Its revelations rocked the nation. Even defenders of the banks were blindsided.Few people were more instrumental in bringing about the commission than journalist Adele Ferguson. Through her exposes in print and on television, she pursued the truth about funds mismanagement, fraud, lack of probity, and the hard-sell culture that took over the finance industry after deregulation in the 1980s. But it wasn't just light-touch regulators and crooked bankers growing fat on bonuses she put under the spotlight. It was also their victims - men and women who had lost everything, and had no recourse when they discovered empty accounts, egregious fees, forged documents and broken promises.Now in Banking Bad, Ferguson tells the full story of the power imbalance, toxic culture and cover-ups. She describes the long fight for justice by whistleblowers, victims and political mavericks, and she looks at the outcomes of the royal commission - the falls from grace, the damaging hubris, the scathing assessment of the regulators, and the colossal compensation bill - an estimated $10 billion.Finally, she asks where to from here? In May 2019, the Coalition government, which resisted calls for a royal commission, was re-elected. Bank stocks surged and lending regulations were loosened. Will it all be business as usual from now on, or have our financial executives learned that their wealth cannot come at the expense of ordinary Australians?

    One of his high school classmates, Danny Corwin, was a vicious serial killer who had raped and mutilated six women, murdering three of them. Yet the town had denied all early signs of the radical evil that was growing within Corwin. What had led the local media to ignore his early rapes? Why had the local Presbyterian Church tried to shield him from prison? Why had local law enforcement been unable to solve and prosecute his murders as they continued? Burrough is widely admired as a master storyteller, and this chilling tale raises important questions of whether serial killers can be recognized before they kill or rehabilitated after they do. It is also a story of Texas politics and power that led the good citizens of the town of Temple to enable a demon who was their worst nightmare. This title contains mature themes, including physical and sexual violence, that some listeners may find unsettling.

    In this country, he's more important than Ned Kelly.' Jack ThompsonIt's been almost fifty years since a teenage David Gulpilil illuminated screens worldwide with his breakout role in Walkabout. It was one of the first times we'd seen an Aboriginal person cast in a significant role and only four years after Holt's referendum to alter the constitution and give Indigenous people citizenship and, subsequently, the right to vote.Gulpilil quickly became the face of the Indigenous world to white Australian audiences. Charisma. Good looks. A competent, strong, mysterious man starring in films ranging from Crocodile Dundee to Rabbit-Proof Fence.But what has marked Gulpilil, despite his fame and popularity, is the feeling that he's been forever stuck between two worlds: a Yolngu man, a hunter, a tracker, who grew up in the bush in Arnhem Land outside any white influence; and a movie star flitting from movie sets to festivals.Able to exist in both worlds, but never truly home.From the author of the bestselling Wednesdays with Bob , Derek Rielly builds a narrative around his attempt to encapsulate the most beguiling and unconventional of Australian entertainers, observing Gulpilil's own attempt to find a place in the world. With interviews from notable icons and friends - such as Jack Thompson, Paul Hogan, Phillip Noyce, Craig Ruddy, George Gittoes, Gary Sweet and Damon Gameau - this book unriddles a famous enigma at last.'He has an extraordinary presence, what ever that word means. It's very real. Some people have it and some people don't. And David has it - he knows how to feed the camera.' Jack Thompson

    We see them every day. We trust them implicitly. But what about the British army sergeant who sabotaged his wife’s parachute? Or the lodger who took his landlady on a picnic from which she never returned? From dentists to PAs, these normal-seeming people were quietly wrecking lives, and nobody suspected a thing.In this first book from the addictive award-winning podcast They Walk Among Us, Benjamin and Rosanna serve up small-town stories in gripping detail. They’ve hooked millions of listeners with their intricate and disturbing cases, and now they dig into ten more tales, to provide an unforgettably sinister true-crime experience, scarily close to home. It could happen to you.

