Now I don't want to seem callous, but to me that's not a tragedy - that's natural selection.'In SURVIVAL OF THE DUMBEST, Wil Anderson turns his sharp gaze and wicked wit to the stupid, strange and perplexing quandaries of popular culture. Wil spares no-one, not even himself, as he delivers an almighty forehead slap to the modern world. And let's face it: between TV, politics, oversexed sports stars, advertising and automatic phone-banking systems - there are a lot of foreheads that need one.Wil Anderson caused cornflake snorting incidents as a breakfast announcer on Triple J, hosts ABC TV's ever-popular The Glass House and continues to thrill audiences at just about every comedy festival known to man. Now Wil has set down some of his funniest rants and observations in this book. Let's just hope there are enough people left who can read…

    He's been part of five premierships: three as a player at Essendon, where he was coached by the best, and two at Geelong, where he coached that club's greatest team of all. He exited the game amid the Essendon supplements scandal with unfinished business. After 34 years 'at a thousand kilometres an hour', Thompson has taken the opportunity to reflect on the game that shaped him and to reveal the personal cost of his involvement at the top level. We ride the bumps of the coaches' box, the boardroom and the press conferences as Mark Thompson handles things his own way. He talks about his mentors, his proteges and contemporaries with insight and candour. And he reveals the development of what became his trademark as a successful coach: building a team from the ground up to play defence-first accountable footy, with kamikaze ball movement, under a teacher-mentor relationship. This is as good a book about football as you'll get, from a purist who is not interested in the politics of the AFL. His legacy is some of the greatest footy to be played in the modern era. 'I hate group-think, it's just not my style. I have never been part of any boy's club in footy. I have been an independent going right back to my youth ...I make no apologies for saying what I think. It is my story, after all.'

    After a series of catastrophes, he needed to take drastic measures to restore himself. Opting out of the rat race, he cast himself away to a deserted island off the north-east tip of Australia, as far off the grid as was humanly possible. He has lived there ever since.One annual supermarket shop, a sketchy internet connection and enough ingredients for a home-brew satisfy Dave’s material needs. He catches fish, traps rainwater and cooks on an open fire. For company he tames dingoes, meets with friends from the Aboriginal community 40 kilometres away and entertains drop-ins such as Russell Crowe sailing past on his honeymoon. Then there’s Dave’s running feud with Boxhead, an antisocial saltwater crocodile who just won’t leave him in peace.Between heartbreak and hair-raising adventures, Dave has found happiness on Restoration Island. Brimming with humour, eccentricity and hard-earned wisdom, The Millionaire Castaway will give you a whole new view on life.

    When she was 18 her family moved to Broome, and it was the first time she'd ever used a telephone or seen a television.A year later, only hours after being railroaded into marriage by a fast-talking Yank, Sheryl locked eyes with Bob McCorry, a drover and buffalo shooter. When her marriage ended after only a few months, they began a love affair that would last a lifetime and take them to the Kimberley's harshest frontiers.Sheryl became the only woman in a team of stockmen. She soon learned how to run rogue bulls and to outsmart the neighbours in the toughest game of all – mustering cattle. The playing field was a million acres of unfenced, unmarked boundaries.Sheryl went on to become the first woman in the Kimberley to run two million-acre cattle stations, but her life was not without its share of tragedy. Her story is an epic saga of life in one of the toughest and most beautiful terrains in Australia – a story of hardship, drought, joy and triumph.

    Especially, if you are different. The (un)Lucky Sperm is a funny memoir — a collection of honest, harrowing and absurd accounts.Until he was seventeen, Brett Preiss lived in the dusty outback of Australia, where he was one of four siblings in a dysfunctional family. He learned how to survive under the most bizarre and extraordinary circumstances.In this book, he shares the trials and tribulations of his youth through anecdotes that will leave you in tears of joy or sorrow. Travel back to the ’60s and ’70s and watch Brett transform from a sperm to adolescence. Follow him having his first piano lesson, first sewing machine, first kiss and first ejaculation. The story is moving and disturbing, brutal yet hilarious. Cheer him along in his struggles and triumphs until he leaves the desert and heads off to college.If you like stories full of sarcasm and observational humor, then you are going to love this book.

