of Australia, by an author of outstanding literary skill and experience, and whose own humanity permeates every page.

'No doubt about it, Australians is a corker.' - Cassandra Pybus, Weekend Australian

'...the story of Australia and the Australians could be in no better hands than Keneally's.' - West Australian

'Keneally evokes these distant lives with concrete detail and vivid sympathy...his people inhabit the same world we do - we meet them without the hesitation of reaching across voids of space and time. - Sydney Morning Herald

'[Australians]will appeal to the general reader and the avid historian alike, and this is only the first volume. This reader can't wait for the second.' - Bookseller + Publisher

Thomas Keneally was born in 1935 and, as well as writing many novels, has shown an increasing interest in producing histories. His history of Irish convictism was entitled The Great Shame and was published in all the English language markets. The same was true of his later work, The Commonwealth of Thieves, which looked upon the penal origins of Australia in a way which sought to make the reader feel close to the experience of individual Aboriginals, convicts and officials. His novels include Bring Larks and Heroes, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, Schindler's Ark and The People's Train. He has the won the Miles Franklin Award, the Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Book Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Prize, the Scripter Award of the University of Southern California, the Mondello International Prize, the Helmerich Prize. He lives in Sydney with his wife, Judy, and is Number 1 ticket-holder of the Manly-Warringah Rugby League team.

Looking For The Light On The Hill: Modern Labor's Challenges

Today, the Australian Labor Party is in crisis. Reduced to minority government after just one term, and at rock bottom in the opinion polls, the party seems to be at a defining moment in its history. The perception of the federal government is that it can’t deliver, can’t be trusted, can’t communicate what it stands for, and that it is beholden to independents and the Greens. How did it come to this so soon after Labor’s thumping election win in 2007?

Looking for the Light on the Hill argues that Labor is bedevilled by twin problems: the loss of its intrinsic culture of strong, bold, and innovative leadership; and an identity crisis that has emerged because Labor has failed to refresh its values, philosophy, and purpose for the modern era. Written by a party insider and former Rudd government adviser, the book draws on Labor’s history with fresh perspectives, and includes the secret components of the party’s recent internal review. It also includes new interviews with former party leaders, current and former ministers, and union leaders and party figures — and reveals astonishing opinion-poll results, commissioned exclusively for this book, that demonstrate the depth of the crisis.

Challenged by the Greens on the left and the Coalition on the right, Australia’s oldest political party is in real trouble. Looking for the Light on the Hill shows how Labor can get its mojo back with new policy ideas, a new political strategy, organisational reform, and a refreshing of the party’s values. This book couldn’t be more relevant, more timely — or more necessary.

Fog On The Hill: How NSW Labour lost its way

The crisis in New South Wales Labor is so deep and has such significant ramifications that we need a massive dose of unadulterated, no-holds-barred honesty.

The man who can deliver this honesty is Frank Sartor. An independent outsider who became a Labor minister in 2003, Sartor impressed and irritated insiders and the commentariat in equal measure. As minister for a number of important portfolios in successive Labor Governments Sartor was perfectly positioned to see the way the Labor machine operated the factionalism, the deals, the incompetence, the shortsightedness as it went through four premiers in its last six floundering, backstabbing years.

Sartor s thoughtful and acerbic pen skewers the failings and often-risible hubris of politicians. He pulls no punches in ascribing actions to a number of his former colleagues, but not as an exercise in denigrating opponents, but to illustrate the main actors, their mindsets, and the genesis of some of the New South Wales government s major mishaps.

The Fog on the Hill is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolving landscape of Australian politics. It will be a ready handbook for political aspirants, public servants and all students of political science. Much more, though, it will fascinate all those who value our democracy and want our country and its governments to succeed.

Dirty Money

Mining is a dirty business. This book reveals that the real dirt lies in the boardrooms of some of Australia's biggest companies. At home mining is impacting on the lives of every Australian. In Esperance in Western Australia a doctor called for the lead levels in children to be checked after 4000 birds died in a few months. Lead from WA mines was suspected. In Kalgoorlie Newmont mining admitted dumping 7000 tonnes of poisonous mercury over the city in just 12 months. In Tasmania 30km of the Arthur River has been killed by the run-off from the Mt Bischoff tin mine. These are issues that affect Australians today. Pollution from mining is entering water courses and the drinking supply of every one of us. Are Australian companies prepared to take any steps or is the only imperative greed? This book will provide Australians with the uncomfortable facts and shocking answers.

Australia's Wild Weather

Tredinnick considers what it means to be living at time when weather is no longer small talk; it is most of the news. Beautifully written, the author contemplates what weather means to us and how it affects our daily lives.

"Weather is the oldest story in the world—one we want to keep on telling each other when we meet, as though it were part of who we are, a story that wants to keep on telling itself, and affecting us, whether we like it or not. We breathe it in; we see embodied in it our fears and desires; it falls on our heads. And we’d better take care of it: our lives are in its hands."

Marrying photographs from the collection of the National Library of Australia with an evocative and contemplative essay by poet Mark Tredinnick, Australia’s Wild Weather is a lyric field guide to Australia's climate. Tredinnick considers what it means to be living at time when weather is no longer small talk; it is most of the news. Beautifully written, the author contemplates what weather means to us and how it affects our daily lives.

Breaking The Sheep's Back

Breaking the Sheep's Back is the untold story of the events that led to Australia's biggest industry disaster.

Once a great nation-building icon, the wool business today is but a third of its size when Australia 'rode on the sheep's back'. Compared to the more recent Australian Wheat Board scandal, 40 times more funds were lost in the downfall, and vastly more collateral social and economic damage was done in this country and across the globe.

This story is a tragedy that reached into the offices of prime ministers and Cabinet members across seven federal governments and its agencies. Despite this politically sanctioned collapse, there has never been a royal commission. Until now, no one has investigated what precipitated the great crash of February 1991 or the industry ongoing decline.

It has taken author Charles Massy ten years to research and write this book. In the process he spoke to most of the major players and gained access to the key documents and correspondence. He has gone inside cabinet and political offices, the Wool Corporation, the boardrooms of international wool buyers, wool processors and designers, and the living rooms of farmers across the country.

Breaking the Sheep's Back is Massy's private royal commission – a must-read account of the decline and fall of the Australian wool empire.

A Forgerer's Tale: The Extraordinary Story Of Henry Svaery, Australia's First Novelist

Delve into the many lives of Henry Savery, Australia’s first novelist, described by Tom Keneally as ‘a man whose own story is as picaresque as anything inside the covers of the novel’.

Written with the assistance of an Australia Council grant, A Forger’s Tale won the 2010 Fellowship of Australian Writers Walter Stone Award for Life Writing.

Kinglake-350

Read Adrian Hyland's interview with Meg Mundell about Kinglake-350.

Kinglake-350 to VKC. Urgent, do you read me?
The fire’s here now. God help us.

Kinglake-350 is a masterpiece of writing about family, community, country life and what happens when a day of ultimate terror arrives. Adrian Hyland takes a dramatic and compelling sequence of events on that day and weaves them into a picture of universal significance and deep fascination.

On 7 February 2009 Roger Wood was the police officer in charge of Kinglake, at the epicentre of the worst bushfire disaster in Australia’s history, Black Saturday. As the firestorm engulfed the community, he risked his life, again and again, to try and save people.

With the fire raging all around, he phoned home to warn his wife what was coming. She screamed that the fire had already hit their property. Then the line went dead.

Black Saturday was a many-headed monster in whose wake stories of grief, heroism and desolation erupted all over the state of Victoria. This is a book about the monster—and the heroism of those who confronted it.

Praise for Kinglake-350:

This is a masterpiece of storytelling about the most terrifying natural disaster in Australia’s recorded history. Even those for whom Black Saturday 2009 has already become another distant tragedy in a landscape of disasters will find this heart-wrenchingly compelling. Of its type, I have read none better. If the Victoria Cross represents our peak measure of valour, then the central characters in this special book emerge as Victoria Cross heroes in the heart of a bush community.— Kerry O’Brien

Every Australian, both rural and urban, should read this book. Adrian Hyland pulls no punches in describing the harrowing consequences of living on the planet’s driest and most fire-prone continent, and his account of the disastrous Black Saturday fires is a story of courage, dread and fallibility that will never leave you.— Cate Kennedy

I’ve been waiting for a writer to look Black Saturday in the eye ever since the flames died down and, finally, Adrian Hyland’s done it. In this compelling and moving book, Hyland has captured the character of a town caught, quite literally, in a fireball.— Anna Krien

Kinglake-350 is about more than Black Saturday. It’s about families and communities, the vital nature of ecology and geology; it’s about the genesis of life itself. And while there are too many deaths in this saddest of tales, for the lucky ones the outcome was redemption — Lincoln Hall

A History Of Tasmania

James Fenton (1820–1901) was born in Ireland and emigrated to Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) with his family in 1833. He became a pioneer settler in an area on the Forth River and published this history of the island in 1884. The book begins with the discovery of the island in 1642 and concludes with the deaths of some significant public figures in the colony in 1884. The establishment of the colony on the island, and the involvement of convicts in its building, is documented. A chapter on the native aborigines gives a fascinating insight into the attitudes of the colonising people, and a detailed account of the removal of the native Tasmanians to Flinders Island, in an effort to separate them from the colonists. The book also contains portraits of some aboriginal people, as well as a glossary of their language.

Fear, Faith And Hope: The Long Wet Summer Of 2010-2011

Fear, faith and hope are just three of the emotions felt by the people of Queensland during the long, wet summer of 2010–2011.

The floods and cyclones of that wet season produced a natural disaster which will continue to influence the lives of people living in this state for years to come. The scale was huge, but out of the wreckage a wonderful story emerged: a story of community spirit and human resilience as friends, neighbours, and total strangers came together to help one another through the worst aspects.

Fear, Faith and Hope tells the story in words and images of the events of that long, wet summer, focussing on the personal anecdotes of those who experienced it. This book is a compilation of what journalists and photographers from The Courier-Mail, and others who witnessed the events unfold, saw and felt. It is a tribute to the people of Queensland and a celebration of their enduring spirit.

Fear, Faith and Hope is attractively designed as a large-format paperback with full-colour photographs throughout to compliment the moving text. Edited by Matthew Condon, editor of Qweekend for The Courier Mail, the royalties from this book will be donated to The Red Cross to help those affected by hardships and disasters across the country.

Fear, Faith and Hope is published by UQP with The Courier-Mail.

Digger Smith And Australia's Great War

Smiths were among the first men to land at Gallipoli. Smiths fought and died at Pozières, Bullecourt and Passchendaele. Smiths were wounded – and treated by doctors and nurses named Smith.

At home, Smiths penned patriotic doggerel and spoke vociferously against conscription. There was Grace Cossington Smith and her iconic painting The Sock Knitter, and Victor Smith, who designed a guided missile in his dad’s workshop in suburban Brisbane. Australia’s Smiths included the AIF’s senior policeman, a Jewish VC, and the war’s most famous Australian aviators. They and thousands of more humble Smiths reflect the hopes and fears, the tragedies and the triumph of Australia in the Great War.

Then there are the German-Australian Smiths, the Schmidts, who fought for Australia even as Schmidts at home were vilified and interned. Just as the Great War affected all Australians, we can see the great range of their experience through the lives and deaths of those sharing the most common, representative surname.

