Books

The discovery of a stolen red monoplane on the dry, flat bottom of Emu Lake meant many things for different folks. For Elizabeth Nettlefold, the chance to nurse its strangely ill meant renewed purpose in life. For Dr Knowles, brilliant physician and town...

'...and we will be like two stars circling about each other, drawn together - a double star...' It's 1961 and life turns upside-down when 15-year-old Sandra and her family move to the city from their small country town. She's upset to leave behind her...

"How Lawrence Found His Lost Girl in Cornwall", is the title of the Introduction to this edition of Lawrence's sixth major novel. In it Sandra Jobson shows how Lawrence based part of his character Alvina Houghton on Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand...

The First National Black Playwrights Conference and Workshop held in Canberra in January 1987 was a hectic affair. More than one participant called on Mudrooroo to use the proceedings (in the sense of what was happening) and the stories going around in a...

Arthur Roberts was a schoolmaster in country NSW (1861 to 1894) and it was education and the changing educational system that shaped his life. Born in the hop-growing region of Kent, England, his life and prospects were transformed by a wave of...

This is a remarkable book as it is a translation of an account written by the author Ernst Raubitschek soon after World War Two. As the title suggests it tells of his journey to Dachau concentration camp, his stay there and subsequent journey to...

'A uniquely companionable - and, yes, neglected - round-midnight voice, smoky but sharp-edged, knowing but knowledgeable, world-weary but worldly-wise as it muses on love, war, politics, music and ideas. Direct in its imagery, dryly aphoristic in its...

Darlinghurst Nights and Morning Glories: Being 47 strange sights observed from eleventh storeys, in a land of cream puffs and crime, by a flat-roof professor; and here set forth in sketch and rhyme, first published in 1933.

Martin Flanagan, journalist at the Age, has often written of the great Wonders of Australian Sport, his love of the AFL, of the importance of Aboriginal players in the highest echelons of Australian sport. A few years ago he threw himself at the...

The vision and achievements of Henry Parkes, one of the nation's greatest founding fathers, provide the catalyst for this collection of ideas for Australian society - from education policy to rail infrastructure, from models of government to options for...

'...distant hooves beat time with the name. Nick Nick Nicholas Nick, they cantered. A melody began that danced along on the magical words...' It's 1960 in an Australian country town - a time well before smartphones and social media. Fourteen-year-old...

Leon Theremin, born at the end of the 19th Century, died at the end of the 20th, was a Russian and Soviet inventor. He is most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments. He was also the inventor of...

Best known for his 'Australian Slanguage', Hornadge this time writes of all those from settlement to the present who have sought their own idea of Paradise, either on our shores or on such famous expeditions as those to Paraguay. This is a bible of...

Pioneering ecologist and humanist N. N. Miklouho-Maclay went to the island of New Guinea, the first white man to do so, to prove that the people of all races are equally human. He stayed with the Papuans, and his diaries are testimony to a native culture...

Melbourne during the depression. A seedy, corrupt city. Someone has struck at the heart of Australia's soul: they have killed the horse that would have won the Melbourne Cup. For what motive? Profit, blackmail, a betting scam? Only Tom Pink, the rider...

Includes over 450 portraits of workers across the art world in our capital city - a kind of roll-call and a salute to the predominantly visual arts community members who have crossed Susan's path. 'Domestic Lives' highlights the current silence around...

The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell: before cities existed in Australia, Francis McNamara, the convict poet, described the infernal one populated by those who tormented him and his fellow prisoners. Sentenced in 1832 to...

Imaginative, cosmopolitan, and full of ironies and complexities, this collection established Mudrooroo in the top rank of Australia's poets.

Bar, Bench and Land Law is both entertaining and informative. Former Appeals Court judge John P. Bryson tells the history of the development of Sydneys Phillip Street barristers chambers and recounts amusing anecdotes about the judges he has worked with...

Mudrooroo (aka Colin Johnson) had planned to write a multi-volume autobiography, but passed away in January 2019 shortly after completing the first installment, Tripping with Jenny. It is published here posthumously, marking the end of an illustrious...

Best of Australian Poems is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot and barometer of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry across a timeframe of 1 July...

A Workingman's Cemetery unearths the contents of a small bone orchard in 41 short, fictional biographies. The histories of the interred, from a Hunter coalmining village now gone, are connected by the spectacularly unkempt life of Ronald Borthwick, the...

The fashion industry is killing the planet but I really need that new designer handbag...Her daughter is divorcing and she's going to die because of it... The mother must be medicated... I just want to be in Cyprus, why would I want to be in Australia.....

Diane Fahey builds on an already rich body of poetry about birds with this fresh tribute to their exquisite intelligence, grace and splendour as they exist in the wild, and in our immediate sensory world. Vividly, she evokes the lives and contemporary...

'Alive, passionate and on the move - these poems range through worlds of wide reading, inner and outer journeying, through both the historic and the personal past and present, the fleshly and the vegetal. Always alert to "terrible Aphrodite" in their...

