Society & Social Sciences Books

Lorraine McGee-Sippel was just a small girl when she asked her parents what a half-caste was. It was the 1950s and the first step on a journey that would span decades and lead her to search for her birth family. In the historic climate of the Rudd...

This is the autobiography of Ambrose Mungala Chalarimeri, a Kwini man from the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. Ambrose speaks out honestly, without malice or accusation, on a number of subjects including the appropriation of rock art, the...

Chi Vu takes the central figure in a traditional Buddhist folktale, a deranged killer who wears his victims' fingers in a garland around his neck, and turns him into a menacing abbatoir worker who carries bloody chunks of meat home to his lodgings in...

Wild & Woolley: A Publishing Memoir is Wilding's rollicking account of those heady bohemian years in the 1970s and 80s, charting the growth, the experiments, and the development of this innovative small press against a background of social upheaval...

The three long essays that make up The Bone House are an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, each based on a single theme and woven out of the same few elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and...

Making Australia Slightly Better Than Average Again(TM) is Mark Swivel's soundbite manifesto as he embarks on a bid for the senate in 2019. Swivel argues our political class detached from the rest of us a long time ago and has no real purpose beyond...

Holocene Pointbreaks presents a triptych of long poems that veer physically, temporally, and textually across the lands of the Dharawal and Eora Nations. From morning reflections on Australia's most polluted urban waterway, the 'Cooks River', to a...

Books one to four in this carefully researched series cover the development of the necessary grammatical knowledge, from the early years to the end of junior school in a practical and readily accessible form. These contain write-in activities.The Growing...

Charities play an outsize role in the social, cultural and economic life of the nation, delivering goods and services on which lives depend. To effectively serve their communities, charities also participate in politics: campaigning for changes to law...

In 1975, as Gough Whitlam's government hurtled towards its demise, a nineteen-year-old arts student at the University of Melbourne, Kim Carr, began a long march.Raised in an avowedly blue-collar household headed by his boilermaker father, Carr eschewed...

Violence against women and children is a national crisis. Nearly a decade has passed since family violence was first declared a national emergency in 2015, and yet communities are still taking to the streets to demand greater leadership and action, and...

An idealist as well as a pragmatist, and someone who believes passionately in equality, democracy and empowerment, Race Mathews has inspired and mentored many.Race was principal private secretary to Gough Whitlam in the lead-up to Whitlam's election as...

*Victorian Community History Awards : History Publication Commendation*Save Our Sons tells for the first time the full story of the Save Our Sons movement of Australian women who banded together to oppose conscription during the Vietnam War.In 1965,...

Whenever anyone tells you that only the big parties or star candidates have a chance of winning a seat in federal parliament, just say 'Cathy McGowan'. Running as a community-backed independent candidate, Cathy won the previously safe Liberal seat of...

Ken Inglis was one of Australia's most creative, wide-ranging and admired historians. During a scholarly career spanning nearly seven decades, his humane, questioning approach - summed up by the recurring query, 'I wonder...' - won him a large...

'My journey to this book is the culmination of a long-held fascination with the history and currency of Australia's domestic interior. Having been born in a remote, desert-bound Queensland town, I have felt its power as a solace; a retreat from the...

What is happening inside theworld's most militarised zone? This book is the result ofthe authors' visit to the Kashmir Valley, the northernmost region of the Indiansubcontinent, in December 2016, but it encapsulates the experiences andunderstanding of...

From the maelstrom of the Depression and World War II, fromCommunist Party membership in the 1930s-1950s, and early attachment to thefeminism and peace, Jean Blackburn emerged as a significant publicintellectual. Her life work was the attachment of...

Whatmakes one nation curious about another nation? Curious enough that the study ofthe other's culture and language becomes a natural commitment or something thatcould be described as a national project? This question lies behind much of thewriting in...

Jakartabased Andreas Harsono is one of the most knowledgeable, experienced,high-profile and courageous of reporters and commentators on contemporaryIndonesian society. Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and ReligiousViolence in Post-Suharto...

Professor Lord Meghnad Desai is a world-renowned commentator on globalisation and de-globalisation. He is currently Chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) Advisory Board, which facilitates discussion between key...

What isthe purpose of an intelligence organisation? The short answer is to transformdisparate and ambiguous information into a product that clarifies nationalsecurity decision-making. Ideally, that process ought to be politically neutraland detached from...

In CreativityCrisis Robert Nelson argues that university education is systematicallyuncreative and suggests how this might be changed. Constructive alignment, thecentrepiece of today's university pedagogy, promotes mechanistic thinking andthe anxious...

