Australia's most celebrated poet and storyteller helped define our national traits of loyalty, mateship and laconic humour, but he did and was so much more. A soldier in the Boer War and WWI, the balladeer bushman was also a solicitor, newspaper editor, columnist, war and foreign correspondent and ABC broadcaster.Close friends with many luminaries of his time, including Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Haig, Breaker Morant and Henry Lawson, the tennis ace, notorious ladies man, brilliant jockey and celebrated polo player was eye witness to many of the great moments in Australian 20th century history. Extensively researched and written with Kieza's trademark verve, Banjo is a rich and captivating portrait of our most celebrated poet and a truly great Australian.

    

    His work shows exactly why our national war memorial must acknowledge the frontier wars, why we must change the date of our national day, and why treaties are important. Most of all, it makes urgently clear that the Uluru Statement is no rhetorical flourish but carries the weight of history and law and gives us a map for the future.

    An improvised game of cricket was often the circuit-breaker Harry and his team needed after the tension of operations. He began a tradition of organising matches wherever he was sent, whether it was in the mountains of East Timor with a fugitive rebel leader, or on the dusty streets of Baghdad, or in exposed Forward Operating Bases in the hills of Afghanistan. Soldiers, locals and even visiting politicians played in these spontaneous yet often bridge-building games.As part of the tradition, Harry also started to take a cricket bat with him on operational tours, eleven of them in total. They'd often go outside the wire with him and end up signed by those he met or fought alongside. These eleven bats form the basis for Harry's extraordinary memoir. It's a book about combat, and what it takes to serve in one of the world's most elite formations. It's a book about the toll that war takes on soldiers and their loved ones. And it's a book about the healing power of cricket, and how a game can break down borders in even the most desperate of circumstances.

    The time before the First Fleet is usually treated as a preface to the main story, a brief interlude that starts 50,000 years before the present and ends as sails are seen on an eastern horizon. But in 1787 the peoples of Australia were not simply living in a timeless ‘Dreamtime’, following the seasons, and waiting for colonisation by Britain in 1788.In 1787, Nick Brodie uses the sailors, writers, scientists, and other visitors to our shores to reassess neglected chapters of Australia’s early history, and place Australia and its peoples into the great story of human history. He turns the narratives of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ around to take a closer look at the Indigenous peoples, the broader regional scene, and what these encounters collectively tell. 1787 does not stand for a year—it stands for an idea. This is the sweeping story of Greater Australasia and its peoples, a long-overdue challenge to the myth that Australia’s story started in 1788.Dr Nick Brodie is an historian, archaeologist, and writer. Nick’s previous book Kin was published to critical acclaim in 2015.

    Molly gives us his unforgettable encounters with The Beatles, Elton John, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Madonna, John Farnham, Bruce Springsteen, the Bee Gees, Rod Stewart, Russell Crowe, Oasis, Beyonce and Prince. As well as the tales that surround his other loves: the Australian cricket team, the St Kilda footy club and the Melbourne Storm."I have a lot of love for the great Ian 'Molly' Meldrum" - Shane WarneNo one has lived a life like Ian 'Molly' Meldrum. And no one can tell a story like Molly.

    On the afternoon of Sunday, the first of February 2015, Cadel Evans crossed the finish line in the first-ever race of the event that would immortalise his name: the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race. At that moment, an extraordinary cycling career, spanning 20 years and more than 750 professional races, came to a close. Now, looking back on his journey, Cadel Evans tells his story of the races and moments that mattered, taking you with him as he places in the top ten in six Tours de France and becomes Australia's first and only Tour de France champion; as he wins the Mountain Bike World Cup twice and Australia's first and only UCI Road World Championship; as he claims the points jersey in the Giro d'Italia; and as he wins a succession of other great races, including the Tour of Austria (twice), Tour de Romandie (twice), Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali, Tirreno-Adriatico, Flèche Wallonne, Criterium International and Giro del Trentino. Ranging from the dirt tracks of his early 1990s mountain-biking days to the Tour de France's famous podium in 2011 and beyond, The Art of Cycling is a tale of potential realised and ambition fulfilled. It's also the inspiring story of a young boy from the Australian bush, whose focus, talent and dedication conquered the elite world of international cycling in an era when few Australians competed, let alone won. Famous in the sport for his meticulous preparation and as an athlete who pridedhimself on his ability to give his all, Evans writes with forensic detail about the triumphs, the frustrations, the training, the preparation, the psychology of the sport, his contemporaries, the legends, the controversies and, above all, his enduring love of cycling.