Born in the 1970s in Shanghai as Wu Yadi, Duo Er is a member of the Shanghai Writers' Association and the Songjiang District Writers' Union. Her work has been widely published in such literary magazines as Poetic Exploration, Chinese Poets, Shanghai...

The Hard Word is the second collection from this respected and influential critic and teacher. The poems contain his trademark conversational tone combined with vivid wit and is the distillation of 12 years of poetry.

'John Carey possesses a wicked, intelligent sense of humour and a deft feel for the play of language. His poetry is a finely calibrated device for detecting and skewering absurdity, cant, hypocrisy, humbug, mendacity, and institutional cruelty...

Astroturfing for Spring is the second collection for this conceptually challenging poet. His language has been described as bright and alive, perhaps a case of William Blake meets Hello Kitty: there is a mash-up of voices which offers unsettling...

Born in Shanghai, in November, 1953, Lu Piao, whose original name is Lu Jinchang, is a member of Shanghai Writers' Association and editor-in-chief of Pujiang Literature, and has published a number of poetry books, including A Dark River, Snow in the...

Born in 1965 in Taizhou, Zhejiang, Hai An, Chinese scholar-poet and translator, whose real name is Li Dingjun, was the winner of Shanghai Cultural Development Fund (2007), Chinese National Social Sciences Fund (2013), Shanghai Universities and Colleges...

Exploring relations to place, ways we receive language as we move in the world, and anxieties of communication, hotel universo particularizes the rendered, the middling and ostensibly universal. Written in Newcastle's suburbs and published here its poems...

Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt is a Marxist-feminist epic poem - wait, no, it's historical - actually it's poems of the worker's body. It is none and all of these things. It is absurd or perhaps entirely sincere. Gomez's second book brings...

Four Oceans, Toby Davidson's second collection, confirms his reputation as one of the most expansive and radical voices in the emerging generation of Australian poets. The scale and scope of the works are deliberately ambitious, often testing the limits...

The Owl Inside presents an often haunted and feral, sometimes confessional and domesticated enquiry into what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene. These poems are suffused with musings on the escape to outer space, secret communications between...

'Wattison's poems are always investigative, always humane. They are always willing to take risks. I know of no other Australian poet who writes quite like Meredith Wattison. She choreographs language in a way that is distinctive, deftly filtering moods...

This anthology realigns Australian poetry from a 21st century perspective, with a selection from a wide range of living poets as well as familiar voices from the past. There is an emphasis on social observation and personal experience of Australia's...

Man Chen is a post-romantic poet who is at his best when language is polished like a withered flower, knowing its demise, but continuing to forge on against the odds, wanting to shine in a declining darkness that feels like depression.

Todd Turner's second book, Thorn, is an expansive and intimate collection whose poems open out with a strong and developed voice to encompass a broad range of subject matter. There are odes and elegies, stunning evocations of birds and animals, a...

Na Ye's poetry shows her as a woman relaxed at her work, smoking while staring inwardly at the outside world, focusing on her own inner world, seeking peace and tranquility from night as much as from the storm or desert out there in her peripheral vision...

S. K. Kelen's oeuvre covers a diverse range of styles and subjects, and includes pastorals, satires, sonnets, odes, narratives, haiku, epics, idylls, horror stories, sci-fi, allegories, philosophical musings, prophecies, politics, history, love poems,...

Martin Duwell wrote in Australian Poetry Review that 'Sharkey's project seems to be built on a desire to make poetry once more (or more satisfactorily) deal with life as a socially lived phenomenon, and that 'not many people are writing so well and so...

A Crooked Stile takes a slantwise leap over the everyday, a fencer's delight in parry and parody. Starting out from an almost out-of-body consideration of being, Jenkins blithely waltzes around the globe, your better-than-Baedeker witty tour guide. At...

Shorter Lives' histories of notable creators (and notable enablers of the creative) drift away from conventional tellings to offer alternative facts and believable untruths. No small part of the author's extensive research, however, has been the trawling...

In these essays Simon West examines our metaphors for reachingback after inspiration. Rather than cultural rubble ripe for plunder, he celebrates our waterways in imagining that heritage, rivers that nourish the red gums across floodplains. In doing so...

A lickety split trip through Australianlife with slippery language, puns, sleight of lip and playful sharp-eyedobservation. From the sudden sharks waiting under the water in Sydney Harbourto rainbow lorikeets, and too too sleekly cheeky bower...

Like its precursor Barnacle Rock, Brief Garden is a collection of poems largely concerned with environmental degeneration and loss. The title poem deals with the ephemeral nature of a civilisation and its artefacts, but the focus of the collection goes...

Gee these poems be limber, you think, flipping thru the pages, admiring, here, the cut of this poem's jib, there the poise & rancour of another. For this is a book that might save your heart, a book to pull from your jacket pocket at some...