    He needs surgery for a chronic shoulder injury sustained when he was hit by a car in Kabul. Like the others in detention with him, he faces an uncertain fate, and years in limbo. Most of the people in the centre have already had their spirits broken.'When psychiatrist and mother of three Emma Adams travels to Darwin as an observer of conditions for mothers and babies in the immigration detention centres there, she expects the trip to be confronting. What she doesn't expect is to return to Canberra consumed by the idea that she must help a sixteen-year-old unaccompanied Hazara boy from Afghanistan - Abdul.The premise was simple: Wouldn't any teenage boy be better off staying with a family rather than locked behind a wire fence? In this brutal and bureaucratic system, freedom was a hopeless dream. Emma and Abdul's connection, and her fight to get him out and provide him with an Australian home, a family and a future, forms an important testimony in Australia's appalling treatment of asylum seekers. Their story is a beacon of hope and humanity.

    You know, again.

    Secrets are different from privacy. They are things you are forced to keep to yourself, by family, friends, by your own shame. Secrets like these come to the surface one day and demand an airing.Emerging from an unconventional, boisterously happy childhood, Mary-Rose MacColl was a rebellious teenager. And when, at the age of fifteen, her high-school teacher and her husband started inviting Mary-Rose to spend time with them, her parents were pleased that she now had the guidance she needed to take her safely into young adulthood.It wasn't too long, though, before the teacher and her husband changed the nature of the relationship with overwhelming consequences for Mary-Rose. Consequences that kept her silent and ashamed through much of her adult life. Many years later, safe within a loving relationship, all of the long-hidden secrets and betrayals crashed down upon her and she came close to losing everything.In this poignant and brave true story, Mary-Rose brings these secrets to the surface and, in doing so, is finally able to watch them float away.

    Until he was kidnapped by the Intelligence Service.Behind his professional success, Kooshyar was a rebel on several fronts. Marginalised since boyhood as a Jew in a fundamentalist Islamic state, he was a member of a political group that opposed the government. He'd also been using his medical skills illegally, to save unmarried pregnant women from death by stoning.Snatched from the street, he was jailed and tortured and then forced to spy for the regime, before finally escaping to Turkey. There he faced a whole new struggle to keep his family safe while awaiting refugee status from the UN. He was forbidden to work and at the mercy of corrupt police, con men and red tape. Then life became more dangerous still, when the Intelligence Service tracked him down and used his mother, back in Iran, as blackmail.Kooshyar's inspiring story of how he managed to forge a new life in Australia is heightened by his largeness of heart, strength of character, and insight into human behaviour, from the unfathomably evil to the selflessly kind. With the skill of a natural storyteller, Journey of a Thousand Storms recounts a life of endurance, compassion and gritty determination.

    'They've let off an atom bomb today. Right here in W.A. Atom bombs worry the blazes out of me, and I want you at home.'In the sleepy and conservative 1950s the British began a series of nuclear tests in the Montebello archipelago off the west coast of Australia. Even today, few people know about the three huge atom bombs that were detonated there, but they lodged in the consciousness of the young Robert Drewe and would linger with him for years to come.In this moving sequel to The Shark Net, and with his characteristic frankness, humour and cinematic imagery, Drewe travels to the Montebellos to visit the territory that has held his imagination since childhood. He soon finds himself overtaken by memories and reflections on his own 'islomania'. In the aftermath of both man-made and natural events that have left a permanent mark on the Australian landscape and psyche – from nuclear tests and the mining boom to shark attacks along the coast – Drewe examines how comfortable and familiar terrain can quickly become a site of danger, and how regeneration and love can emerge from chaos and loss.

    Told through the key figures who helped build it into the thriving nation it is today, David Hill once again offers up Australian history at its most entertaining and accessible. In his latest book, David Hill traces the story of our nation from its European beginnings to Federation. When James Cook landed on the east coast of Australia, the rest of the world had some idea of how empty, vast and wild this continent was, but so little was known of it that in 1788 most people thought it was two lands. In the subsequent years, its coastline was charted, its interior opened up, and its cities, laws and economy developed. In this riveting, wide-ranging history, David Hill traces how this happened through the key figures who built this country into the thriving nation it is today: from its prescient and fair-minded first governor, Arthur Phillip, to the unpopular William Bligh, the victim of the country's first and only military coup; from the visionary builder and law-maker Lachlan Macquarie to William Wentworth, the son of a convict who secured Australia's first elected parliament; from Henry Parkes, the grand old man of politics who started the fraught process of Federation, to the first prime minister, Edmund Barton. It was Barton who formed the first Australian government just in time for the inaugural celebrations on 1 January 1901, when the nation of Australia was born! David Hill is one of our most popular writers of Australian history. His previous books, The Forgotten Children, 1788, The Gold Rush and The Great Race have all been bestsellers.