In a world of fake news and populist politics, elections can seem like theatre. With growing rates of informal votes and a perceived narrowing of differences between the major parties, do Australian elections really matter? Taking ten examples, this book...

In 1969 car crashes killed over 1000 Victorians, making Victoria's roads some of the world's most deadly.By 2016, the fatality rate had been cut by 85% and Victorians are now taking seriously the goal of eliminating death on the roads altogether.This...

Manga Vision examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and...

What woman forgets the moment of discovering her first period?  The shock? Fear? Panic? Loathing? Embarrassment? Pride?  Happiness?First Blood examines the ways in which women from countries as diverse as India and Sri Lanka,...

This is the rollicking tale of Australia's first true adventure playground, when children were allowed to use a patch of public land as their own backyard, to play in freely as they wished, not as adults directed them. They chased their dreams and...

Technology is radically transforming society. From social media to artificial intelligence, our world is now governed by algorithms, powerful tools that not only predict human behaviour but affect how we look at each other, and ourselves. At the same...

In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that overturned Roe v Wade, declaring that the American Constitution did not protect the right to abortion. Several US states immediately banned abortion, while others were quick to...

A new format of an acclaimed history - joint winner of the Northern Territory Chief Minister's History Book Award 2013.In 1883, pastoralists began to drive great herds of cattle into the Northern Territory's Victoria River District. They entered a vast...

In March 2020, schools and childcare centres across Australia were forced to close to control the spread of the recently arrived novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Families and carers suddenly had to adjust to long periods of home-schooling, disparities in...

Courts aren't just there to settle divorces, sentence law-breakers and resolve corporate disputes. A healthy legal system, one that ensures access, transparency and accountability, is fundamental to democracy. When the system works, the courts act as a...

My father, political activist Samuel Mark Goldbloom, was my hero and my nemesis all the days of his life.Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo grew up in thrall to her father, a prominent socialist and covert member of the Communist Party. From an early age, she...

In 1946 Aboriginal people walked off pastoral stations in Western Australia's Pilbara region, withdrawing their labour from the economically important wool industry to demand improvements in wages and conditions. Their strike lasted three years. On Red...

Human rights come into question in times of crisis. But should we wait for crises to arise before we discuss these rights? Advancing human rights should be everyone's business, not just that of a select group of public interest lawyers, conspiracy...

What does reconciliation and truth-telling look like, and how do we as a nation find justice for Indigenous people?In this deeply personal work, Inala Cooper shares stories of her family to show the impact of colonisation on the lives of Aboriginal...

Rarely is the public taken deep into the inner sanctum of major news organisations. In this extraordinary book, award-winning journalist John Lyons goes to the heart of how the media reports - or does not report - one of the biggest stories of our time:...

Long-term population directions, in terms of both size and age composition, drive the destiny of all nations. While for decades we have worried about global overpopulation, it is far more likely that the period 19502050 will be an extraordinary...

Over the past thirty years, the internet has transformed virtually every area of human activity, social and economic. The bulk of these changes have been positive, allowing people to work, imagine and connect with each other in new ways. The boost to...

One in five Australian women has been the victim of a sexual assault. For these women, there is less than a 1 per cent chance that their rapist has been arrested, prosecuted and convicted of the crime. These are the bare numerical facts of system failure...

How much do you know about the history of Australia's oldest political party, the Australian Labor Party? You know the big names: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. But what about the names behind the big names? The unsung and overlooked True...

The exposs in early 2021 of sexism and sexual violence in Parliament House prompted women (and some men) across the country to take to stages, lecterns and social media to express their rage and demand action. However, while these events highlighted that...

The recent revelations and allegations of sexual harassment and assault in the Australian Parliament have prompted furious responses. Political leaders have attempted to limit the damage by referring to the lack of criminal charges, resisting a...

Why does Australia go through cycles of public policy boldness and timidity? The COVID-19 crisis has shown that the Australian political system has much more tolerance for policy innovation than appeared to be the case on the evidence of the previous...

As the many nations of the Pacific deal with the threat of climate change, including rising sea levels and lessening access to fresh water, they are also suffering from some of the slowest rates of development of any region on earth. Now more than ever,...

In Australia, corruption spends public funds in pursuit of power, rewards favour, and strips support from worthy programs. It silences journalists and those charged with upholding standards of integrity by depriving them of funding. Grift and stacking...

Fatal Contact explores the devastating infectious diseases introduced into the Indigenous populations of Australia after the arrival of the British colonists in 1788. Epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, measles and sexually transmitted...