About the Author

Dr Peter Stanley is Australia’s most prolific writer on the Great War. He has published 25 books, most dealing with the experience of war in Australia and Britain. Peter’s books include Tarakan, White Mutiny, For Fear of Pain, Quinn’s Post, Anzac, Gallipoli, Invading Australia and Men of Mont St Quentin. His books published by Pier 9 include Commando to Colditz, Bad Characters and Simpson’s Donkey. Formerly the Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial, where he worked from 1980 to 2007, he heads the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia and is an adjunct professor at the Australian National University and the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian In The Outback

After immersing himself in the culture of a remote Australian Indigenous community for close to a year, the young Japanese scholar Minoru Hokari emerged with a new world view. Gurindji Journey tells of Hokari’s experience living with the Gurindji people of Daguragu and Kalkaringi in the Northern Territory of Australia, absorbing their way of life and beginning to understand Aboriginal modes of seeing and being.

This compelling book, published in English posthumously, seven years after the author’s death, is a personal, philosophical, lyrical record of Hokari’s journey into Indigenous Aboriginal culture. Part memoir, part history, part theory, Gurindji Journey is the story of Hokari’s discovery of Gurindji modes of history and historical practice. It is an inspiring work that opens up new pathways for approaching cross-cultural history, anthropology, and historical epistemology.

The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe: A History Of Aboriginal Involvement With The World Game

A first in sporting literature, The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe is the largely untold history of Aboriginal involvement with the ‘world game’. Maynard examines an important aspect of our nation’s sporting history. The acceptance that Aboriginal players found within the post–World War II migrant communities had a profound impact on their life directions and outlook. The multicultural environment of Australian soccer after the war provided them with a haven from the prejudice and racism of wider Australian society. Interweaving personal narrative and extensive research with links to the broader Indigenous world community, Maynard's book is a celebration of the extraordinary journey taken by Aboriginal sportsmen and women to forge the way ahead for the present crop of talented players.

‘This book is a first in sporting literature — the untold history of Indigenous Australians’ involvement in the world game. My wish is that The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe will have a profound effect on the game by encouraging the greater involvement of our first peoples.’ Football Federation Australia Chairman Mr Frank Lowy AC

Adelaide

A painting, a frog cake, a landmark, a statue, a haunting newspaper photograph, a bucket of peaches, pink shorts in parliament, concert tickets, tourist maps … Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of iconic objects.

Adelaide navigates her southern home, discovering its identifying curios and passing them to the reader to touch, inspect and marvel at. These objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark and contradictory history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the homey friendliness. They all paint a lively portrait of her home city – as remembered, lived in, thought about, missed, loved, hated, laughed at, travelled to and from, seen from afar and close up by assorted writers, citizens and visitors – but mainly as it exists in her memory and imagination.

Into The Unknown

Ludwig Leichhardt is Australia's most intriguing explorer. Born and educated in Prussia in the early 19th century, Leichhardt was a polymath, a man fascinated by the natural world and possessed by a longed for adventure and exploration. Australia was then almost completely unexplored apart from the colonies clustered on its coastline–the interior a vast and mysterious blank. It was a continent and a time ripe for amateur naturalists and explorers, and Leichhardt took up the challenge.

His expeditions were to begin in triumph, then dwindle into acrimony, despair and misery before finally ending in disappearance and death and giving rise to one of the enduring mysteries of the Australian history.

The Forgotten Islands

Michael Veitch has long been fascinated by the islands that lie between mainland Australia and Tasmania. As a child, he was told a mysterious tale about a young man, a lighthouse and one of the islands of Bass Strait. He stored this information away, mentally filing it alongside other snippets he gleaned about the islands and the goings-on there. Years later he is reminded of this story and wonders if there is any truth to it. Then, one day, he finally has a chance to explore the islands.

Bass Strait has over fifty cold, dark islands that are regularly pounded by atrocious weather and hardly visited. These islands are rich in atypical Australian history: sealers, shipwrecks, lighthouse keepers, feuds, Aboriginal 'resettlements', deadly encounters with nature and people who have vanished.This is the story of how he manages to get to the islands (weather/transport dependent) and what he finds when he gets there – the inhabitants, the stories, the birds and plantlife.

On his personal odyssey (plagued at times by appalling seasickness, airsickness and stinging nettles) around these islands, Michael comes across unresolved myths and legends, beaches of incomparable beauty, magical lighthouses, and people who live truly solitary lives.

The Forgotten Islands is an incredible, evocative read that will shine a light on this little known part of Australia and its extraordinary history.

'I had pursued a myth to its source, and felt now that its restless voice was finally being stilled, or rather released from within, having served its purpose: propelling me through an odyssey, tantalising me with a treasure - the question of its truth. The real treasure, however, I now realised, had been the journey itself, and the discovery of the small but wonderful world of Bass Strait and its enigmatic islands.'

Pedder Dreaming: Olegas Truchanas And A Lost Tasmanian Wilderness

In 1972 Lake Pedder in Tasmania's untamed south-west was flooded to build a dam. Wilderness photographer Olegas Truchanas, who had spent years campaigning passionately to save the magnificent fresh water lake, had finally lost. The campaign, the first of its kind in Australia, paved the way for later conservation successes, and turned Truchanas into a Tasmanian legend.

Pedder Dreaming quietly evokes the man, the time and the place. Truchanas, a Lithuanian émigré, is a stalwart adventurer, loving family man, activist, thinker, survivor and artist. Australia on the cusp of environmental awareness is the time, and Lake Pedder and the south-west of Tasmania, the place – wild, pristine, wondrous.

Through those who were closest to him, Truchanas emerges, as does his influence on early conservation in Tasmania, and the small group of landscape artists, the Sunday Group, who admired his passion for the lake and were inspired by it. Stunningly illustrated with original Truchanas photographs from the 1950s, '60s and '70s, and artwork from the Sunday Group, Pedder Dreaming captures the brutality, raw beauty and vulnerability of the Tasmanian wilderness and the legacy of one man who had the vision to fight for it.

The Sons Of Clovis

The Sons of Clovis is a scholarly tour de force. It begins with the Ern Malley affair, establishing previously unrecognised connections between the Australian scene and French symboliste poetry, before embarking on a fascinating journey through literature, culture, and poetics. Making full use of his skills as novelist, poet, and scholar, David Brooks has created a page-turning literary history with the narrative tension of a thriller.

In the mid-1940s, writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart submitted a series of poems to the modernist literary magazine, Angry Penguins, under the fictitious name Ern Malley. In a flurry of excitement, the poems were published in a special edition proclaiming the discovery of an important new Australian voice. When the hoax was exposed, it occupied the front page of newspapers around the nation for weeks. It is still Australia's best-known and most talked-about literary hoax.

For the past twenty years, David Brooks has been on a quest to find the inspiration for the hoax and this journey has uncovered astounding facts that will overturn all previous assumptions about the hoax and its origins. The resulting book is not just an account of the Ern Malley hoax; it is also a fascinating study of literary hoaxes and poetry in general. Written in a playful narrative style that takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey, The Sons of Clovis will be one of the most talked-about literary books of 2011.

Noongar Mambara Bakitj

A young man follows a kangaroo track deep into the old people’s country. Along the way he meets some spirit creatures (‘mambara’) who allow him to go on. But after he has hunted down the kangaroo, one mambara is angry and demands a fight (‘bakitj’). All day they fight, until the Noongar discovers he is a magic person and defeats the mambara.

This book is inspired by a story Bob Roberts and Freddie Winmer told the American linguist Gerhardt Laves at Albany, Western Australia, around 1931. It has been workshopped in a series of community meetings, which included some of the contemporary family of both Bob Roberts and Freddie Winmer.

This story is told in old Noongar, contemporary Noongar and English.

The Australian Book Of Great Trials

The Australian Book of Great Trials tells the story of some of the most interesting and important trials in Australian history, including the first ever civil case, brought by two convicts a short time after the First Fleet landed; the remarkable tale of bushranger and folk hero Ned Kelly; the dingo and the baby at Uluru; and Eddie Mabo's historic fight to establish Indigenous people's ownership of their land. These are more than remarkable stories - they also tell us something about Australian life, what we stand for, and our belief in a 'fair go'.

Mark Strizic: Melbourne, Marvellous To Modern

This magnificent collection of photographs arose from the creativity of a young photographer and his adoption of his new home town, Melbourne. His pictures were taken at a time when the Victorian elegance of the city once known as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was being punctuated by a wave of development and the modern architectural movement.

Today Mark Strizic is renowned as a photographer. In the 1950s he was a young science student from Europe playing with the possibilities of the camera. His enthusiasm for photography was encouraged by Melbourne artist Leonard French and academic David Saunders. As he gained work as a professional his commercial success was accompanied by the instincts and eye of an artist. His solid technicality was accompanied by the whimsy and wit that him the ‘poet of the fleeting movement’.

The versatility of his work shows us many aspects of Melbourne – its magnificent architectural heritage, its intimate and vibrant laneways, its grand arcades counter-posed against the sudden spaces of the wrecker, the brash intrusion of the glass and concrete skyscrapers, the poignancy of poverty in the run-down inner suburbs. We see the people, on grand occasions such as the 1954 Royal Visit, or just caught in their own world of travelling, shopping, resting, walking, working.

The Greens: Policies, Reality and Consequences

The idea for this book came from an awareness of the alarming void in media analysis of the Greens' policies at a time when they have been gaining in political strength.

This book brings together leading Australian experts who look at a wide range of their policies in detail – from Agriculture to Z00phytes – to reveal the practical consequences of these policies.

The book suggests that the Greens have an uncontrollable urge to spend our money, a mania for legislative and regulatory control – of both institutions and individuals – a disturbing and unwarranted confidence in central planning and a belief that government knows best. Underlying this is a thoroughly naïve understanding of how the real world works.

The irony is that the Greens' policies would not only destroy our economy but actually make the environment worse.

The Catalysts: The Change And Continuity 1910 To 2010

Longmire’s book The Catalysts: Change and Continuity 1910-2010 is the story of a women’s club based on the sharing of a meal and discussion panel once a month. This book is a wonderful encounter with some of Melbourne’s most influential women.

Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom And Australia's Future

'We think we are the lucky country, but what we really have is dumb luck—a lot of luck without the planning or strategy to make sure our good fortune lasts.'—Paul Cleary

In Too Much Luck, Paul Cleary shows that the resources boom, which seems like a blessing, has the potential to become a curse – unless our governments take urgent action.

Today, under-taxed and under-regulated multinational companies make a tidy profit by selling off our non-renewable resources. As the mining boom accelerates, it will drive the dollar sky-high, forcing up the cost of doing business for everybody. Industries such as tourism and education—industries that, unlike mining, involve many jobs—will fade away. But what happens if commodity prices suddenly collapse, as they did with the GFC in 2008; or worse, when the resources run out?

Many countries before us have been caught by the resources trap: a heady period of boom and growth, followed by a painful bust. Paul Cleary maps out the pitfalls, considers what has worked overseas, and suggests a better way forward.

Inside Pine Gap: The Spy Who Came In From The Desert

In 1966, Australia and the US signed a treaty that allowed the establishment of a jointly run satellite tracking station, just south of Alice Springs. For more than forty years it has operated in a shroud of secrecy and been the target of much public and political controversy.

For the first time, a US high-tech spy who worked at Pine Gap for 18 years speaks out to give an insider’s account of what happens behind those locked gates in the middle of the Australian desert. The author details his career with an American intelligence agency during a tumultuous period in history that covered the terms of three American Presidents, four Australian Prime Ministers, the end of the Cold War, a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, two wars in Iraq, genocide in Rwanda, as well as the ‘War against Terror’ and the emergence of North Korea as a nuclear-armed nation.

This is a fascinating glimpse inside the top-secret world of military surveillance.

The author served as an American representative at the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap in Alice Springs for 18 years (1990-2008). His background is in signals intelligence (primarily weapons-related signals such as radars), electronic warfare and weapons-testing methodologies for various missiles and he has expert knowledge of how intelligence is collected, analysed, processed, and reported. He became an Australian citizen in 2009, moving to Sydney to be with his new family.

