Then in the late 1970s came a surprise berth on an expedition that was to define his career as a high-altitude mountaineer and transform him personally. A chronicle of his apprenticeship, Thin Air established Child as one of the great mountaineering writers of our time.Thin Air is about the intensity of climbing on the edge day after day. It is about friendships and tragedies and the memories that linger for decades. Filled with humor, irony, and pathos, Thin Air touches us with the beauty of the Baltoro Glacier's landscape and encounters with the local people. It also paints portraits of legendary mountaineers Doug Scott, Don Whillans, Alan Rouse, and others.

    A few months later, the local Aboriginal people found the six-foot-five former soldier near death. Believing he was a lost kinsman returned from the dead, they took him in, and for thirty-two years Buckley lived as a Wadawurrung man, learning his adopted tribe's language, skills and methods to survive.The outside world finally caught up with Buckley in 1835, after John Batman, a bounty hunter from Van Diemen's Land, arrived in the area, seeking to acquire and control the perfect pastureland around the bay. What happened next saw the Wadawurrung betrayed and Buckley eventually broken. The theft of Kulin country would end in the birth of a city. The frontier wars had begun.By the bestselling author of The Ship That Never Was, The Ghost and the Bounty Hunter is a fascinating and poignant true story from Australian colonial history.

        He has undertaken nineteen Himalayan expeditions, including four to Mount Everest which he climbed in 1985 at the age of fifty, and has made many first ascents in the Alps and greater ranges of the world. Along the way we will be fascinated by his many daring climbs, near-death adventures, and the many luminaries of the mountain fraternity he has climbed with, and in some cases - witness their deaths on the rock. The mercurial Dougal Haston; the legendary-tough Don Whillans, the philosopher of the rock Stephen Venables, and the enigmatic Doug Scott, plus many more – this will be an expert’s opinion on the past sixty years of British/ world mountaineering.In Ascent Chris also discusses his first wife (Wendy) who tragically passed away after a long battle with motor neuron disease  - his many years of caring for her, and then in his twilight years deciding to return to an iconic climb from his past - The Old Man of Hoy - to summit at the age of 80 years of age. He has now also found love again amidst the sadness and grief. It is a truly inspirational tale.     Ascent will be a memoir like no other. Not only a cerebral narrative on what it takes to conquer fear, and learn/ develop the technical skills necessary to climb the world’s greatest peaks; what it is like to survive in places no human being can ultimately reside in for longer than a few months at very high altitude, but also how one overcomes emotional obstacles, too, and rediscover what drives us on to happiness.

    He is the voice of ABC Radio’s leading current affairs program PM; he was a founding broadcaster for the groundbreaking youth station Double J; he initiated The World Today program; and he’s one of the most popular and influential journalists in the twittersphere. Mark has been covering local and global events for more than four decades. He has reported on wars, royal weddings and everything in between. In the midst of all this he discovered that his father was an MI6 spy. Light and Shadow is the incredible story of a father waging a secret war against communism during the Cold War, while his son comes of age as a journalist during the tumultuous Whitlam and Fraser years and embarks on the risky career of a foreign correspondent. Mark was witness to some of the most world-changing events, including the Iranian hostage crisis, the buildup to the first Gulf War in Iraq and the direct aftermath of the shocking genocide in Rwanda. But when he contracted a life-threatening illness while working in the field, his life changed forever. Mark Colvin’s engrossing memoir takes you inside the coverage of major news events and gently navigates the complexity of his father’s double life.

    Only Capstick "can write action as cleanly and suspensefully as the best of his predecessors" (Sports Illustrated). This long-awaited sequel to Death in the Silent Places (1981) brings to life four turn-of-the-century adventurers and the savage frontiers they braved.* Frederick Selous, a British hunter, naturalist, and soldier, rewrote the history books with his fearless treks deep into the Dark Continent.* English game ranger Constantine "Iodine" Ionides saved Tanganyikan villages from man-eating lions and leopards. He also gained lasting fame for his uncanny ability to capture black mambas, cobras, Gaboon vipers, and other deadly snakes.* The dashing Brit Johnny Boyes who gained the chieftainship of the Kikuyu tribe with sheer bravado and survived the ferocious battles and ambushes of intertribal warfare.* And Scottish ex-boxer, Jim Sutherland, one of the best ivory hunters who ever lived. His tracking skills and stamina afoot became the stuff of African hunting legend.If you are a Capstick fan, you'll relish The African Adventurers, his eleventh book. Once again he delivers "the kind of chilling stories that Hemingway only heard second-hand...with a flair and style that Papa himself would admire" (Guns and Ammo). The author's pungent wit and his authenticity gained from years in the bush make this quartet of vintage heroics an unforgettable return to the silent places.

    But in 1934 Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman made the first of their great Himalayan expeditions by forcing a way up the river gorge. In 2000, the Sanctuary was entered for one single visit. Hugh Thomson was offered a place on this unique expedition led by Eric Shipton's son, John Shipton and the great Indian mountaineer, Colonel Kumar. This journey forms the basis of the book. Woven through it are all the amazing stories that surround the mountain—a powerful blend of myths and politics.

