During the week, I write about Australia’s booze-soaked culture. At the weekends, I write myself off.’Booze had dominated Jill Stark’s social life ever since she had her first sip of beer, at 13. She thought nothing could curb her love of big nights. And then came the hangover that changed everything. In the shadow of her 35th year, Jill made a decision: she would give up alcohol. But what would it mean to stop drinking in a world awash with booze?This lively memoir charts Jill’s tumultuous year on the wagon, as she copes with the stress of the newsroom sober, tackles the dating scene on soda water, learns to watch the footy minus beer, and deals with censure from friends and colleagues, who tell her that a year without booze is ‘a year with no mates’.In re-examining her habits, Jill also explores Australia’s love affair with alcohol, meeting alcopop-swigging teens who drink to fit in, beer-swilling blokes in a sporting culture backed by booze, and marketing bigwigs blamed for turning binge drinking into a way of life. And she tracks the history of this national obsession: from the idea that Australia’s new colonies were drowning in drink to the Anzac ethos that a beer builds mateship, and from the six o’clock swill that encouraged bingeing to the tangled weave of advertising, social pressure, and tradition that confronts drinkers today.Will Jill make it through the year without booze? And if she does, will she go back to her old habits, or has she called last drinks? This is a funny, moving, and insightful exploration of why we drink, how we got here, and what happens when we turn off the tap.

    With courage and compassion she addresses her own frailties and fears, and asks the big questions about life, about the shadows we inherit and the gifts we pass on.Honest, poignant, utterly captivating, Reckoning announces the arrival of a fearless writer and natural storyteller. It will touch the lives of its readers.Magda Szubanski is one of Australia’s best known and most loved performers. She began her career in university revues, then appeared in a number of sketch comedy shows before creating the iconic character of Sharon Strzelecki in ABC-TV’s Kath and Kim. She has also acted in films (Babe, Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet, The Golden Compass) and stage shows. Reckoning is her first book.

    Filled with relentlessly driven diary entries, vivid details of life at the fringe, and memories of binge-drinking into oblivion as an escapeduring his playing days at the Sydney Swans, 28 is a portrayal of the sporting psyche in a way that has never been done before.But the true beauty of this book lies in the space outside football. Laid bare on these pages is a searingly honest deep dive into sport, addiction, art, sexuality, masculinity, love, family and identity.'Searingly honest, unflinching' Peter FitzSimons'Brandon Jack has talent and daring in abundance' Christos Tsiolkas

    Hubert Wilkins was the most successful explorer in history: no one saw with his own eyes more undiscovered land and sea. Largely self-taught, he was a celebrated reporter, pilot, spy, war hero, scientist, and adventurer. He captured in his lens war and famine, cheated death repeatedly, met world leaders like Lenin, Mussolini, and King George V, and circled the globe on a zeppelin. Knighted for being the first person to fly across the North Pole, Wilkins was also the first to fly in the Antarctic, discover land by airplane, and take a submarine under the Arctic ice.

    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.

    We know, for example, that there are a few core truths to science of happiness. We know that being kind and altruistic makes us happy, that turning off devices, talking to people, forging relationships, living with meaning and delving into the concerns of others offer our best chance at achieving happiness. But how do we retain happiness? It often slips out of our hands as quickly as we find it. So, when we are exposed to, or learn, good things, how do we continue to burn with them?And more than that, when our world goes dark, when we're overwhelmed by illness or heartbreak, loss or pain, how do we survive, stay alive or even bloom? In the muck and grit of a daily existence full of disappointments and a disturbing lack of control over many of the things that matter most - finite relationships, fragile health, fraying economies, a planet in peril - how do we find, nurture and carry our own inner, living light - a light to ward off the darkness?Absorbing, achingly beautiful, inspiring and deeply moving, Julia Baird has written exactly the book we need for these times.