Gangland Melbourne

This compelling and comprehensive book takes you on a tour of Melbourne’s criminal past.

Throughout the past century, Melbourne has spawned its fair share of notorious criminals—some more infamous than others. In this compelling and comprehensive book, Britain’s top true crime writer James Morton and former barrister and legal broadcaster Susanna Lobez take you on a tour of Melbourne’s criminal past, visiting Australia’s favourite larrikin Squizzy Taylor, career criminals Chopper Read and the Pettingill family, as well as chronicling the long-running Painters and Dockers’ Union and recent Melbourne gang wars. Along the way, tales of Melbourne’s talented standover men, contract killers, robbers, conmen, brothel keepers, biker gangs, drug dealers and corrupt cops offer an extraordinary insight into this colourful and mysterious world.

Vivid and explosive, Gangland Melbourne is compulsive reading. About the Author

James Morton, a former defence lawyer, is one of Britain’s leading experts on crime, and the author of more than twenty books including his bestselling Gangland series.

Susanna Lobez is an actor-turned-barrister-turned-broadcaster. She has been an ABC specialist legal broadcaster on The Law Report (radio) and Law Matters (TV). She has written feature articles for the Age and columns for the Sunday Herald Sun.

They are the co-authors of the bestselling Gangland Australia, Dangerous to Know and Kings of Stings. James Morton is also the co-author of Shotgun and Standover, an account of the Painters and Dockers’ Union.

Australian Encounters

What happened when Bob Hawke locked horns with Frank Sinatra, when Errol Flynn interviewed Fidel Castro, and when Norman Gunston joined Frank Zappa on stage? Australian Encounters is a one-of-a-kind book, written by Shane Maloney and illustrated by Chris Grosz. With abundant humour, it tells of 50 true encounters - public or private, ill-fated or fortuitous - between a renowned Australian and an international mover and shaker.

Featuring politicians, socialites, film stars, artists, entrepreneurs and sporting legends, these portraits capture their subjects in a single, fleeting moment, when paths crossed and personalities collided.

Subjects include Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Donald Bradman and Boris Karloff, Margaret Fulton and Elizabeth David, Michael Hutchence and Kylie Minogue, Nana Mouskouri and Frank Hardy, Martina Navratilova, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Brian Burke, Henry Kissinger, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Menzies, Helena Rubinstein, and many more.

These lively encounters appear regularly in the Monthly and are presented here as a collection for the first time.

Praise for Australian Encounters:

“Bizarre, unexpected – and memorable!” – Barry Jones

“Shane Maloney has been getting couples to wriggle about lewdly under the doona for years. It’s a triumph that he has squeezed all that grunt and poke into this startling book.” – H.G. Nelson

So Many Firsts: Liberal Women From Menzies To Turnbull

Margaret Fitzherbert’s new book follows on from her first, Liberal Women, and examines the political lives of women in the Liberal Party from Menzies to Turnbull - their achievements and work for the community.

These pioneering women had many hurdles to overcome – including the long fight to extend child endowment, the battle to remove the legislative barriers to married women working in the public service, along with the notion that they could do more than only represent women’s issues. In 1948, The Mail helpfully declared of Senator Annabelle Rankin: “She tackles men’s problem’s too”.

In the late 1950s to early 1960s, these Liberal women were arguing for equal work and equal opportunity and equal pay. (Plus ca change!)

By the close of 1975, 10 Liberal women had been elected to the federal parliament compared with five from ALP, four of whom were elected in 1974 and 1975. None had taken leadership roles, in contrast to the Liberal Party where women had done so since the 1940s: Enid Lyons as a member of the Menzies Cabinet, Annabelle Rankin as Whip and then one of Harold Holt’s ministers, Ivy Wedgwood chairing Senate committees, and Kathy Martin as Assistant Whip during the blocking of supply in 1975. And three years of opposition had seen the elevation of the woman poised to be the most powerful yet: Margaret Guilfoyle.

By the time Malcolm Turnbull became Opposition Leader in 2008, women achieving leadership roles in parliament was no longer remarkable. But the women themselves were. Jocelyn Newman, Judi Moylan, Amanda Vanstone were among those who expanded the legacy of the generations of women who went before them. Under Malcolm Turnbull, even more historical firsts have been achieved with Liberal women occupying the two most senior portfolios – Julie Bishop taking the mantle of Deputy Leader and Shadow Treasurer, and Helen Coonan as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs.

The Australian Voter: 50 Years Of Change

In the 1960s, voting was class and party-based; today, environmentalism, evaluations of economic performance and the personalities of the leaders dominate political debate. Ian McAllister assesses the implications of these changes for politics, and points to future directions in Australian voting behaviour. The book also includes analysis of the 2010 Federal election.

1835: The Founding Of Melbourne And The Conquest Of Australia

In 1835 an illegal squatter camp was established on the banks of the Yarra River. In defiance of authorities in London and Sydney, Tasmanian speculators began sending men and sheep across Bass Strait – and so changed the shape of Australian history. Before the founding of Melbourne, British settlement on the mainland amounted to a few pinpoints on a map. Ten years later, it had become a sea of red.

In 1835 James Boyce brings this pivotal moment to life. He traces the power plays in Hobart, Sydney and London, the key personalities of Melbourne’s early days, and the haunting questions raised by what happened when the land was opened up. He conjures up the Australian frontier – its complexity, its rawness and the way its legacy is still with us today.

Praise for Van Diemen’s Land:

“The most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore. In re-imagining Australia’s past, it invents a new future.”—Richard Flanagan

“A brilliant book and a must-read for anyone interested in how land shapes people.”—Tim Flannery

“Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land is a triumph.”—The Sydney Morning Herald

“A fascinating, splendidly realised piece of history.”—The Adelaide Review

“A remarkable work”—The Canberra Times

Ali Abdul Vs The King: Muslim Stories From The Dark Days Of White Australia

Mahomet Allum, wonder herbalist and ladies' man, bush battler Ali Abdul, the feisty Afghan Rock men, and Sam the republican pearl diver, are some of Deen's 'men from the archives'. To others they are troublemakers and 'lustful aliens'. Unwelcome and a threat to Australian workers, these are the dark strangers in the days of the White Australia Policy, when race was used to classify people and bar them from entering the country. This fascinating collection of narratives combines storytelling with history and nostalgia as Deen takes the reader back into Australia's past. These stories may even help explain some of the moral ambiguities and strange ironies that trouble us today.

Darwin Spitfires: The Real Battle For Australia

In 1943, a small band of inexperienced Australian and British fighter pilots fought an ongoing air battle in defense of north-western Australia, flying against a formidably skilled and proficient opponent. The air raids on Darwin during 1942-43 constituted the only sustained and intensive direct assault on Australian mainland territory in the whole of World War Two and yet, surprisingly, most Australians have no idea that it ever happened. Following the RAAF’s No 1 Fighter Wing, Darwin Spitfires tells this little-known story, and in so doing, recovers this important aspect of Australian history.

Half A Citizen: Life On Welfare in Australia

What is it really like to be unemployed and on welfare? How do you make ends meet? Does the welfare system actually help people get back into jobs? Half a Citizen draws on in-depth interviews with 150 welfare recipients to reveal people struggling to get by on a low income, the anxieties of balancing paid work with income support, and how unstable housing makes it difficult to get ahead.

By investigating the lives beyond the statistics, Half a Citizen also explodes powerful myths and assumptions on which welfare policy is based. The majority of welfare recipients interviewed are very active, in paid work, caring for children or for other family members, and they see themselves as contributing and participating citizens, even if they sometimes feel they are being treated as 'half a citizen'. These stories of resilience and passion bear no resemblance to the cliched images of dependence, laziness, and social isolation which underpin social policy and media debate.

Storm Over Kokoda

Most of us have heard of the battered and muddy troops who ‘saved’ Australia on the Kokoda Track during the darkest hours of the Pacific war. Far fewer know of the Australian pilots and aircrew of 75 Squadron who first checked the Japanese advance into the South West Pacific, in desperate air fighting that swirled over the jungles of New Guinea and the base at Port Moresby, fully six months before the land campaign began. Storm Over Kokoda tells how Australian crews, in a handful of Hudson bombers and Catalina flying boats, took the fight to the Japanese. Peter Ewer draws on eyewitness accounts and combat reports to shed new and exciting light on a neglected episode in Australian military history. This is not merely an ‘aviation’ story, but a compelling tale of men at war - on both sides - in a harsh physical environment. This was a time when every flight proved an epic, and every man a hero.

Personal View Photographs 1978 1986

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The First Fleet: The Real Story

In 1787 a convoy of eleven ships, carrying about 1500 people, set out from England for Botany Bay. According to the conventional account, it was a shambolic affair: under-prepared, poorly equipped and ill-disciplined. Robert Hughes condemned the organisers' 'muddle and lack of foresight', while Manning Clark described scenes of 'indescribable misery and confusion'.

In The First Fleet: The Real Story, Alan Frost draws on previously forgotten records to debunk these persistent myths. He shows that the voyage was in fact meticulously planned – reflecting its importance to the British government's secret ambitions for imperial expansion. He examines the ships and supplies, passengers and behind-the-scenes discussions. In the process, he reveals the hopes and schemes of those who planned the voyage, and the experiences of those who made it.

A Little History Of The Australian Labor Party

The Australian Labor Party is one of the oldest labour parties and was the first in the world to form a government. 2011 marks its 120th birthday. This short and lively book tells the story of the ALP’s numerous successes in winning government at all levels and making policy that has transformed lives. The book also shows how the ALP has attracted an extraordinary range of members, parliamentary representatives, leaders, unionists, activists and, indeed, opponents. Whether their audience are Labor voters or not, writers Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno argue that it has been such a central force in Australia throughout the twentieth century that its history should be known.

Northern Voyages: Australia's Monsoon Coast In Maritime History

The maritime history of Australia’s monsoon coast, stretching from Broome to Thursday Island, has a known story that is far older, more complex and more redolent of men against the sea than any other coast of the continent. Here came the earliest explorers of Australia, the greatest of her hydrographic surveyors, the whole of her pearling fleets, the trepang and trochus-shell gatherers of the East Indies, the seaborne missionaries of Cape York, Arnhem Land and the Kimberley shore, the bold entrepreneurs who forged and kept open the thin line of sea transport that alone enabled European settlement to survive on that long and lonely coast. Here, too, was fought the only real naval war in Australia’s history and here the Royal Australian Navy still holds the front line in the country’s defence.This book blends the multiple threads of north coast history into a single concise and colourful story.

Beyond White Guilt: The real challenge for Black-White Relations in Australia

A deeply provocative call for white Australians to take personal responsibility for the ongoing impact of colonisation on Aboriginal Australians. Sarah Maddison's bold and original take on the running sore of black-white relations offers a genuinely constructive alternative when so many other approaches have failed.

'This book lays out the way modern Australia can right the wrongs that have occurred in the intervening years, and decades, and centuries that have passed since that first dramatic encounter.' - From the foreword by The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG

'An excellent diagnosis of Australia's mind-set.' - Jeff McMullen journalist, author, film maker

Deep in our hearts, Australians know that our nation was built on land that does not belong to us. Some of us now assert that Aboriginal people should simply take advantage of opportunities offered by white society. But many others feel guilt, often turning this guilt inwards, feeling helpless in the face of the appalling conditions in which many of the original inhabitants of this country now live. Successive government policies of obliteration, assimilation, cultural maintenance and intervention have manifestly failed to bridge the gulf between black and white Australians, and to improve the lives of many Aboriginal Australians. Efforts at reconciliation have stalled. In many ways, we are stuck.