    

    Keli Lane, Australian water polo champion and elite private school teacher had it all -- a privileged social life on Sydney's Northern Beaches, a tightly knit circle of friends and a rugby hero for a boyfriend -- until her hidden double life was exposed. In secret, Keli carried three babies to term, giving birth on her own each time. Incredibly, her family, friends, colleagues -- even her boyfriend -- had no idea. Two babies were adopted but one, Tegan, disappeared without a trace. In December 2010, Keli Lane was found guilty of murder. In this probing, investigative work, journalist Rachel Chin sifts through Keli's background and the compelling drama that unfolded daily in the coronial inquest and criminal trial for answers to this baffling case. Who is Tegan's father? Why did Keli keep her pregnancies and births secret -- and how could her family and friends not know?Nice Girl explores all these questions and more, revealing a dark and bizarre story of secrets and lies.

    Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man.Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has.In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.

    Gripping, a standalone romantic thriller from an author at the top of her game.A tragic accident, a terrible crime, an unknown threat ...Scarred by a recent tragedy on Federation Peak, Tess Atherton is reluctant to guide a group of young hikers in the wild Tasmanian winter, but it seems safer than remaining amid the violence that threatens them in Hobart. Little does she know that she has brought the danger with her ...Detective Senior Sergeant Jared Denham is closing in on a serial killer, but someone doesn't want him getting to the truth and the case is becoming personal. He already owes Tess his life, and wants to return the favour - but when it comes to enemies, Jared may be looking in the wrong direction.Time is running out, and death is stalking them both ...Deadman's Track is a dark, compelling thriller, filled with vivid imagery and heart-stopping suspense. Sarah Barrie has made me desperate to visit Tasmania and simultaneously terrified of ever stepping foot there. I loved every moment. -Nicola Moriarty, author of The Ex

    Providing you with the antidote to every annoying little thing, these rules are not made to be broken.488 Rules for Life is not a self-help book, because it's not you who needs help, it's other people. Whether they're walking and texting, asphyxiating you on public transport with their noxious perfume cloud, or leaving one useless square of toilet paper on the roll, a lot of people just don't know the rules. But thanks to Kitty Flanagan's comprehensive guide to modern behaviour, our world will soon be a much better place. A place where people don't ruin the fruit salad by putting banana in it … where your co-workers respect your olfactory system and don't reheat their fish curry in the office microwave ... where middle aged men don't have ponytails …What started as a joke on Kitty Flanagan's popular segment on ABC TV's The Weekly, is now a quintessential reference book with the power to change society. (Or, at least, make it a bit less irritating.) What people are (Kitty Flanagan is) saying about this book: 'You're welcome everyone.''Thank god for me.''I'd rather be sad and lonely, but right.''There's not actually 488 rules in here but it sure feels like it'.

    Skye is a daring and brash pilot, and Liberty the one to defy her at every turn. Even if women aren't allowed in the Royal Air Force, Skye is determined to help the war effort. She's thrilled when it reunites her with her childhood soulmate, Nicholas. She's less thrilled to learn Nicholas is now engaged to an enigmatic Frenchwoman named Margaux Jourdan.Paris, 1947: Designer Christian Dior unveils his glamorous first collection to a world weary of war and grief. He names his debut fragrance Miss Dior in tribute to his beloved sister Catherine, who forged a friendship with Skye and Margaux through her work with the French Resistance.Present Day: Fashion conservator Kat Jourdan discovers a priceless collection of Dior gowns in her grandmother's vacant cottage. As she delves into the mystery of their origin, Kat begins to doubt everything she thought she knew about her beloved grandmother.

    A self-confessed workaholic, she regularly put 'knife before life', knowing it was all going to be worth it because it would lead to her longed-for career.But if the punishing hours in surgery weren't hard enough, she also faced challenges as a young female surgeon navigating a male-dominated specialty. She was regularly left to carry out complex procedures without senior surgeons' oversight; she was called all sorts of things, from 'emotional' to 'too confident'; and she was expected to work a relentless on-call roster - sometimes seventy hours a week or more - to prove herself.Eventually it was too much and Yumiko quit.Emotional Female is her account of what it was like to train in the Australian public hospital system, and what made her walk away.Yumiko Kadota is a voice for her generation when it comes to burnout and finding the resilience to rebuild after suffering a physical, emotional and existential breakdown. This is a brave, honest and unflinching work from a major new talent.