     Whether they did or not is for you to decide as Jonquil Graham takes you on a return journey to childhood and teenage years that included sea voyages, modelling assignments, making a movie, Contiki trips, doing the hippie trail across Asia and hitch-hiking around Europe. Join her in this fun flashback to memories that will make you sigh and laugh aloud as she recalls life in Australia in the 50s and 60s.

    Songwriter. Swamp child. Soul man. Tex Perkins is a true rock'n'roll animal. In this loud, uncut, no-holds-barred, laugh-out-loud and take-no-prisoners memoir, the enigmatic king of the Australian music underground lays bare an extraordinary life lived on the road, on the stage and on the edge.Raised a bible-thumping Catholic and beaten bloody on the streets of Brisbane for being a "cow-punk", skinny Gregory Perkins flees to Sydney and mutates into "Tex", rogue leader of the Dums Dums, Thug and Salamander Jim before finding a strange kind of success, celebrity, sex symboldom and icon status as Tex Perkins, snake-hipped, honey-voiced, often bloodied frontman of influential Aussie bands the Cruel Sea, Beasts of Bourbon and Tex, Don & Charlie... and inventor of "Zoneball".Gigs. Albums. Tours. Fights. Feuds. Arrests. Drugs. High times. Low roads. This is a wild ride of a life written loudly, proudly and full of punk energy.

    Their work is often secret, their bravery undeniable and for thirteen years they were at the forefront of Australia's longest war. Shunning acclaim, they are the Australian Defence Forces' brightest and best skilled.In an extraordinary investigation undertaken over ten years, Chris Masters opens up the heart of Australia's Special Forces and their war in Afghanistan. He gives voice to the soldiers, he takes us to the centre of some of the fiercest combat Australia has ever experienced and provides the most intimate examination of what it is like to be a member of this country's elite fighting forces. But he also asks difficult questions that reveal controversial clouds hanging over our Special Operations mission in Afghanistan.For Australia, there is no more important war to examine in detail. Afghanistan lives in our recent past and will continue to occupy our future. Masterfully told, No Front Line will find a place as one of Australia's finest books on contemporary soldiering.'In this remarkable book about the intense combat environment experienced by our soldiers in Afghanistan, Chris Masters captures the highs, the lows, the courage and the sacrifice of Australian warriors and their loved ones in our longest war.' - Air Chief Marshal Sir Angus Houston AK, AFC (Ret'd)'This book tells a story that many of us had not told our loved ones and will no doubt help to articulate and heal all those who sacrificed much in and out of uniform.' - Commando Warrant Officer'I was impressed by [No Front Line's] detail, quality and objectivity...I wanted to reassure you that most Regiment members understand this and are speaking positively about the book.' - Former SASR Patrol Sergeant'Thank you Chris Masters for your dedication and attention to detail in documenting this most comprehensive story of Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan.' - Former Commando corporal'I have always felt that 90% of the blokes in the unit would be supportive of the book...' - SASR Troop Sergeant'Brilliant. There's seriously no one else in Australia with the knowledge that Chris Masters has in relation to Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan. Lots of lessons learned and examples of heroism that if not for Chris Masters would be lost forever.' - Former Commando Major'Thanks for your professionalism and intellectual honesty. It is much needed in this space.' - Former SASR Trooper'Well done. Great to see the boys being recognised for their sacrifice.' - Former Commando Lance Corporal'I think you captured the feelings of many of us at the end of that deployment perfectly.' - Former Special Forces Major

    I'm not sure how we'll go now without Annie. She was like Carrie, you know, in Sex and the City. Annie was our Carrie."Without Annie, friends Catherine, Lexie and Rachel are lost. What will things be like now? How will they fill the void? Will their friendship survive? These questions are soon overshadowed by the complexities of their own lives. Catherine is excelling in her high-flying career but struggling in her relationships, especially with her unfathomable teenage daughter. Lexie is juggling the demands of her young family and the ego of her hardworking husband, while taking the first steps to achieving her own dreams. And finally Rachel, the one who can't seem to settle down, is experiencing the heady euphoria of a new relationship. But when the truth comes out about who she has fallen in love with, fragile friendships will be put to the test all over again...