Sarah Maddison argues that there is no point in looking again to governments for a solution to these challenges. Rather, it is up to us, all of us. We need to acknowledge our collective responsibility, change at a deep level, and develop a revitalised view of our national self. Only then will we develop policies and practical solutions that work.

Sarah Maddison is an Associate Professor in the Indigenous Policy and Dialogue Research Unit at the University of NSW, and author of several books including Black Politics.

Read Sarah Maddison's guest blog post about the story behind Beyond White Guilt.

Circus: The Australian Story

In CIRCUS: THE AUSTRALIAN STORY, author Mark St Leon presents a comprehensive, entertaining and visually stunning history of circus in Australia. His interest was sparked by his insatiable curiosity about his own family's celebrated past in Australian circus. You will read how a colonial circus industry developed out of its Old World roots; how the saga of circus is woven into the historical fabric of modern Australia; how circus in Australia absorbed influences from as far afield as America, Japan and Europe; how Australia has been visited by some of the world's major circus companies; and how Australia's circus people have coped with unrelenting social, cultural, technological and economic change.

You will also read how Australia has been a significant developer and exporter of circus talent. The 'world's greatest bareback rider' May Wirth and the Indigenous wirewalker Con Colleano although forgotten in Australia are regarded, internationally, as among the finest circus artists of modern times. The author shows how circus in Australia today, in both its traditional and contemporary genres, is the outcome of a continuum that extends, not only over some 175 years of modern Australia's history, but back to its London, medieval and ancient roots.

Dick Smith's Population Crisis: The Dangers of Unsustainable Growth for Australia

Dick Smith takes on the hot topic of our times, arguing that Australian and global population growth carries enormous risks, dangers that none of our political parties is prepared to address.

In 2011 the world's population exceeded 7 billion. Each year we add nearly 80 million people and by mid-century we will require twice as much food and double the energy we use today. Australia will be deeply affected by these trends - we have the fastest growing population of any developed nation.

These are the staggering facts that confronted Dick Smith. They set him on his crusade to alert us to the dangers of unsustainable growth. They are the facts that have convinced him that if we are to ensure the survival of our civilisation and the health of the planet then we must put a stop to population growth, now.

As our cities continue their unrestrained growth, as we battle daily on crowded public transport and clogged freeways, and as we confront the reality of water and power shortages, Dick challenges the long-held myth that growth is good for us. But more importantly he offers ways for us to re-invent our economy, to reassess the way we live and to at least slow down that ticking clock. This is a provocative, powerful and urgent call to arms.

Dick Smith is one of Australia's most recognised individuals. A multi-millionaire philanthropist and adventurer, who originally made his fortune retailing electronics and then founded Australian Geographic magazine, Dick Smith has since become well known as a restless adventurer, making many pioneering and record breaking flights by helicopter, aeroplane and balloon.

The Bogan Delusion

Nothing defies cultured Australia’s sense of itself more than the bogan – that boorish, racist, drunken, sexist, bethonged, Barnesy-loving embarrassment out there in the back blocks. Part travelogue, part social critique, The Bogan Delusion explores the cultural and social landscape of Australia in 2011. It reveals, with searing analysis and sharp wit, that the bogan so widely feared is nothing more than a bogey: a convenient excuse for many to never venture beyond the cafe-lined cocoon of the inner city. What is believing in the bogan doing to Australia?

David Nichols lectures in urban planning at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Go-Betweens and co-editor with Hannah Lewi of Community: Building Modern Australia. He has written for The Age, Rolling Stone, Meanjin, Puncture and The Big Issue.

Radical Hope Education And Equality In Australia

In Radical Hope, one of Australia’s most original and provocative thinkers turns his attention to the question of education. Noel Pearson begins with two fundamental questions: How to ensure the survival of a people, their culture and way of life? And can education transform the lives of the disadvantaged many, or will it at best raise up a fortunate few?

Pearson argues powerfully that underclass students, many of whom are Aboriginal, should receive a rigorous schooling that gives them the means to negotiate the wider world. He examines the long-term failure of educational policy in Australia, especially in the indigenous sector, and asks why it is always “Groundhog Day” when there are lessons to be learned from innovations now underway.

Pearson introduces new findings from research and practice, and takes on some of the most difficult and controversial issues. Throughout, he searches for the radical centre – the way forward that will raise up the many, preserve culture, and ensure no child is left behind.

The Protectors: A Journey Through Whitefella Past

Powerful and provocative, this is a beautifully written and very personal search to understand the men who were the protectors of Aboriginal people in Australia's north - their moral ambiguities, their good intentions and the devastating consequences of their decisions.

On 13 February 2008 Kevin Rudd and Brendan Nelson gave two very different apology speeches to the Stolen Generations. Rudd alluded to racism, eugenics and the immorality of past policies. Nelson spoke of benign intentions, goodness and the hurt felt by those accused of wrongdoings. Both cannot be true - or could they?

The questions Stephen Gray raises about guilt, judgement and good intentions apply as readily to the complexities of black/white relations today as they did one hundred years ago.

This is an intelligent book that challenges how we judge the past and asks what exactly it was that the Australian nation said sorry for. It is a fresh contribution to white Australia's perennial search for national identity - an identity we need to now assert against the darker facts of our history on the continent.

My School: What Every Parent Needs To Know

A clear and accessible book that answers every likely question parents could have about My School/NAPLAN/choosing a school.

What makes a good school? What should a parent know and what should they ask? This book also covers hot topics such as what to do about a bad teacher, bullying, multi-cultural policies, enrolment policies, coaching, selective schools, private vs public.

Maralyn Parker is an award-winning education columnist for The Daily Telegraph.

Maralyn taught in primary and high schools in NSW, South Africa and England. She was the NSW Department of Education's first Information Officer in 1983 and had several books on education published during the 1980s & 90s.

After working as a freelance education journalist for several years Maralyn was employed as the Education Columnist for The Daily Telegraph in 1993. Maralyn's columns appear weekly in The Daily Telegraph and she also runs a popular blog on education.

Maralyn Parker is an award-winning education columnist for The Daily Telegraph.Maralyn taught in primary and high schools in NSW, South Africa and England. She was the NSW Department of Education's first Information Officer in 1983 and had several books on education published during the 1980s & 90s. After working as a freelance education journalist for several years Maralyn was employed as the Education Columnist for The Daily Telegraph in 1993. Maralyn's columns appear weekly in The Daily Telegraph and she also runs a popular blog on education.Her awards include the inaugural NSW Professional Teachers Association Award for Journalism, and the Australian College of Educators Award for Excellence in Journalism.Maralyn has studied at the University of Sydney and the University of Wollongong. She has a Master of Arts (Journalism) from the University of Technology, Sydney and gave the occasional address to graduating UTS education students in 2006. Maralyn Parker is listed in the Who's Who of Australian Women. She has three daughters, Rachel and twins Jessica and Alexandra.

Making Trouble: Essays Against The New Australian Complacency

As this eloquent and important book shows, no one in Australia makes a better argument than Robert Manne.

In Making Trouble, Australia’s leading public intellectual takes aim at the “new Australian complacency”.

This is a book that will enlighten and provoke. It covers much ground – from Howard to Gillard by way of Rudd, from Victoria’s bushfires to the Apology, from Wilfred Burchett to Primo Levi.

Making Trouble includes an essay on the new Australian complacency, as well an exchange of letters with Tony Abbott, an appreciation of W.E.H. Stanner, a reflection on ways of remembering the Holocaust and an incisive analysis of the asylum-seeker issue, among others.

Teaching Aboriginal Studies: A Practical Resource for Primary and Secondary Teaching

A thoroughly revised new edition of this widely used text on teaching Aboriginal issues across the curriculum in Australian schools.

Teaching Aboriginal Studies has been a practical guide for classroom teachers in primary and secondary schools, as well as student teachers, across Australia. Chapters on Aboriginal history and culture, stereotypes and racism, government policies and reconciliation provide essential knowledge for integrating Aboriginal history and culture, issues and perspectives across the curriculum.

This second edition of Teaching Aboriginal Studies encompasses developments over the past decade in Aboriginal affairs, Aboriginal education and research. It features a wide range of valuable teaching sources including poetry, images, oral histories, media, and government reports. There are also strategies for teaching Aboriginal Studies in different contexts and the latest research findings. The text is lavishly illustrated with photographs, posters, paintings, prints, ads and cartoons.

Teaching Aboriginal Studies s is the product of consultation and collaboration across Australia. Remarkable educators and achievers, both Aboriginal and other Australians, tell what teachers need to know and do to help Aboriginal students reach their potential, educate all students about Aboriginal Australia and make this country all that we can be.

'The importance of this book cannot be overestimated. We have been insisting for years that pre-service teachers be required to learn about Aboriginal history, culture and identity, and that it be regarded as integral to qualifying for their education degrees.' Lionel Bamblett, General Manager, Victorian Aboriginal Education Association Inc.

Whitlam

Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of the elected Whitlam Government in 1975, more or less at the behest of the Liberal-Country Party Coalition led by Malcolm Fraser, was among the most momentous events in Australian political history. Born into a privileged life Whitlam joined the Australian Labor Party, rose to be its Parliamentary leader and took it into power after twenty-three years in the wilderness. But the pace of change scared too many people, and sudden changes in the world economic environment threw down challenges he just could not overcome. Nor could he overcome the local political challenges thrown down by the conservative forces,and he and his colleagues seemed determined to keep providing him with the ammunition they needed to shoot him down. On 11 November 1975, they did.

An Eye For Eternity: The Life Of Manning Clark

Manning Clark (1915–1991) was a complex, demanding and brilliant man. Mark McKenna’s compelling biography of this giant of Australia’s cultural landscape is informed by his reading of Clark’s extensive private letters, journals and diaries—many that have never been read before.

An Eye for Eternity paints a sweeping portrait of the man who gave Australians the signature account of their own history. It tells of his friendships with Patrick White and Sidney Nolan. It details an urgent and dynamic marriage, ripped apart at times by Clark’s constant need for extramarital romantic love. A son who wrote letters to his dead parents. A historian who placed narrative ahead of facts. A doubter who flirted with Catholicism. A controversial public figure who marked slights and criticisms with deeply held grudges.

To understand Clark’s life is to understand twentieth century Australia. And it raises fundamental questions about the craft of biography. When are letters too personal, comments too hurtful and insights too private to publish? Clark incessantly documented his life—leaving notes to the biographers he knew would pursue his story. He had a deep need to be remembered and this book means he will now be understood in an unforgettable way.

Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading historians. A research fellow in History at the University of Sydney, he is the author of several prize winning books, including Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: an Australian History of Place, which won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and Book of the Year in the 2003 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

His essays and articles have been widely published in Australia and overseas. Seven years in the making, his biography of Manning Clark is his most ambitious project to date.

Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy

When Lindsay Tanner resigned in 2010 as the ALP’s federal minister for finance and member for Melbourne, having had an 18-year career as an MP, he notably managed to retire with his reputation for integrity intact. In Sideshow, he lays bare the relentless decline of political reporting and political behaviour that occurred during his career. Part memoir, part analysis, and part critique, Sideshow is a unique book that tackles the rot which has set in at the heart of Australian public life.

Lindsay Tanner was the minister for finance and deregulation in the Rudd–Gillard governments, and held the seat of Melbourne for the ALP from 1993 to 2010. Having retired from politics at the 2010 federal election, he is now a special adviser to Lazard Australia, and a vice-chancellor’s fellow and adjunct professor at Victoria University. Mr Tanner is the author of several previous books, including Crowded Lives (2003) and Open Australia (1999).