    A political betrayal. A constitutional crisis. The Palace Letters is the groundbreaking result of one historian’s fight to expose secret letters between the Queen and the then Australian governor general, Sir John Kerr, during the dismissal of prime minister Gough Whitlam in the 1970s. Whitlam was a progressive prime minister whose reforms proved divisive after two decades of conservative leadership in Australia. When he could not get a budget approved, it sparked a political deadlock that culminated in his unexpected and deeply controversial dismissal by Kerr.More than 200 letters between Kerr and the Queen from the period exist in the archive, and historians have long believed that they could reveal the extent to which Buckingham Palace knew about or approved of the dismissal. But until now they have remained hidden in the National Archives of Australia, protected from public scrutiny through their designation as ‘personal’.In the face of this, Professor Jenny Hocking embarked on a 10-year campaign and a four-year legal battle to force the Archives to release the letters. In 2015, she secured a stellar pro bono team that took her case all the way to the High Court of Australia. On 29 May 2020, the court ruled in her favour, requiring the correspondence to be released.Now, Professor Hocking is able to reveal the previously hidden trove of letters. And, drawing on never-before-published material from Kerr’s archives and submissions to the court, Hocking traces the collusion and deception behind the dismissal, and charts the role of High Court judges, the Queen’s private secretary, and the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, in Kerr’s actions, and any prior involvement of the Queen and Prince Charles in Kerr’s planning.

    'I have several young busty blondes, Derek,' Ruth sang like the weathergirl. 'One is a very sexy Danish girl, just back from a skiing trip, five-foot-five, long wavy blonde hair, blue eyes, twenty-five years old. A fantastic figure: thirty-six, twenty-five, thirty-five. Or I have a more demure, very pretty, young strawberry blonde Australian, Derek. She's nineteen ...' When her acting career stalls, Merridy Eastman lands a challenging role: night receptionist at a Sydney brothel. A long way from the bright lights of a TV studio, she is swept into the high drama of the sex industry. This former Play School presenter learns words for items and acts she never imagined, she opens the door to first-timers, old hands, couples and the occasional celebrity. But the place she spends every moment she can is the kitchen table, having a cup of tea and discussing investment portfolios, and life's many great mysteries, with Sapphire, Shelby, Antoinette and Bree - the women who make a living from having sex with strangers. And then, in this most unlikely of places, she finds herself falling in love ... There's a Bear in There (and he wants Swedish) is a funny, fascinating and true account of a forbidden world.

    Women and Leadership takes a consistent and comprehensive approach to teasing out what is different for women leaders. Almost every year new findings are published about the way people see women leaders compared with their male counterparts. The authors have taken that academic work and tested it in the real world. The same set of interview questions were put to each leader in frank face-to-face interviews. Their responses were then used to examine each woman's journey in leadership and whether their lived experiences were in line with or different from what the research would predict.Women and Leadership presents a lively and readable analysis of the influence of gender on women's access to positions of leadership, the perceptions of them as leaders, the trajectory of their leadership and the circumstances in which it comes to an end. By presenting the lessons that can be learned from women leaders, Julia and Ngozi provide a road map of essential knowledge to inspire us all, and an action agenda for change that allows women to take control and combat gender bias.Featuring Jacinda Ardern, Hillary Clinton, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Theresa May, Michelle Bachelet, Joyce Banda, Erna Solberg, Christine Lagarde and more.

    It is a tale of ambition, of wealthy widows and marriage mistakes; of money and trade, espionage and mercenaries, hardship and illness. Beyond the facts of discovery and exploration, this book reveals the extraordinary idealism and the influence of the Enlightenment on the founding of Australia.Michael Pembroke provides a compelling portrait of Arthur Phillip. He carefully weaves together the little-known facts and projects us into life in Georgian England – a time when newly discovered territories were the road to untold wealth.‘At long last, a finely written biography of the astonishing egalitarian who became Australia’s founding father. There are gripping descriptions of his amazing sea voyages and moving accounts of the humanity he brought to the government of a penal colony that only he thought would ever become a nation. The book shows the moral vision of a man who gave history its best example of the possibility of the Reformation of the human spirit.’-Geoffrey Robertson QC‘A gripping life of a quite extraordinary man: the most important enlightenment life story that we’ve never had properly told before.’-Andrew Marr, BBC broadcaster and television host‘The colour and dash of Arthur Phillip’s extraordinary life, lived in amazing times in every corner of the world, is told just brilliantly in Michael Pembroke’s utterly absorbing book, destined to become a classic of Imperial literature.’-Simon Winchester, bestselling author and journalistMichael Pembroke is a writer, judge and naturalist. He spent much of his childhood travelling to many of the maritime ports of the colonial era. His first school was at Sandhurst in England in the grounds of a military academy and his last on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour. He completed his education at Cambridge and now lives and writes in Sydney and at the hamlet of Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains. In 2009 he wrote Trees of History & Romance, a paean to nature and poetry. He is a direct descendant of Nathanial Lucas and Olivia Gascoigne, who arrived in Botany Bay in January 1788.

    NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURERobyn Davidson's opens the memoir of her perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company with the following words: “I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back." Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia's landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people, and a willingness to cast away the trappings of her former identity. Tracks is the compelling, candid story of her odyssey of discovery and transformation. “An unforgettably powerful book.”—Cheryl Strayed, author of WildNow with a new postscript by Robyn Davidson.

    But Sniper's Ridge was a different proposition. Killing took on another dimension. In the flurry of trench warfare, a soldier would rarely be certain he had hit an enemy. On this ridge of death, however, Savige's job was to make sure he struck as many of the opposition as possible.' The son of a country butcher, Stan Savige left school at twelve to become a blacksmith's striker. But in 1915, a passage in the bible inspired the devout scout leader and Sunday school teacher to enlist. Soon his abilities as a crack marksman attracted the attention of the officers and he was put in charge of Sniper's Ridge, his job to eliminate the enemy assassins in Anzac Cove. Savige succeeded and survived Gallipoli, only to be sent to the Western Front then Iran as part of the crack squad Dunsterforce. It was the beginning of a long, dangerous and distinguished military career spanning both world wars, with Savige commanding and fighting in Europe, Iran, North Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific in World War II, initially as Major-General then Lieutenant General. In this gripping biography, Roland Perry paints a fascinating and complex portrait of Lieutenant General Sir Stanley George Savige, KBE, CB, DSO, MC, ED, a man of character and compassion, a quiet outsider who founded the war veterans' support charity Legacy, who still has few peers in courage, skill and achievement and whose record is second to none in Australian military history, in the scope of his combat over two world wars.

    But, for Isla and her brother, their mother's sadness and the cold, damp greyness of Hobart's stone streets seeps into everything.Then, one morning, Isla sees a red ship. That colour lights her day. And when a sailor from the ship befriends her mother, he shares his stories with them all - of Antarctica, his home in Denmark and life onboard. Like the snow white petrels that survive in the harshest coldest place, this lonely girl at the bottom of the world will learn that it is possible to go anywhere, be anything. But she will also find out that it is just as easy to lose it all.For Isla, those two long summers will change everything.Favel Parrett delivers an evocative and gently told story about the power fear and kindness have to change lives.

    Covered head-to-toe in strict, modest clothing, she received a rigorous education at Alta Academy, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' school headed by Warren Jeffs. Always seeking to be an obedient Priesthood girl, in her teens she became the nineteenth wife of her people's prophet: 85-year-old Rulon Jeffs, Warren's father. Finally sickened by the abuse she suffered and saw around her, she pulled off a daring escape and sought to build a new life and family.The church, however, had a way of pulling her back in-and by 2007, Rebecca had no choice but to take the witness stand against the new prophet of the FLDS in order to protect her little sisters and other young girls from being forced to marry at shockingly young ages. The following year, Rebecca and the rest of the world watched as a team of Texas Rangers raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a stronghold of the FLDS. Rebecca's subsequent testimony would reveal the horrific secrets taking place behind closed doors of the temple, sending their leaders to prison for years, and Warren Jeffs for life.THE WITNESS WORE RED is a gripping account of one woman's struggle to escape the perverse embrace of religious fanaticism and sexual slavery, and a courageous story of hope and transformation.

    Dismissing concerns from family and friends that her safety and career were at risk, she arrived with no teaching experience whatsoever, to work at a high school in a town she'd never heard of, where the winters are frigid and plunge to sub-zero temperatures.During her childhood on an isolated cattle station in Central Australia, Tanya had always dreamed of adventure and romance in Europe but the Czech Republic was not the stuff of her dreams. On arrival, however, she falls headlong into misadventures that change her life forever.This land of castles, history and culture opened up to her and she to it. In love with Prague and her people, particularly with the charismatic Karel, who takes her into his home, his family and as far as he can into his heart, Tanya learns about lives very different to hers.Alice to Prague is a bittersweet story of a search for identity, belonging and love, set in a time, a place and with a man that fill Tanya's life with contradictions.