In this "natural history" of the author herself, we travel gently through childhood and family, grief, love and solitude - and her spellbinding twin obsessions with art and the natural world. It is the work of a questing, roving intellect and a rare humility, and Hastrich's sheer joy in language infuses the whole with a deliciously sly, intelligent humour. I'd liken her to an antipodean Annie Dillard with a fishing rod in one hand and the whole of western art history in the other - except there simply is no other writer like Hastrich. This book will tell you things you never knew about your world and yourself, and you will never forget it. Night Fishing is a masterpiece, and Vicki Hastrich is a world-class writer.' - Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of ThingsVicki Hastrich takes the reader on a stunning voyage through her writer's life and across her chosen patch: the private byways of Brisbane Water, north of Sydney, where she has spent much of her life.Hastrich fuses her intimate, loving knowledge of a tiny arena of Australia's natural world with the grand influence of ideas from throughout civilisation - from the baroque to the American Western, and artists as diverse as Zane Grey, Tiepolo and Goya - to create a truly original and deeply pleasurable collection.Night Fishing unfolds as a series of expeditions or essays, undertaken in the spirit of the philosopher scientist. All the while, slowly, thoughtfully, Hastrich reveals the ordinary and remarkable detail of her life, from her childhood by the sea to her life as a camera operator for the ABC, as a historian and amateur marine biologist, and as a single woman exploring her small stretch of water. The result is entirely new, entirely fresh and profoundly captivating. Night Fishing is a tonic for those of us who have forgotten how to slow down, how to look around, how to be part of our natural world. It will take its place alongside classics of observation and nature by David Malouf, Tim Winton and Annie Dillard.

    These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance, but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them. Their strength and dignity were remarkable. Using diaries and letters Peter Rees takes us into the hospital camps and the wards and the tent surgeries on the edge of some of the most horrific battlefronts of human history. But he also allows the friendships and love of these courageous and compassionate women to enrich their experiences, and ours. Profoundly moving, this is a story of extraordinary courage and humanity shown by a group of woman whose contribution to the Anzac legend has barely been recognized in our history. Peter Rees has changed that understanding forever.

    After months of struggle, he learned how to resume his life as a farmer, running a sheep and cattle property in northwest New South Wales. then he met and fell in love with Jenny Black, an ABC Rural journalist, proposed to her on air, and the rest is history. Jenny tells Sam's story in his own laconic, wry style. By turns romantic, funny and moving, it affirms the strength of iron-willed determination and the power of love.

    At last the lid is lifted. Come on board a real airline with a real flight attendant and find out what really goes on. In Confessions of a Qantas Flight Attendant – True Tales and Gossip from the Galley, Owen Beddall dishes the dirt – he tells you the things you always wanted to know (and maybe a few things you didn't) about the glamorous world of flying. This book is packed with cabin crew adventures and misadventures in and out of that smart uniform in far flung places. There's sex, drugs and lots of celebrity gossip; Katy Perry, Lily Allen, Kylie Minogue, Venus Williams and Cate Blanchett – are all in the galley having a gossip with Owen. Confessions of a Qantas Flight Attendant is a hilariously bumpy ride around the world with a very funny man.

    A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a dozen critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and--even more important--on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and takes us to places ranging from Tokyo's Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvelous lens of sport emerges a panorama of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running."

    Every essay is crafted with the same scathing wit and poignant candor thousands of loyal readers have come to expect from visiting her notoriously hilarious blog.

    

    Stern, domineering, fiercely loving, Lotty Kneen—born Dragitsa—was always tight-lipped about her early life and family history. She rebuffed Krissy’s curiosity and forbade her from taking the trip back to the old country that might have satisfied it.When her grandmother died recently, Krissy finally felt at liberty to explore the questions that had nagged at her for so long. In The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen Krissy sets out with a box containing her grandmother’s ashes, intending to trace the old woman’s early life in Slovenia and Egypt, and perhaps locate some remnants of family. Along the way she uncovers the extraordinary story of the colony of Slovene women who became the nannies of choice for the wealthy Italians of pre-war Alexandria—and identifies as best she can the places where Lotty’s restless, demanding spirit will be at peace.