Red Silk: A Biography Of Elliott Johnson QC

Elliott Johnston is a working class hero. He and Elizabeth Johnston became Communists in 1941 and he resigned only to join the South Australian Supreme Court Bench. His appointment as Queen's Counsel by the Dunstan Government - after his controversial rejection by the former government of Steele Hall - was the highest public office attained by a Communist in Australia. In 1991 he made his national mark as head of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

The Enemy At Home: German Internees In World War I Australia

When nearly 7,000 people with German and Austrian heritage were detained by the Australian authorities following the outbreak of World War I, Paul Dubotzki, a talented Bavarian photographer, was among them. These unlikely prisoners-of-war came from all walks of life – merchant sailors, visiting academics — and many, including beer baron Edmund Resch and acclaimed orthopaedic surgeon Dr Max Herz, had lived in Australia for decades. In The Enemy at Home Dubotzki’s rediscovered photographs and never-before-published excerpts from inmates’ diaries reveal what life was like inside the Holsworthy, Berrima and Trial Bay internment camps. Dubotzki’s stunning images offer a rare and surprising snapshot of the theatrical events, small businesses and sports that boosted the men’s spirits.

There Goes The Neighbourhood: Australia And The Rise Of Asia

For the first time in history, Australia will be uncomfortably close to the designs and demarches of competing great powers. In the years ahead, we will no longer be too small to make a difference. In his book, Wesley points to the key economic and political issues that we need to be considering right now, as a western country geographically and economically tied to Asia, and urgently calls for a renewed public engagement and debate.

Both Sides Of The Wire: The Memoir Of Captain William Cull

This is Bill Cull's unforgettable story of his experiences in WW1: he fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front where he was captured by the Germans and was a POW until the end of the war.

This is Bill Cull's unforgettable story of his experiences in WW1: he fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front where he was captured by the Germans and was a POW until the end of the war. Captain William Cull fought the First World War from both sides of the wire. As a young infantry officer on the Allied side of the Western Front, Cull frequently led patrols out into No Man's Land and raids on the German trenches. He took part in bitter fighting on the Somme at Pozi?res, and in February 1917 was severely wounded in a futile attack on the German trenches near Warlencourt, where he was taken prisoner by the Germans. Having survived the ordeal of battle, Cull spent the remainder of the war on the German side of the wire. The first half of Both Sides of the Wire is an action-packed account of Cull's war on the Western Front in the months leading up to his capture. The second half is a candid portrayal of his experiences as a prisoner of war in the hands of the Germans. Cull endured many months of agony as he recovered in prison camps in occupied France and Germany- surviving in spite of German doctors' early predictions that he would not live through his first night in captivity.

This book is based on the memoir At All Costs that Cull wrote in the months after his repatriation to Australia in October 1918. Aaron Pegram is a historian at the Australian War Memorial. He has written the introduction, epilogue and notes for Cull's memoir, which remains one of the very few published accounts of captivity in Germany during the First World War.

William Cull was an apprentice coach builder from Sanford, Victoria, who enlisted in the AIF in May 1915. He saw active service as an infantry officer on Gallipoli and the Western Front where he was severely wounded and taken prisoner during the 6th Brigade's attack on Malt Trench near Warlencourt in February 1917. He spent eleven months in captivity in Germany before being transferred to Switzerland in January 1918. He died in Melbourne in 1939.

Aaron Pegram is a historian at the Australian War Memorial and the Managing Editor of the Memorial's magazine Wartime. A Charles Sturt University history graduate, he is currently writing a PhD thesis on the 3,861 Australian troops taken prisoner by the German Army on the Western Front.

Great Central State: The Foundation Of The Northern Territory

This book tells the sometimes bizarre story of the founding and precarious existence of the Northern Territory up to its constitution as a separate entity in 1911. Acquired by South Australia in 1863, the early years are a case study in planned colonisation, a world-wide movement in the mid-nineteenth century which, at its most ambitious, aimed at spreading civilisation around the world. This grand vision was marred by human folly, pride and hubris, overarching ambition, petty jealousy and murderous payback. Strange tales abound in this very lively history being published ready for the Territory's centenary celebrations in 2011, as Jack Cross casts a wry, affectionate eye over a meticulously researched text that also anticipates the day when the Territory's unique proximity to Asia determines that it becomes the seventh Australian state.

The Great Australian Dream: A Guide To Buying Your First Home

The Great Australian Dream is a must-have for anyone considering entering the property market. As house prices soar, the great Australian dream of owning your own home is very quickly slipping out of reach for many Australians, especially generations X and Y. This book arms you with the tools you need to confidently enter the property market. A practical, realistic and independent guide, The Great Australian Dream covers the spectrum of the home-buying process, from saving for a deposit and choosing the right loan, to managing your mortgage and becoming an investor.

Witnesses To War: The History Of Australian Conflict Reporting

'Witnesses to War' is a landmark history of Australian war journalism that covers the major conflicts of the 20th Century: World War I, World War II, Vietnam and Bosnia through to recent and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 'Witnesses to War' looks at how journalists reported the horrors and politics of war, the rise of the celebrity journalist, issues of censorship and the ethics of 'embedding'. Interviews with leading war correspondents including John Pilger, Paul McGeough and Chris Masters reveal the challenges of covering wars and how they personally deal with the violence they witness. Many describe becoming desensitised to the horror. Many other journalists are permanently marked by it.

Heart Of Arnhem Land

In 1974, Francois Giner had his first taste of northern Australia, not realising that it would be the start of a 36-year sojourn and adventure, far from his hometown of Lodeve, in southern France. As a teenager, Giner had set out to discover new horizons and people. Now he headed across Australia to discover its indigenous heart.

With the blessing of the local Aboriginal community, he established Bodeidei Camp, to receive visitors interested in experiencing something of indigenous culture and country, or others wanting to hunt buffalo. Heart of Arnhem Land shares Giner's experiences of living and working in this remote region.

Heart of Arnhem Land is a personal journey of discovery and self-discovery, but above all it is a cry for a beloved community whose culture lies on the edge of extinction. Giner's memoir aims to remind people that those swaying black shadows with haggard eyes crossing streets in Katherine, Alice Springs or Darwin, were once free men, who have been deprived of their bearings and their dreams.

En Terre Aborigene has sold over 15,000 copies in France alone, now this bestselling book is published in English for the first time.

Notorious Australian Women

The sensational lives and exploits of some of Australia′s most audacious women

Notorious Australian Women celebrates the lives of some of Australia′s most fearless, brash and scandalous women. There′s Tilly Devine, who went from streetwalker in London to wealthy Sydney madam and standover merchant; Mary Bryant, the highway robber and First Fleeter who escaped by rowing from Port Jackson to Timor with her two children; Lola Montez, the Irish-born grande horizontale, who destroyed King Ludwig I of Bavaria; Ellen Tremaye and Marion Edwards, women who challenged the gender order and became men; and Helena Rubinstein, who rewrote her humble Polish background and became one of the most successful and astute businesswomen in the world.

From bushrangers, courtesans and cross-dressers, to writers, designers and a radical or two, what these splendid rebels have in common is a determination to take their destinies into their own hands.

Kay Saunders AM was Professor of History and Senator of the University of Queensland from 2002 to 2006. In 2001 she received the Medal of the National Museum of Australia, and in 2006 was the recipient of the John Kerr Medal from the Royal Historical Society of Queensland.

The Great Australian Novel: A Panorama

Written originally for a French audience to inform them about the richness of Australian writing, The Great Australian Novel – A Panorama now appears in a remastered English version. It is a story of Australia, its people and ideas, its history and geography as revealed through the exciting genre of the Australian novel.

As the title indicates, the book has an innovative cinematic structure containing 35 inserts: Close-ups of an author, low-angle shots for the greats – novels and/or authors, panoramic views for themes or the career of specific writers and bonus items such as a bibliography and an index.

The author speaks directly to the reader in a free-flowing narrative that is concerned with involving the reader emotionally and intellectually. Highlighted along the way are contributions by women, non-Anglophone and Aboriginal authors, as well as the most recent trends in writing.

A timely book for the general reader that will stimulate an interest in Australian literature.

Author Information

Jean-Francois Vernay is the author of Water From the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch and Panorama du roman australien des origines a nos jours 1831-2007.

Marie Ramsland, Chevalier des Palmes Academiques, is an conjoint lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her translations include Hanoi Blues by Jeanne Cordelier, The Culverin by Michel Tournier and White Wings Red Sands

Boat People: Personal Stories From The Vietnamese Exodus 1975-1996

The years 1975 to 1996 were witness to the largest mass migration in modern history, with more than a million people leaving their war-torn homeland, Vietnam, in search of safety.

Forces migrations are usually fraught with danger and even hazard as the displaced people negotiate mountains, deserts and oceans in all kinds of weather. What was unique about the Vietnam Exodus was that the only route for escape for over a million people was by sea – across open water – and so the only way was by boat. Subsequently this group of refugees has become known the world over as the 'boat people'.

Most of the escape boats has been built as river craft plying trade on inland waterways. They were not designed to stand up to the rigours of open-water travel across the South China Sea and often simply fell apart in conditions more challenging than a medium swell. For this reason alone many thousands perished, but others succumbed to starvation, dehydration and cold-blooded attacks by Thai pirates. One in three boat people never completed their journey. Those who did survive it have become a diaspora of Vietnamese people making new lives for themselves in many countries around the world.

This beautiful book by Carina Hoang portrays just a handful of experiences of members of this new diaspora – the perilous sea journey, the time spent in their temporary island camps as refuges and their final journey to their new adopted homelands. It is a testimony to the human spirit.

'They piled on top of one another in wooden boats, men, women and children. So desperate to escape their war-torn home, more than a million people would risk everything to tackle the high seas in search of safe haven. Many never made it to land. Those who did, endured unimaginable horrors. Told simply in their own words, Boat People gives voice to some of the survivors of the Vietnamese exodus, the largest mass migration in modern history.' The West Australian

Anzac Fury

From Tobruk to the Battle of Crete - the new bestseller from the author of PACIFIC FURY.

ANZAC FURY commemorates the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe when 8900 Anzac prisoners of war captured in Greece and Crete were released from captivity. In 2010 it will be exactly 70 years since the 2nd AIF arrived in the Middle East to begin their extraordinary adventures in battles against the German and Italian armies in North Africa, mainland Greece and Crete prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War.

Written by a brilliant storyteller, ANZAC FURY tells the riveting story of how the legendary Anzac Corps was reformed in the heat of battle during World War II to fight a powerful and merciless foe. Dramatically combining personal memories with combat action, ANZAC FURY gives voice to the experiences of young Australians and New Zealanders who were sent on Churchill’s orders from the victorious battlefields of Libya on a disastrous mission to Greece and Crete.

A companion volume to the acclaimed 2008 publication PACIFIC FURY, this book celebrates the Anzac spirit of sacrifice, mateship, courage and endurance that sustained the new Anzacs during the darkest days of the war.

Crack Hardy

"Crack hardy" was a saying among Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the First World War trenches. It means, "Grin and bear it. Put on a brave face."

This is the true story of three Australian soldiers, the Searle brothers. One brother was killed at Gallipoli, another on the Western Front. One came home a decorated hero.

Viv, a gifted poet who was planning to be a clergyman before the war, became a deadly efficient sniper. Ray shot himself and was charged with desertion. Ned was a true Australian larrikin, up for anything, and the black sheep of the family.

The Searle boys had to crack hardy, as they fought in one grueling campaign after another - from the first wave of the Gallipoli landings to Lone Pine, from Ypres to Messines and Hill 60 in Flanders, to bloody Somme battles at Mouquet Farm, Bullecourt, and Hamel, with their brothers and mates falling all around them.