    By morning, the head of the sexual crimes squad confirmed to journalists that they were preparing to question two Collingwood players ... And so, as police were confiscating bed sheets from a townhouse in South Melbourne, the trial by media began.'What does a young footballer do to cut loose? At night, some play what they think of as pranks, or games. Night games with women. Sometimes these involve consensual sex, but sometimes they don't, and sometimes they fall into a grey area.In the tradition of Helen Garner's The First Stone comes a closely observed, controversial book about sex, consent and power. In Night Games, Anna Krien follows the rape trial of an Australian Rules footballer. She also takes a balanced and fearless look at the dark side of footy culture – the world of Sam Newman, Ricky Nixon, Matty Johns and the Cronulla Sharks.Both a courtroom drama and a riveting piece of narrative journalism, this is a breakthrough book from one of the young leading lights of Australian writing.

    Very, very real. Actor, writer and comedian, Celeste Barber is one very funny woman - not to mention a global social media comedy phenomenon. Amassing over 3 million followers in only 18 months with her hilarious #challengeaccepted pics, she has been dubbed 'Australian Comedy Queen' by ABC Online; voted The Funniest Lady on Instagram; gone on sold-out comedy tours of US and UK; and won herself fans ranging from Tom Ford and Ruby Rose, to Amy Schumer and Dawn French. In the tradition of Tina Fey's Bossypants, Celeste's memoir is part memoir, part comedy routine, part advice manual. Calling out our ridiculous celebrity Instagram culture and the obsession we all seem to have with how we look, Celeste reveals all, including her thoughts on keeping it real and feeling good (instead of worrying about looking good); the secrets to love, friendship, family and marriage (#hothusband); how to deal with life's many challenges, like, well, motherhood, among other things; and how to stay nice in Spanx. Celeste is real, hilarious and the world can't get enough of her.

    ‘No dolls. No pink dresses. Just lots of adventures. Lots of spoiling. The pair of you like two mighty warriors protecting her at every step.’Eliza Miller grew up in Australia as the only daughter of a troubled young mother, but with the constant support of two watchful godmothers, Olivia and Maxie. Despite her tricky childhood, she always felt loved and secure. Until, just before her eighteenth birthday, a tragic event changed her life.Thirteen years on, Eliza is deliberately living as safely as possible, avoiding close relationships and devoting herself to her job. Out of the blue, an enticing invitation from one of her godmothers prompts a leap into the unknown.Within a fortnight, Eliza finds herself in the middle of a complicated family in Edinburgh. There’s no such thing as an ordinary day any more. Yet, amidst the chaos, Eliza begins to blossom. She finds herself not only hopeful about the future, but ready to explore her past, including the biggest mystery of all – who is her father?Set in Australia, Scotland, Ireland and England, THE GODMOTHERS is a great big hug of a book that will fill your heart to bursting. It is a moving and perceptive story about love, lies, hope and sorrow, about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves.

    That obsession led Renner to a successful career as an investigative journalist. It also gave him post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2011, Renner began researching the strange disappearance of Maura Murray, a University of Massachusetts student who went missing after wrecking her car in rural New Hampshire in 2004. Over the course of his investigation, he uncovered numerous important and shocking new clues about what may have happened to Murray but also found himself in increasingly dangerous situations with little regard for his own well-being. As his quest to find Murray deepened, the case started taking a toll on his personal life, which began to spiral out of control. The result is an absorbing dual investigation of the complicated story of the All-American girl who went missing and Renner's own equally complicated true-crime addiction.True Crime Addict is the story of Renner's spellbinding investigation, which has taken on a life of its own for armchair sleuths across the web. In the spirit of David Fincher's Zodiac, it's a fascinating look at a case that has eluded authorities and one man's obsessive quest for the answers.