Readings.com.au: Walkley Non-Fiction Award 2008 Longlist

The Bone Man Of Kokoda

Kokichi Nishimura was a member of the Japanese Imperial Army. In 1942 he fought along every foot of Kokoda as the Japanese attempted to takea Port Moresby. He was the only man from his company to survive the campaign, and made a promise that one day he would return to his comrades and bring them home for proper burial. After the war, Nishimura prospered. But under the surface, the driving ambition of his life was to fulfil his promise. In 1979, he shocked his family by returning to New Guinea to search for the remains of Japanese soldiers. For the next 25 years, Nishimura lived alone along the Kokoda Track. Armed only with a metal detector, a mattock and a shovel, he searched for his dead comrades. His story is an incredible adventure that gives us a radically different viewpoint on a battle that has become part of our national myth.

The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia

In The Content Makers Margaret Simons explains the changes taking place in the Australian media. She analyses audiences, our major media organisations, the role of government – and the implications of all of these for our society and our democracy.

Her examination leads her to the conclusion that the challenges facing the content providers in the modern world are part of a broader striving, a very old struggle – we might call it the search for meaning. The big media businesses may or may not survive into the future, but content certainly will, because we need it, and have always needed it.

The Content Makers delivers a visceral understanding of how modern media works, gives a plain-language explanation of new media, and provides straightforward information on recent changes to ownership legislation and what they mean. But most importantly, it suggests a vision for the future – a. new way of looking at the role of the content makers and how they and their audiences might find new hope and purpose in the future.

Vietnam: The Australian War

'War takes a blender to standards and values ... Men come back and spend the rest of their lives trying to find out who they are ...' - Harry Whiteside, who served with the SAS and the Royal Australian Regiment in Vietnam'Surely God weeps,' an Australian soldier wrote in despair of the conflict in Vietnam. But no God intervened to shorten the years of carnage and devastation in this most controversial of wars.Seen as the last 'hot' frontline of the Cold War, the ten-year struggle in the rice paddies and jungles of South Vietnam unleashed the most devastating firepower on the Vietnamese nation and visited terrible harm on civilians and soldiers.Yet the Australian forces applied tactics that were very different from those of the Americans. Guided by their commanders' experience of jungle combat, Australian troops operated with stealth, deception and restraint in pursuing a 'better war'.Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti-war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.More than 500 soldiers were killed and thousands wounded. Those who made it home returned to a hostile and ignorant country and a reception that scarred them forever. This is their story.

The Godfather: The Life Of Brian Burke

Once touted as a future prime minister of Australia, former WA premier Brian Burke has had a rollercoaster political career. This is the first major biography of this charismatic and influential politician who even out of power and disgraced, pulls the political strings in WA and beyond.

As premier, Brian Burke was one of the key players behind the mineral boom that became the infamous WA Inc in the 1980s. After a high profile inquiry, he was jailed for corruption in 1994 for and then again in 1997. Most men would have sought a quiet life after losing their reputation in this fashion, but Brian Burke became a ruthless behind the scenes powerbroker in WA politics, business and unions. With his capacity to deliver fundraising largesse to the ALP, his control over pre-selections, and a cadre of mafia-like devoted supporters, Brian Burke became the Godfather of WA politics. As the Corruption and Crime Commission steadily closed in on him he fled to Ireland, but his fingerprints are still all over WA politics.

Quentin Beresford tracks the rise, fall, resurrection and then collapse of the man in the Panama hat, asking what it is in Burke's personality, the nature of Labor factionalism and the WA business community that has allowed him to obtain such power and influence.

'Beresford pulls off what might have seemed an unattainable goal; shedding light on the enigma that is Brian Burke without either caricaturing him or being thrown off balance by his undoubted magnetism.' - Carmen Lawrence, former WA Premier and Federal ALP parliamentarian

Blubberland: The Dangers Of Happiness

Renowned architecture writer and former NSW City Councillor Elizabeth Farrelly broadens her scope to examine Western society’s addiction to acquiring ‘stuff’. ‘Blubber’, by her definition, is anything spare or surplus. It can be good (spare time in the day, a birdsong for the sake of it) or it can be destructive: McMansions, silicone body parts, junk food–fuelled obesity. This is an intelligent, incisive examination of why we can’t seem to stop overdoing everything in our quest for happiness – even though we now know that overconsumption is not only not making us happy, but is fast destroying the earth. Along the way, Farrelly looks at how and why we attribute value to things (including our definitions of beauty and desirability) and concludes that it all stems from a desire to impress or outdo our peers.