Back home in an Australian country town, their mother, father, sisters and remaining brother also had to crack hardy, as the bad news from the front just kept coming, and coming.

Told from the heart by the Searle brothers' great-nephew, award-winning author Stephen Dando-Collins using the letters and journals of the Searle brothers and remembrances of other family members, CRACK HARDY is a compelling book that defines Australia and Australians during the making of our nation on the far-flung battlefields of the First World War.

The Business Of Nature: John Gould And Australia

In 1838, John Gould and his wife, Elizabeth, left behind their family and home in London to travel to the far-flung colony of Van Diemens Land, from where Gould would travel around the mainland to observe the native fauna. Goulds artistsElizabeth foremost among themwould depict these creatures in exquisite lithographs, accompanied by Goulds commentary. With all the acumen of a shrewd Victorian entrepreneur, Gould established a thriving business that took him into the world of the British aristocracy and the scientific elite. His is a tale of enduring love and of a mans unending ability to see beauty in nature, despite the greatest of lifes tragedies.

Sempre Con Te, Always With You

Sempre Con Te (Always with you) tells the fascinating and very personal stories of Italian women who migrated to Sydneys Northern beaches during the early 20th century. The stories of nine of these women, all from the harsh rural area of Calabria, who came to settle in the Northern Beaches suburbs of Dee Why, Beacon Hill, Brookvale and Narrabeen are revealed through family mementoes, photographs, recipes and treasured objects. Their stories describe the pain of separation, the bewilderment of settling in a different country, the struggle to set up a new life (often with a husband they had not met before) and the joy of being reunited with family and friends in the years that followed.

Pozieres: The Anzac Story

In 1916, one million men fought in the first battle of the Somme. Victory hinged on their ability to capture a small village called Pozières, perched on the highest ridge of the battlefield. After five attempts to seize it, the British called in the Anzacs to complete this seemingly impossible task.

At midnight on 23 July 1916, thousands of Australians stormed and took Pozières. Forty-five days later they were relieved, having suffered 23,000 casualties to gain a few miles of barren, lunar landscape. Despite the toll, the capture of Pozières was heralded as a stunning tactical victory. Yet for the exhausted survivors, the war-weary public, and the families of the dead and maimed, victory came at such terrible cost it seemed indistinguishable from defeat.

This account tells the stories of those men who fought at Pozières. Drawing on their letters and diaries, it reveals a battlefield drenched in chaos, suffering, and fear. Bennett sheds light on the story behind the official history, showing how commanders struggled with a war conducted on an unprecedented scale and how the survivors witnessed appalling human tragedy to return home as heroes but, too often, shattered men.

While Gallipoli has entered the national mythology, Pozières has received less attention. This superb book recreates the experiences of those men who fought in one of the largest and most devastating battles of the Great War.

Scott Bennett

Scott Bennett was born in Bairnsdale, Victoria, in 1966, and holds an Executive Master of Business Administration from the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of Sydney. Over the last ten years, he has worked for many of Australia’s most recognised retail companies as a management consultant or an executive manager.

In 2003, he visited the Great War battlefields in France and Belgium to retrace the steps of his great-uncles, who had fought there. The experience led him to question the many ‘truths’ that have developed around the Anzac legend. The result was the writing of Pozières, which re-examines the battle of Pozières and the Anzac legend.

Watch This Space: The Future Of Australian Journalism

With traditional print media sinking under shrinking readerships, redundancies and declining advertising revenue, the imminent death of 'quality' journalism is being prophesied by academics, publishers and journalists. Are we losing a vital public sphere for interrogating those in power and creating local and national communities? Or is a moribund media status quo getting a long overdue shake up? Milissa Deitz argues that far from being the grave digger, the internet is in fact reinventing and reinvigorating 'citizen journalism'. More democratic through interactivity and participation, more immediately responsive to rapidly changing events and issues, we increasingly go online for our news. Far from undermining traditional journalism, a changing mediascape composed of dedicated online journals, blogs, social networking, twitter and mobile telephony, is returning journalism to its radical and democratic roots, recreating the feisty, informed public domain extinguished over the twentieth century by the concentration of media ownership in Australia.

All Day Long The Noise Of Battle

During the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in February 1968 an Australian infantry company assaulted a North Vietnamese bunker complex. In the longest sustained attack fought by Australians during the Vietnam War the soldiers went forward again and again over three days. Yet the battle passed without any notice in Australia at the time, and the men who fought it were further insulted by higher command's apparent failure to acknowledge what they had done. Above all, decorations for their bravery seemed pitifully meagre. What happened? And why did these men fall through the net of our historical memory? In answering these questions Gerard Windsor brings up into relief so many of the individual soldiers who went into this battle. "All Day Long the Noise of Battle" is a book about the strengths and problems of this group of men, their alliances and tensions, their relaxations and misbehaviour, their morale, their internal tensions, their reactions to combat, their stand-out characters and their leaders. And throughout, "All Day Long the Noise of Battle" becomes an essay on the nature of men's memory of battle. Gerard Windsor brings the eye of a writer of fiction to this episode of Australian heroism and tragedy. Full of memorable personalities and their stories, "All Day Long the Noise of Battle" is a ground-breaking and moving book. This title includes contemporary photos of many of the men in this battle, bringing you closer to the people at the heart of the story. Written with extensive research and input from fifty of the men in the Company, this is a very personal insight into the men and their story, in the context of the trials of the Vietnam War. It is a highly factual, explosive contribution to the ongoing debate about recognition and fitting decorations for the men who fought in Vietnam.

Willingly Into The Fray: One Hundred Years Of Australian Nursing

Comprises the personal stories of sixty-five individual nurses, their voices preserved and their words, often fraught with emotion and mired in distress at what they have seen, endured and railed against, carefully retained. Many of these stories are told for the first time, particularly those of the recent campaigns and disaster relief.

Bomber

Tony "Bomber" Bower-Miles was a young sapper in the Australian Army when he first went to Vietnam in 1969. Landmines were one of the biggest threats faced by troops on both sides, and much of Bomber's work involved task of clearing them. He saw mates and colleagues killed and horribly injured around him, leaving him with a deep-rooted hatred of these deadly weapons

He returned to Australia scarred, battered and unable to relate to a peacetime world. Alcohol became his way of escaping, and his life spiralled down into addiction and violence. He could easily have been lost – another vet unable to cope, another grim statistic put down to the tragedy of Vietnam.

But Bomber wasn't ready to let the war beat him. In 2001, he returned to South East Asia, putting his old skills to work in the dangerous job of clearing the millions of forgotten land mines that litter Cambodia. Starting from scratch, with makeshift equipment, Bomber established the Vietnam Veterans Mine Clearing Team, an NGO with a difference – as those who fought now help others still suffering the consequences of the conflict.

Bomber is his story. Tough and uncompromising, it reveals the true face of war in all its brutality. But it also tells of redemption and humanity in the hardest of cirumstances.

Author Information

Tony Bomber Bower-Miles was born in Victoria in 1950. A childhood love of explosives, coupled with his father's tales of military life, led him to join the army at seventeen. In 1969 he went to Vietnam, where he served his tour as a sapper – engineers who lay and clear mines. Life after the war proved tough, however, and like so many veterans, Bomber went on a downward spiral into alcoholism and the many symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Eventually he returned to Asia in 2001, having heard about mine clearance efforts going on in Cambodia. Inspired by the people he met there, Bomber is now spending his retirement raising funds and helping to clear the mines littering the countryside.

Gallipoli

The first book since Charles Bean's Official History to provide a detailed narrative of the bloody and tragic battle for Hill 60, along with the other engagements that went on until the very last days at Anzac - viewed from both sides of the trenches. It is also the first since Bean to examine the planning and execution of the evacuation of the troops from Anzac - the most successful part of the whole Gallipoli fiasco. Cameron's detailed research and use of firsthand accounts enables him to convey the confusion of battle while telling a good story with a powerful emotional impact.

Batavia

The greatest story in Australia’s history.

The Shipwreck of the Batavia combines in just the one tale the birth of the world's first corporation, the brutality of colonisation, the battle of good vs evil, the derring-do of sea-faring adventure, mutiny, ship-wreck, love, lust, blood-lust, petty fascist dictatorship, criminality, a reign of terror, murders most foul, sexual slavery, natural nobility, survival, retribution, rescue, first contact with native peoples and so much more.

Described by author Peter FitzSimons as "a true Adults Only version of Lord of the Flies, meeting Nightmare on Elm Street," the story is set in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland. The magnificent ship is already boiling over with a mutinous plot that is just about to break into the open when, just off the coast of Western Australia, it strikes an unseen reef in the middle of the night.

While Commandeur Francisco Pelsaert decides to take the long-boat across 2000 miles of open sea for help, his second-in-command Jeronimus Cornelisz takes over, quickly deciding that 250 people on a small island is unwieldy for the small number of supplies they have. Quietly, he puts forward a plan to 40 odd mutineers how they could save themselves, kill most of the rest and spare only a half-dozen or so women, including his personal fancy, Lucretia Jansz - one of the noted beauties of Holland - to service their sexual needs. A reign of terror begins, countered only by a previously anonymous soldier Wiebbe Hayes, who begins to gather to him those are prepared to do what it takes to survive . . . hoping against hope that the Commandeur will soon be coming back to them with the rescue yacht.

It all happened, long ago, and it is for a very good reason that Peter FitzSimons has long maintained that this is "far and away the greatest story in Australia's history, if not the world's." FitzSimons unique writing style has made him the country's best-selling non-fiction writer over the last ten years, and he is perfect man to make this bloody, chilling, stunning tale come alive.

The Many Worlds Of R.H. Mathews: In Search Of An Australian Anthropologist

The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews is about the life and work of the renowned 19th century surveyor turned ethnologist, R.H. Mathews, whose studies of Aboriginal Australia were path-breaking and quite controversial. His childhood in Goulburn meant that he grew up with Aboriginal children as playmates, so when he began his obsession with documenting Aboriginal life, he came to his subject with fond familiarity, not the freakshow interest that spurred many of the English anthropologists of the time, especially Baldwin Spencer, who went out of his way to discredit Mathews' work, especially after his death. Largely due to this conspiracy, Mathews has been a reasonably unknown figure in early anthropology, but his legacy and work have been reassessed and he is emerging as one of our most important documentors of Aboriginal language, legends and mythology. So important, in fact, that it is his legacy of papers, interpretations and documents, held largely in the National Library of Australia, that is being used by contemporary Aboriginal people to rejuvenate their culture. Martin's approach to his subject is not conventional biography, but something more ambitious and unusual, and one perfectly tuned to the revelations it contains.

Suddenly, Last Winter: An Election Diary

Just as Bob Ellis's last book One Hundred Days of Summer, about Tony Abbott's ascension to the Liberal leadership, was ready to hit the shelves, the nation was stunned to witness Labor suddenly call time on Kevin Rudd's Prime MInistership and replace him with Julia Gillard. Such political turbulence couldn't remain unexamined by this restless observer of our times.

Ellis watches in horror as his beloved Labor lurches from miscalculated announcement to egregious strategic error in the ensuing federal election campaign, threatening to lose government after one calamitous term to the hard-right charmer Abbott. When the rural independents swung their support behind Gillard, Ellis was there, chatting to them between the closed-door meetings that decided the government.

Suddenly, Last Winter is another diary of an extraordinary period in Australian political history, as ever combining Ellis's insider understanding with caustic wit.

Speech Matters: Getting Free Speech Right

Why is Australia’s current attitude towards freedom of speech harmful to democracy?