    

    This classic book is also a detailed account of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition's daily subsistence on the icy continent, its scientific endeavours, and Douglas Mawson's epic sledge journey in 1912-13 during which his companions, Ninnis, and Mertz, both perished.It is illustrated with over ninety original photographs depicting the wildlife, the harsh living conditions, and the spirit of the explorers.Mawson's writings were first published, in two volumes, in 1915. An abridged popular edition was published in 1930. This facsimile edition of the abridged popular edition was first published in 1996.Douglas Mawson was born in Yorkshire in 1882, and moved to Australia, with his family, in 1884. Throughout his life he made important contributions to many fields of science, including geology, forestry, and conservation.Mawson is best remembered, though, as a pioneering explorer of the Antarctic region. His polar feats so excited public imagination that thousands of admirers once carried him down the main street of Adelaide.He was knighted for his achievements in 1914, and his death, in 1958, was marked by a state funeral.

    He thinks he made a lucky escape, until he is caught and sentenced to 45 years inside America's toughest prison, US Penitentiary Alcatraz Island.This is one man's true story of life inside America's most notorious prison, from terrifying times in solitary confinement to daily encounters with the "Birdman." An inspiring, moving, and dramatic tale.

    Faced with constant attack from all the peoples who followed them, the last of the Bushmen have retreated to the scorching depths of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. After a gruelling trek, van der Post finds the Bushmen, thriving in one of the world’s most inhospitable landscapes, with their physical peculiarities, their cave art and their joyful music-making intact.

    It covered 2,000 kilometres and was raced in appalling conditions across the battlefields of the Western Front, otherwise known as the Zone Rouge. The race was so tough that only 21 riders finished, and it was never staged again.With one of the most demanding routes ever to feature in a bicycle race, and plagued by appalling weather conditions, the Circuit des Champs de Bataille was beyond gruelling, but today its extraordinary story is largely forgotten. Many of the riders came to the event straight from the army and had to ride 18-hour stages through sleet and snow across the battlefields on which they had fought, and lost friends and family, only a few months before. But in addition to the hellish conditions there were moments of high comedy, even farce.The rediscovered story of the Circuit des Champs de Bataille is an epic tale of human endurance, suffering and triumph over extreme adversity.

    But an astonishing 540 of them closed down between 2004 and 2008. Last Shop Standing lifts the lid on an industry in tatters. Graham Jones has worked at the heart of record retailing since the golden era of the 1980s. He was there during the years of plenty and has witnessed the tragic decline of a business blighted by corruption and corporate greed. Undertaking a tour of the last remaining independent record shops in Britain, he has collected a wealth of entertaining stories that explain why the best are still standing, and how the worst of them blew it. In telling the tale of the industry's sad decline Graham Jones has unearthed wry anecdotes about dozens of rock stars and music industry figures, including The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, David Bowie, The Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Oasis, John Peel and many others. Last Shop Standing is a hilarious yet harrowing account by a man who has been there and sold that. It is a book that will bring a wry smile to the face of anyone who has ever bought a CD or attended a concert, and still has the T-shirt to prove it.

    They would sell it all, downsize, leave their high-paying jobs, and go out to find and explore every corner of the world. They would take risks. In this book, written in a very present first-person style, Joe takes the reader on a journey through the decisions, challenges, and triumphs of embracing a minimalist lifestyle, and getting on the road full time. Full of practical insight and wisdom, and told in an almost folksy and very personal tone, Take Risks is a powerful ‘how-we-did-it’ tale that will inspire you and give you a starting place for your own journey. If you’ve ever wanted to move into a full-time RV lifestyle, this book is for you. Take your own risks, starting right now, and embrace the rewards that come with them. This is the book I wish I’d read two years ago. It’s less of a ‘how-to,’ and more of a ‘how we did it’ look at RV life.” —Kevin Tumlinson, Author & Podcast Host

    This is what it's really like to be an undercover police officer.'Banks has told his story in a raw and honest autobiography. It is the best true crime book published in Australia in a decade.' - John Silvester, Crime Reporter for The Age Undercover was like guerrilla warfare; to understand your enemy, you had to walk amongst them, to become them. The trick was to keep an eye on that important line between who you were and who you were pretending to be.This is the true story of Keith Banks, one of Queensland's most decorated police officers, and his journey into the world of drugs as an undercover operative in the 1980s. In an era of corruption, often alone and with no backup, he and other undercover cops quickly learned to blend into the drug scene, smoking dope and drinking with targets, buying drugs and then having dealers arrested. Very quickly, the lines between his identity as a police officer and the life he pretended to be part of became blurred. This is a raw and confronting story of undercover cops who all became casualties of that era, some more than others, when not everyone with a badge could be trusted.

    It is the story of Albert Facey, who lived with simple honesty, compassion and courage. A parentless boy who started work at eight on the rough West Australian frontier, he struggled as an itinerant rural worker, survived the gore of Gallipoli, the loss of his farm in the Depression, the death of his son in World War II and that of his beloved wife after sixty devoted years - yet he felt that his life was fortunate.Facey's life story, published when he was eighty-seven, has inspired many as a play, a television series, and an award-winning book that has sold over half a million copies.