Other People's Country

When comfortable housewife and mother of six adult children, Maureen Helen reached her late fifties, she decided she wanted to do something a little different.

Spurred on by an adventure in Thailand, she decides to use her rusty skills to become a RAN: a remote area nurse, in an isolated Aboriginal settlement in WA's Pilbara region.

Faced with the terrible health problems of the community, inadequate equipment and a growing sense that she doesn't belong, Maureen battles her own crisis of confidence as well as the harshness and hostility of her environment.

Other People's Country is an elegantly written examination of the unexpected consequences of one woman's wish to do good. This finely judged piece of writing offers penetrating insights into the cultural clash between Aboriginal and white Australia, as well as taking a cool look at the narrator's own moral compass when faced with a demanding and hostile environment.

An Exacting Heart: The Story Of Hephzibah Menuhin

Hephzibah Menuhin had a musical gift most people only dream of. Her refusal to be defined by it led her to reinvent herself not once, but twice in her remarkable life.

Born in 1920 in San Francisco she was, like her world-renowned brother Yehudi, a child prodigy, simultaneously thrown into the spotlight at an early age and closeted by a dominating, controlling mother.

In the brief spring between the world wars, the Menuhin family travelled extensively, driven by the demands of Yehudi's career. Then Hephzibah, aged seventeen, celebrated as her brother's musical partner and on the brink of greatness in her own right, turned her back on performing. She married Lindsay Nicholas, the Melbourne-born heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and moved to his sheep property in western Victoria.

Far from playing the conventional wife of a wealthy grazier, Hephzibah threw herself into humanitarian projects in her adopted country. She raised two sons and eventually resumed performing, both solo and with Yehudi, to international acclaim. But after sixteen years that seemed from the outside happy and fulfilled, she met a man who drew her to question what she thought she knew - and to abandon her established life a second time.

What makes a woman walk out on her children? What makes her turn her back on a brilliant artistic career? An Exacting Heart reveals the complex and contradictory nature of Hephzibah Menuhin: warm-hearted, humorous, astute, generous, occasionally ruthless and wrong-headed. In portraying the life and times of this fascinating and mercurial woman. Jacqueline Kent examines not only the consequences of possessing great talent, but the costs and rewards of gambling for high emotional stakes.

Voices From The Fortress: Stories Of Survival From Terezin Concentration Camp

Paul Rea uncovered the extraordinary story of an Australian ex-prisoner of war who had been illegally thrown into a Nazi concentration camp called Terazin in Czechoslovakia, now known as the 'Living Grave'. This soldier was stripped of any protection offered by his national and military status and was punished for doing no more than his duty: escaping from a POW camp. Further investigation tracked down more than a dozen Australian and New Zealand veterans who broke a long silence to speak about their horrendous ordeals. These soldier's British counterparts were awarded Nazi war crime compensation, but all the ANZACs receiveved was denial by their Army and their governments. Voices from a Small Fortress is a record of the extraordinary experiences of the men who survived.

Thirsty Country Options For Australians

Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world and current global warming forecasts are for it to become drier still but what do we do about it? Schemes abound but will they work, can we afford them and are there hidden consequences?

Few people know more about this issue than Asa Wahlquist, Rural Writer for The Australian. In Thirsty Country she lays the facts clearly before the reader. With no agenda other than to inform, Wahlquist explains how the various schemes work, or don't, their ramifications and their financial and environmental costs. She looks at ventures, small and large, that have worked, and ones that haven't. She exposes some of the stresses and strains between private water authorities and governments that can impede sensible development and she empowers the reader with useful practical advice that they can apply in the home, garden and on the land to reduce demand.