Australia is the land of the ‘fair go’. But does this attitude extend to freedom of speech? Unlike the US, Australia has no Bill of Rights to protect our right to free speech, yet most Australians take this right for granted. In Speech Matters, political analyst Katharine Gelber shows why many of Australia’s laws and policies, supported by the wider public, are actually harmful to democratic participation in politics.

A council officer shuts down a Sydney art exhibition that sends a political message about the Iraq war; Big Day Out organisers are attacked for asking attendees not to wear the Australian flag after the Cronulla riots. Gelber investigates a wide range of political expression to see how we value free speech: from different uses of the national flag, hate speech and anti-terrorism laws to protest, campaigns against corporate actions and art. Gelber considers the laws and policies that regulate behaviour alongside the views of everyday Australians about these issues.

What Gelber finds is a political culture that is failing free speech. Our laws allow powerful companies to silence dissent while making peaceful protests difficult to carry out. Speech Matters tackles these controversial issues head-on, providing compelling reasons for why we should protect the types of speech that give everyone a voice in deciding how our country is run.

Australian Prime Ministers

Larrikins or patricians, socialists or silvertails - in the century following Federation, Australia's prime ministers were as diverse as the nation they served. Some came from backgrounds of rural or urban poverty and were largely self-educated, looking to the ballot box as a tool of social justice; some were drawn to politics as their destiny; still others regarded high office as no more than their due. One or two demonstrated that, as well as being the art of the possible, politics can also be the art of the unlikely.

In this lively and authoritative book, 21 historians, biographers and political analysts discuss and profile the men who have attained Australia's highest public office and the forces that shaped them. In doing so, Australian Prime Ministers obliquely considers the nature of Australian democratic and political power.

The Way They Were: The View From The Hill Of The 25 Years That Remade Australia

For many years reading Alan Ramsey’s vitriolic, vindictive but always entertaining and insightful pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald was a standard feature of Saturday mornings for many Australians. He may have disappeared from our Saturday papers but he certainly hasn’t been forgotten – by those who applauded his opinions, those who were enraged by them, and by the politicians he wrote about. From mid-1987 to the end of 2008, no one had greater access to our national parliament and politicians than Alan Ramsey. From the granite quarry of national politics in Canberra, Ramsey wrote 2273 columns for the Sydney Morning Herald. This collection of his best reveals how twenty-five years of national leadership by Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard changed Australia forever, as the Labor Party stopped being the Labor Party and became just another meaningless political label like the Liberal Party. It also includes a new essay, reflecting on the tumultuous political events of 2010.

Boyer Lectures: The Republic Of Learning: Higher Education Transforms Australia

ach year the ABC Board invites a prominent Australian to present six radio lectures expressing their thoughts on major social, cultural, scientific or political issues. In 2010 Professor Glyn Davis presents the 51st Boyer Lecture series, entitled The Republic of Learning: higher education transforms Australia. The lectures explore Australia′s higher education landscape, revealing an experience sharply at odds with traditional images of sleepy cloisters and ivory towers.

How Australia Decides: Election Reporting And The Media

In recent years, the Australian media have come under fire for their reporting of politics and election campaigns. Political reporting is said to be too influenced by commercial concerns, too obsessed with gossip and scandal, and too focused on trivia and 'sound bites' at the expense of serious issues. There are accusations of bias, sensationalism, 'lazy' journalism and 'horse-race' reporting that is obsessed with opinion polls. How Australia Decides is the first book to put these allegations to the test. Based on a four-year empirical study, Sally Young reports the results of the only systematic, historical and in-depth analysis of Australian election reporting. This groundbreaking book shows how election reporting has changed over time, and how political news audiences, news production and shifts in political campaigning are influencing media content – with profound implications for Australian democracy.

The Dreaming And Other Essays

W.E.H. Stanner's words changed Australia. Without condescension and without sentimentality, in essays such as 'The Dreaming' Stanner conveyed the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture. In his Boyer Lectures he exposed a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale,' regarding the fate of the Aborigines, for which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. And in his essay 'Durmugam' he provided an unforgettable portrait of a warrior's attempt to hold back cultural change. 'He was such a man,' Stanner wrote. 'I thought I would like to make the reading world see and feel him as I did.'

The pieces collected here span the career of W.E.H. Stanner as well as the history of Australian race relations. They reveal the extraordinary scholarship, humanity and vision of one of Australia's finest essayists. Their revival is a significant event.

With an introductory essay by Robert Manne.

"Bill Stanner was a superb essayist with a wonderful turn of phrase and ever fresh prose. He always had important things to say, which have not lost their relevance. It is wonderful that they will now be available to a new and larger audience." - Henry Reynolds

"Stanner's essays still hold their own among this country's finest writings on matters black and white." - Noel Pearson

The Politics Of Suffering (New Edition)

The Politics of Suffering cuts through the cant and offers fresh insight and hope for a new era in Indigenous politics.

"Incandescent, emotional, tragic and challenging' - Marcia Langton

Peter Sutton is a fearless and authoritative voice in Aboriginal politics.

In this groundbreaking book, he asks why, after three decades of liberal thinking, has the suffering and grief in so many Aboriginal communities become worse?

The picture Sutton presents is tragic. He marshals shocking evidence against the failures of the past, and argues provocatively that three decades of liberal consensus on Aboriginal issues has collapsed.

Sutton is a leading Australian anthropologist who has lived and worked closely with Aboriginal communities. He combines clear-eyed, original observation with deep emotional engagement. The Politics of Suffering cuts through the cant and offers fresh insight and hope for a new era in Indigenous politics.

Peter Sutton is an anthropologist and linguist who has worked with Aboriginal people since 1969. He speaks three Cape York languages and as an expert on Aboriginal land ownership has assisted with over fifty land rights cases. He has authored or edited twelve books, including Native Title in Australia: an Ethnographic Perspective, regarded as the most authoritative work in its field. He is an Affiliate Professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide, and the Division of Anthropology, South Australian Museum. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

The Australians: Insiders And Outsiders On The National Character Since 1770

US General Douglas MacArthur, on the Australians fighting on the Kokoda Track, 1942: “Operations reports show that progress on the trail is NOT repeat NOT satisfactory.” To which Major-General A.S. Allen drafted this reply: “If you think you can do any better come up and bloody try.”

Is there an Australian national character? What are its distinguishing features? Over the years, how have insiders and outsiders summed up this country and its people, and how have Australians responded to outside criticism?

In The Australians, John Hirst gathers together the key assessments of the national character, on topics as diverse as sport, war, mateship, humour, put-downs, suburbia and going native. There is celebration and criticism. There is humour and insight. There is the difference between what Australians think of themselves and what they are really like.

Contributors include Winston Churchill, Ned Kelly, Tim Flannery, Henry Lawson, Peter Cosgrove, Germaine Greer, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Captain James Cook, David Malouf, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Patrick White, Oscar Wilde and Tim Winton.

“This is the most democratic place I have ever been in. And the more I see of democracy, the more I dislike it.”—D.H. Lawrence

The Pocketbook Of Aussie History

When was the first Melbourne cup, and which horse won? Who was the first woman to stand for federal parliament? What’s the second verse of ‘Advance Australia Fair’? And why was Vegemite renamed Parwill in 1928?

Here, in one handy reference, are the dates and deeds, the heroes and villains, the icons and famous words that have shaped our country and its place in the world. Full of useful facts – and a healthy dose of irreverence – The Pocketbook of Aussie History is an entertaining guide to Australia’s curious past.

‘A useful reference for anyone who tuned out of Australian history in high school.’ The Age

‘A terrific idea’ David Koch, Sunrise, Network Seven

‘You can dip into it anywhere and have all sorts of dinner-table conversations based on it’ Jon Faine, ABC Radio Melbourne

Botany Bay: The Real Story

For the first time in two hundred years, here is a full and authentic account of the beginnings of modern Australia.

We all know the conventional story. Established as a dumping ground for Britain’s criminals, Australia owes its existence simply to overcrowded jails and a daunting remoteness from everywhere else.

In Botany Bay: The Real Story, Alan Frost goes beyond these clichés to shed new light on the decision to settle New South Wales. He examines the hopes and fears of the politicians who took the decision, and the larger commercial and military needs that underwrote it.

In the years before the First Fleet sailed, Frost reveals, British authorities considered sending convicts to sites in North and South America, Africa and New Zealand. In deciding on Botany Bay, they hoped not only to rid Britain of its excess criminals, but also to gain a key strategic outpost and take control of valuable natural resources.

The culmination of thirty-five years’ study of previously neglected archives, Botany Bay is a groundbreaking work that offers new and surprising insights into how Australia came to be.

Cities Pack (Hobart, Brisbane, Sydney)

Special bind-up of the first three books in the cities series written by prolific Australian authors - Hobart, Brisbane and Sydney.

Sydney by Delia Falconer

"Sydney may look golden, but this is the sunniness of Mozart, whose bright notes, especially at their most joyous, seem to cast themselves out across a great abyss."

Sydney has always been the sexiest and most gaudy of our cities. In this book, the third in a series in which leading Australian authors write about their hometowns, novelist Delia Falconer conjures up its sandstone, humidity, and jacarandas. But she goes beyond these to find a far more complex city: beautiful, violent, half-wild, and at times deeply spiritual. It is a slightly unreal place, haunted by a past that it has never quite grasped, or come to terms with.

Here, in her first non-fiction book, she proves herself an adept memoirist. She twines the stories of the people that have made Sydney the twenty-first century city it is today. Mad clergymen, amateur astronomers, Indigenous weather experts, crims and victims, photographers and artists: their stories are surprising, funny, and moving.

In Seatch of Hobart.

Peter Timms leads us on a journey through his adopted city of Hobart, Australias smallest, most southerly, least prosperous, but arguably most beautiful state capital. He reveals a city in transition, shaking off its dark and troubled past to claim its special place in the contemporary world: going boutique, nice and slow, as one overseas visitor notes. From Hobarts convict legacy, its spectacular natural setting, heritage architecture and climate, to crime-rates, economic hardship and the recent disfigurements of the developers, Timms brings a wealth of fresh insights, exploring the city with a mixture of affection, admiration, frustration and sadness, interviewing a wide range of residents along the way. Those who have experienced Hobart as tourists will be surprised and intrigued by the lively, complex society this book reveals. Those who live here will surely discover their city anew.

Brisbane by Matthew Condon

I keep coming back to the light of Brisbane. If you are born into it, this palette of gentle pinks and oranges at dawn and dusk, the blast white of midday in summer, the lemon luminescence of mid-morning and mid-afternoon, you keep it with you, and measure all other light by it. If you live away from it, then step back into it, it is the first thing that tells you you’re home.

In this book, the third in a series on Australian cities in which leading Australian authors write about their home city, novelist and journalist Matthew Condon rediscovers the city of his childhood, Brisbane. Having returned there after many years, Condon takes the reader on a unique and personal journey through contemporary Brisbane, unearthing its history—sometimes literally—and painting a portrait of the contemporary transformation of the city.

Man Bites Murdoch

An explosive account of almost 40 years in the news business that exposes the inner workings of the world's biggest media company.

Man Bites Murdoch is Bruce Guthrie's explosive account of almost 40 years in the news business, his brutal dismissal from Australia's biggest selling paper, the celebrated court case that exposed the inner workings of the world's biggest media company, and the treachery of its most senior executives.

Guthrie survived tuberculosis, Melbourne's gritty northern suburbs and a boss who twice tried to sack him in his first six months in newspapers, to become a foreign correspondent and then one of Australia's feistiest and most controversial editors. His CV boasts editorships of The Age, The Sunday Age, Herald Sun, Who Weekly, The Weekend Australian Magazine, even a high level stint at America's celeb-news bible, People. Then, just as he claimed one of the industry's most glittering prizes, he fell foul of Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen, who promptly dispensed with his services. What would any self-respecting Broadmeadows boy do in such circumstances? Sue them, of course.