    It argued that classical Aboriginal society was more sophisticated than Australians had been led to believe because it resembled more closely the farming communities of Europe.In Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe ask why Australians have been so receptive to the notion that farming represents an advance from hunting and gathering. Drawing on the knowledge of Aboriginal elders, previously not included within this discussion, and decades of anthropological scholarship, Sutton and Walshe provide extensive evidence to support their argument that classical Aboriginal society was a hunter-gatherer society and as sophisticated as the traditional European farming methods.Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? asks Australians to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal society and culture.

    The performance becomes so familiar I almost forget that it’s staged.What happens when, aged 30, you understand you’re transgender?This was the question that confronted Yves Rees, a historian whose life was upended by gender transition in 2018. Then known as a woman called Anne, Yves was forced to grapple with the sudden knowledge that they were not, in fact, female at all.But when you’ve lived a lie for so long, how do you discover who you really are? And how do you re-learn to live in the world as a different gender?All About Yves tells their moving journey of re-becoming, at the same time laying bare the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. It shares the challenges and joys of being transgender in Australia today, and reveals how trans experiences like Yves' can teach all of us about what it means to be man or woman.

    The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-London flight, and by the time they've reached the luggage carousel, he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair and pale nape and watery green eyes, the way she drives a car and eats Chinese food, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, her views on Heidegger's Being and Time - although he hates her taste in shoes. On Love plots the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through the (Groucho) "Marxist" stage of coming to terms with being loved by the unattainable beloved, through a fit of anhedonia, defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness, and finally through the nausea induced and terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away. Alain de Botton is simultaneously hilarious and intellectually astute, shifting with ease among such seminal romantic texts as The Divine Comedy, Madame Bovary, and The Bleeding Heart, a self-help book for those who love too much. He is schematically flawless, funny, funky, and totally engaging. Filled with profound observations and useful diagrams, On Love displays and examines for all of us the pain and exhilaration of love, asking, "Can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams? Can we not be excused a certain superstitious faith in a creature who will prove the solution to our relentless yearnings?"

    When Stephanie Wood meets a sweet man who owns a farm and property, she embarks on an exhilarating romance with him. He seems compassionate, truthful and loving. He talks about the future with her. She falls in love. She also becomes increasingly beset by anxiety at the lavish three-act plays he offers her in the form of excuses for frequent cancellations and no-shows. She begins to wonder, who is this man?When she ends the relationship Stephanie switches back on her journalistic nous and uncovers a story of mind-boggling duplicity and manipulation. She also finds she is not alone; that the world is full of smart, sassy women who have suffered at the hands of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists and phonies, men who are enormously skilled at deception.In this brilliantly acute and broad-ranging book, Wood, an award-winning writer and journalist, has written a riveting, important account of contemporary love, and the resilience of those who have witnessed its darkest sides.

    How school and later university became her escape route from a family filled with secrets and violence. It is also a story of how, as a mature woman and a mother herself, she came to face what had happened to her as a child. How she had to bring long-buried memories into the light in order to move on.

    

    Born in Sydney to a Samoan mother and Londoner father, Timothy Cahill grew up in the sprawling western suburbs, where cricket and rugby league ruled. It was a long way from his father's beloved West Ham and the English game that transfixed a young Tim with his own unlikely dreams of one day playing professionally.Growing up in the 1980s, life for Tim was about family, football and more football - training, playing and watching it with his brothers. Beginning as the youngest and smallest boy on the field, Tim steadily worked his way through the local club sides with an on-field toughness and intelligence that made the unlikely a possibility.By the time he was a teenager, Tim's parents boldly applied for a bank loan to fund his travels to England. It was an act of faith repaid with a successful trial for Millwall, the storied London club. After 249 appearances and 56 goals and cult-hero status among the fans, he signed for Everton, where he would enjoy a highly successful Premiership and stellar international career - leaving the legacy of becoming one of the most admired and respected Australian sportsmen of all time.With his trademark honesty and candour, Tim reflects on what it takes to make it to the top - the sacrifices, the physical cost, the mental stamina, the uncompromising self-belief, but also the loyalty, the integrity and the generosity. An autobiography that is more than a record of the goals and the games, Tim Cahill's story is a universal reminder of the importance of making your moment count.