    Having covered the war in Iraq and moved to Mexico City with two babies in nappies, he and his wife Diana thought they understood something about the subject.But when they arrived in Sydney so that Cave could establish The New York Times's Australia Bureau, life near the ocean confronted them with new ideas and questions, at odds with their American mindset that risk was a matter of individual choices. Surf-lifesaving and Nippers showed that perhaps it could be managed together, by communities. And instead of being either eliminated or romanticised, it might instead be respected and even embraced.And so Cave set out to understand how our current attitude to risk developed - and why it's not necessarily good for us.Into the Rip is partly the story of this New York family learning to live better by living with the sea and it is partly the story of how humans manage the idea of risk. Interviewing experts and everyday heroes, Cave asks critical questions like: Is safety overrated? Why do we miscalculate risk so often and how can we improve? Is it selfish to take risks or can more exposure make for stronger families, citizens and nations? And how do we factor in legitimate fears and major disasters like Cave has covered in his time here: the Black Summer fires; the Christchurch massacre; and, of course, Covid?The result is Grit meets Phosphorescence and Any Ordinary Day - a book that will change the way you and your family think about facing the world's hazards.

    God’s country. Heartland of the Inner West. Because of its location an always fertile mix of working-class, migrant, genteel, intellectual and eccentric residents. As she got older she noticed Annandale was changing, and she started hearing new words like ‘architect’ and ‘labradoodle’, and eventually entire weeks would go by with no backyard bomb explosions.These stories about neighbourhood warfare, wacky relatives, quashed dreams and facial disfigurement are told with Norton Lodge’s characteristic comic verve and eye for absurdity and menace, inspired by her family, friends, acquaintances and nemeses. Their highlights include Greek grandparents who have lived in mutual resentment for decades and beat each other up with colanders, children who dabble in amateur porn and are sent to school with cat-food sandwiches, ‘distressed’ furniture, rampaging eczema, flying babies and other suburban wonders.

    But John Pilger reveals a hidden side: the rapacious politicking that has kept the nation from true independence in the 20th century, and that has held the aborigines under the heel of what can only be called apartheid. 40 photographs.

     We are one of a handful of countries in the world that enforce this rule at election time, and the only English-speaking country that makes its citizens vote. Not only that, we embrace it. We celebrate compulsory voting with barbeques and cake stalls at polling stations, and election parties that spill over into Sunday morning. But how did this come to be: when and why was voting in Australia made compulsory? How has this affected our politics? And how else is the way we vote different from other democracies? Lively and inspiring, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage is a landmark account of the character of Australian democracy by the celebrated historian Judith Brett, the prize-winning biographer of Alfred Deakin.

    Like a house. We could just buy a block of land, you know, the four of us, and have a go.' It was just an idea. then it started to take shape. In this frank, funny and thought-provoking memoir, Richard Glover describes how he and his friend Philip and their partners built a house in the bush on weekends. It was a huge and exhausting undertaking ... not least because they decided to use mudbricks. 'Imagine this - with mudbrick you have a building that is made out of the very earth it stands on ... there is another thing: the stuff is free. Once we buy the land we'll have no money left. this way we can get started as soon as we have the block.' In the end it took three years simply to make the bricks. As for the house itself ... But the process gave Richard the opportunity to examine things he had never quite reconciled to himself - big things like what it means to be a man, the nature of male relationships, fatherhood - and to challenge himself in the kind of blokey environment he had rejected. Above all, the mud house proved that even if it 'wasn't the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel' there is nothing like the satisfaction of making something with your own hands.

    This title focuses on the changes to NSW criminal laws after these murders.16 b&w photos

    If we really do get the government we deserve, On Mutiny might provoke a civilian rebellion.