Man Bites Murdoch exposes the back rooms of Australian business, politics and media and offers a front-row seat at the many seismic events that played out over the past 20 years, including Murdoch's relentless push for growth both here and overseas, young Warwick Fairfax's ill-fated takeover of the family company and the extraordinary impact of the internet.

Man Bites Murdoch is both an unflinching account of the powerplays and relationships that helped shape modern media in Australia and an inspiring story of one man's victory over a formidable foe.

Bruce Guthrie began his media career as a copyboy at The Herald in Melbourne in 1972. After completing a cadetship, he worked in a variety of reporting roles for the paper until 1985, when he was appointed US west coast correspondent for the Herald and Weekly Times, based in Los Angeles.

In 1987 he returned to Australia and became deputy editor of The Herald, leaving two years later to help launch The Sunday Age. He was appointed editor of that paper in 1992 and editor of The Age in 1995. He joined Time Inc. as a senior editor at People magazine in New York in 1998, and became editor of Who Weekly a year later.

In 2004, he returned to News Limited to become editor of The Weekend Australian Magazine and to launch The Australian's monthly magazine, Wish. He was appointed editor-in-chief of the Herald Sun, Australia's largest selling daily newspaper, in February 2007-a role he filled until his dramatic and unexpected exit in November 2008.

Guthrie is married to journalist Janne Apelgren and lives in Melbourne with their two teenage children and a golden retriever named Tilly.

Transport: An Australian History

Trains, planes, boats and cars. What did Australians do before the invention of modern transport? Aborigines travelled by foot and used canoes made from large sheets of bark stripped from eucalyptus trees, but with European settlement new ideas and technologies emerged for crossing our vast and challenging country. Transport brings together the stories of heroic, groundbreaking and everyday enterprises in transport – in shipping, roads, rail and aviation – across Australia. This is the fascinating story of how transport in Australia has developed, and how it has impacted our lives.

The Best Australian Essays 2010

In The Best Australian Essays 2010, Robert Drewe collects the year’s finest works of non-fiction. These essays roam widely, capturing the preoccupations and events of the previous year. Showcasing our finest writers on a range of topics both public and personal, The Best Australian Essays 2010 is an indispensable record of the year that was.

Sunil Badami
Murray Bail
Carmel Bird
David Brooks
Peter Conrad
Mark Dapin
Sarah Drummond
Elizabeth Farrelly
Tim Flannery
Shelley Gare
Lorna Hallahan
Janet Hawley
Ian Henderson
Amanda Hooton
Clive James
Christine Kenneally
Jo Lennan
Melissa Lucashenko
Shane Maloney
David Malouf
Anne Manne
Robert Manne
Kathy Marks
David Marr
Paul McGeough
Alex Miller
Les Murray
Pauline Nguyen
Maureen O’Shaughnessy
Nicolas Rothwell
Guy Rundle
Andrew Sant
Gerard Windsor

Shack: In Praise of an Australian Icon

In Australia shacks have become our protest against the brick veneer, the place where we unwind on holiday, the workshop that feeds our soul.

Photographer Simon Griffiths has travelled the countryside, from Jericho in Tasmania to the remote coast of Broome, to bring us images of shacks that are both familiar and exotic. We meet the shack dwellers – a mix of artists, environmentalists, fishermen, homebuilders and socialites – and experience the pleasure of inhabiting spaces that are at once monuments to self-expression and symbols of old-fashioned common sense.

Beautifully put-together, Shack is a book that takes us back in history, out into the remote reaches of the famous Australian landscape and inwards to connect with our common desire for retreat and renewal.

The Party Thieves: The Real Story of the 2010 Election

Barrie Cassidy picked a hell of an election to cover: changes of leaders on both sides of politics, Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, a hung parliament, a Green and independent ascendancy, and a country not knowing who its Prime Minister was for nearly three weeks.

But in the beginning were the Party Thieves, Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd. Turnbull’s manic desire to get his own way in the party, and because he simply stopped listening, led to his demise. Rudd stole the party through his authoritarian approach to government and a cabinet that felt alienated from the job of governing.

Cassidy contends that the removal of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in the lead-up to the 2010 election ranks with the Dismissal, the disappearance of Holt and the day Fraser called an election as one of the four big stories in Australian politics in 50 years.

In both cases, the members of their respective parties came at the Party Thieves to reclaim what was rightfully theirs, and set the stage for the ascension of Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard.

And all that, before we even get to the 2010 election campaign.

The Party Thieves is more than just a campaign diary of the extraordinary 2010 election and its aftermath; it is a rip-roaring, incisive analysis of a tumultuous nine months in politics that even surprised veteran journalists such as Cassidy. This is a must for political junkies of any persuasion.

Barrie Cassidy has been covering federal politics since he was first posted to Canberra in 1979. He has worked as political correspondent for ABC TV and radio and political analyst for The 7.30 Report. He is a former president of the parliamentary press gallery.

He was for four years senior press secretary to Prime Minister Bob Hawke and eventually his senior political adviser. Barrie has worked overseas as a correspondent, again in major political capitals. First, as US correspondent for The Australian in Washington during the rise of Bill Clinton and then as European correspondent for the ABC based in Brussels.

He has hosted many political/discussion/interview programs on television including Meet The Press and The Last Shout on Network Ten and currently, Insiders and Offsiders on the ABC.

The Australian Book Of Atheism

Does the Anzac ethos have roots in atheism? Does prayer have a place in Parliament? Should ‘creation science’ be taught in Australian schools? Is atheism maligned in political debate? Will Australia’s future be godless?

While prominent international thinkers have made significant contributions to the general conversation on belief and religion, Australians have been less heard.

The Australian Book of Atheism is the first collection to explore atheism from an Australian viewpoint. Bringing together essays from 33 of the nation’s pre-eminent atheist, rationalist, humanist, and sceptical thinkers, it canvasses a range of opinions on religion and secularism in Australia.

Including contributions from Michael Bachelard, Dr Leslie Cannold, Robyn Williams, Lyn Allison, Tim Minchin, and Dr Philip Nitschke, this is a diverse and entertaining collection of thoughts on a world without God.

Henry Ayers: The Man Who Became A Rock

'The most wonderful natural feature I have ever seen.' With these words the explorer William Gosse expressed the awe he and many others have felt at the natural phenomenon of Uluru. The first white person to reach the central Australian monolith, he gave it the name 'Ayers Rock'. But who was Henry Ayers, the man whose name is forever associated with Australia's most recognisable natural icon? And why should he still be remembered today? Although the rock now carries its ancient indigenous name, Uluru, the name of Ayers is still linked with the the Rock's 'discovery' in 1873. Indeed, 'Ayers Rock' is one of the most famous natural wonders on earth and, despite its remote location, attracts over 400,000 visitors each year. This book, the first biography of Henry Ayers, focuses attention on the complex character behind the name and examines all aspects of his life - from his humble origins in the naval city of Portsmouth in southern England, his migration to Australia and his career as a miner, businessman and eventually as Premier of South Australia - a post to which he was elected seven times. It provides a fascinating insight into Australian history through the life of a man who was consistently in the upper echelons of influence and authority in colonial society and whose legacy lives through his association with the most famous and recognisable natural feature of his adopted country.

Hell's Only Half Full

Hell’s Only Half Full tells the colourful story of Victorian pioneer–settler Lucy Little (Nan) through the lives of three generations of her family. It is essentially a gritty yet engaging story of strong, resourceful women (and fairly ineffectual men) dealing with abject poverty in an unforgiving environment. It is a story peppered with humour — beginning with the spectacle of a horse being given an enema — and spiced with drama, pathos, even fratricide.

Hell's Only Half Full is the winner of category C (book) of the 2010 Museums Australia Multimedia and Publication Design Awards. The book was designed by Sarah Evans.

Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir

On childhood holidays to the beach the sun and surf kept Tim Winton outside in the mornings, in the water; the wind would drive him indoors in the afternoons, to books and reading. This ebb and flow of the day became a way of life.

In this beautifully delicate memoir, Tim Winton writes about his obsession with what happens where the water meets the shore – about diving, dunes, beachcombing – and the sense of being on the precarious, wondrous edge of things that haunts his novels.

Complemented by the breathtaking photographs of Narelle Autio, Land's Edge is a celebration of the coastal life and those who surrender themselves to it.

'Winton's homage to the ocean and his childhood... A book to return to again and again.' Matt Condon, Sun Herald

'A love letter to the beach, an enchanting celebration of life on the edge.' Sydney Morning Herald

25 Years Of Australian Geographic Photography

Twenty-Five years ago Australian Geographic began documenting all facets of Australia and Australians.From the Red Deserts to the Coral reefs, from Suburban landscapes to outback Aboriginal Australia these photographs reveal the true spirit of Australia.There are five chapters: Wildlife Landscape Culture Adventure IndustryEach is introduced by a short essay & followed by 30-40 photographs.

Culture Crisis: Anthropology And Politics In Aboriginal Australia

In 2007 the Australian Government recognised that the health, safety and education of the nation’s remote Aboriginal citizens were in a state of crisis. Its response was what became known as the Northern Territory Intervention, which sparked a heated national debate about Indigenous disadvantage and autonomy. Moreover, it caused Australian anthropologists to question the contribution of their own discipline. Anthropology has always informed and provoked policy change, and has a tradition of confirming difference. So why did the government assume that Aboriginal culture must be interrupted, reshaped and developed, in order to be successful? In Culture Crisis, some of Australia’s leading anthropologists put the ‘Culture Wars’ under the microscope, dissecting the notion of difference and asking whether this is a useful way of looking at the problems remote Indigenous Australians face. An urgently needed dialogue, this book unflinchingly confronts the policies that have failed these communities and shows how the discipline of anthropology can still provide hope.

Australian Encounters

What happened when Bob Hawke locked horns with Frank Sinatra, when Errol Flynn interviewed Fidel Castro, and when Norman Gunston joined Frank Zappa on stage? Australian Encounters is a one-of-a-kind book, written by Shane Maloney and illustrated by Chris Grosz. With abundant humour, it tells of 50 true encounters - public or private, ill-fated or fortuitous - between a renowned Australian and an international mover and shaker.

These lively encounters appear regularly in the Monthly and are presented here as a collection for the first time.

“Bizarre, unexpected – and memorable!” – Barry Jones

“Shane Maloney has been getting couples to wriggle about lewdly under the doona for years. It’s a triumph that he has squeezed all that grunt and poke into this startling book.” – H.G. Nelson

Islam Dreaming: Indigenous Muslims In Australia

Indigenous Australians are increasingly finding in Islam the possibility of reconnection with lost Indigenous traditions and a model of community unavailable elsewhere. But this is not a new story. From the Makassan trepang fisherman of Arnhem Land, the Malay pearl-divers of Broome, through the Afghan camel drivers of the interior, Muslims have lived and worked in Australia for over three centuries, and were among the earliest peoples to form connections with Indigenous Australians. Islam Dreaming tells the stories of Australia’s Indigenous Muslims.

First People: The Eastern Kulin Of Melbourne, Port Phillip And Central Victoria

This is the only up-to-date book available about the Eastern Kulin peoples. The Kulin nation lived around Port Phillip Bay and the Yarra River valley and their territory stretched as far north as the Murray River at Echuca. Gary Presland looks at the Eastern Kulin peoples from before European invasion in the mid-1830s and their world which was changed forever. The Kulin, however, were able to survive and maintain something of their culture through a preparedness to alter their time-honoured practice. Although the culturally and spiritually rich traditional ways were gone, Kulin people maintained their connection to land and ultimately found a place within mainstream European society.