Australia Politics

Broadcaster Tracey Spicer had an epiphany when her young son uttered these six words. Suddenly, her life’s work fighting inequality seemed futile. What’s the point in agitating to change the present, if bigotry is being embedded into our futures? And so began a quest to uncover who was responsible and hold them to account. Who is the ultimate villain? Big Tech, whose titans refuse to spend money to fix the problem? The world’s politicians, who lack the will to legislate? Or should we all be walking into a hall of mirrors and taking a good, hard look at ourselves…?

It all started with a question: What's it like to be old? Then came the letters. What began as a singular response to Sophy's cousin asking about aging, soon blossomed into a full year of unmailed reflections, wonderment, and curiosities on a full life truly lived...

A proud Gunai/Kurnai woman, Veronica Gorrie grew up dauntless, full of cheek and a fierce sense of justice. After watching her friends and family suffer under a deeply compromised law-enforcement system, Gorrie signed up for training to become one of a rare few Aboriginal police officers in Australia. In her 10 years in the force, she witnessed appalling institutional racism and sexism and fought past those things to provide courageous and compassionate service to civilians in need, many Aboriginal themselves.

Why is it that children in a family can share the same gene pool, a similar socio-economic environment and experience similar parenting styles yet have fundamentally different personalities, interests and even different careers as adults? Birth order! The implications for parents, teachers and adults involved with children are many. First published in 2003 to great acclaim, this fully revised and updated edition seeks to increase the listener's understanding of birth order theory.

The true story of Deng Adut - Sudanese child soldier, refugee, man of hope. Movingly narrated by Blessing Mokgohloa. Deng Adut's family were farmers in South Sudan when a brutal civil war altered his life forever. At six years old, his mother was told she had to give him up to fight. At the age most Australian children are starting school, Deng was conscripted into the Sudan People's Liberation Army.

Have you ever bunged it on? Behaved like a drongo? Added mayo to a story? Lost your Reg Grundies? Join bestselling storyteller William McInnes as he offers his own take on our colourful and colloquial way with words. From the simpler times of childhood to today's testing (and unprecedented!) times, or when we're wasting time, enjoying sporting times or hitting the big time, Australians have a turn of phrase for every situation. Our love of plain speaking communicates the essence of the thing to our mates, to those in the know - and to those who should know better.

Hugh Riminton was a small-town New Zealand teenager with a possible drinking problem and a job cleaning rat cages when a chance meeting with a radio news director changed his life. The news man took a chance on him, and at 17 Riminton became a cadet reporter. Over nearly 40 years he has been shot at, blown up, threatened with deportation and thrown in jail. He has reported from nearly 50 countries, witnessed massacres in Africa, wars and conflicts on four continents, and every kind of natural disaster.

As a National Public Radio reporter covering the last stand of the Taliban in Afghanistan's southern borderland, Sarah Chayes became deeply immersed in the attempt to rebuild a broken nation. With her NPR assignment finished in early 2002, she left reporting to help turn around the country's fortunes, accepting a job running a nonprofit founded by President Hamid Karzai's brother. With remarkable access to leading players in the postwar government, Chayes witnessed a tragic, perverse turn of events.

Come with Kaz on a laugh-out-loud frolic through centuries of terrible advice, from 14th-century clergy to the Kardashians (wear a dress made of arsenic, do some day-drinking, have sex with a billionaire biker, worry about your vagina wrinkles). It's also a roar against injustice, a rallying cry for sisterhood and a way to free ourselves from ludicrous expectations and imposed perfectionism.

Since publishing his critically acclaimed, Walkley Award-winning, best-selling memoir Talking to My Country in early 2016, Stan Grant has been crossing the country, talking to huge crowds everywhere about how racism is at the heart of our history and the Australian dream. But Stan knows this is not where the story ends. In this book, Australia Day, his long-awaited follow up to Talking to My Country, Stan talks about our country, about who we are as a nation, about the indigenous struggle for belonging and identity in Australia, and what it means to be Australian.

CSI Told You Lies is a surprisingly moving account of the real forensic pathologists at the frontline of Australia's major crime and disaster investigations. These are the men and women whose post-mortem examinations help the dead to speak. Along with the pathologists, Meshel Laurie, host of the Australian True Crime podcast, also speaks to the homicide detectives, defence barristers and victims' families in this groundbreaking study of the ripple effect of violent crime and largescale natural disaster.

Navigating the Spanish Lake examines Spain's long presence in the Pacific Ocean (1521-1898) in the context of its global empire. Building on a growing body of literature on the Atlantic world and indigenous peoples in the Pacific, this pioneering book investigates the historiographical "Spanish Lake" as an artifact that unites the Pacific Rim (the Americas and Asia) and Basin (Oceania) with the Iberian Atlantic.

Detailing the development of the prison and its outlying stations, including its dreaded coal mines and providing an account of the changing views to convict rehabilitation, Convict-era Port Arthur focuses in on a number of individuals, telling the story through their eyes. Charles O'Hara Booth, a significant commandant of Port Arthur; Mark Jeffrey, a convict who became the grave digger on the Island of the Dead and William Thompson, who arrived just as the new probation system started and who was forced to work in the treacherous coal mines.

Available once again for a new generation, the first volume in Arthur Ashe’s epic trilogy that chronicles the remarkable legacy of Black athletes in the United States—a major addition to our understanding of American history and the fulfillment of this legendary sports star and global activist’s lifelong dream.

Written and read by Jessica Watson, this is the story of a remarkable girl who followed her dream and conquered the world. There is something different about adventurers, about the way their minds work. They look at the world as a place of challenges and though they know what fear is, they refuse to be hindered by it.

As a result of their broad experience on the world stage in politics, economics and global not-for-profits, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Julia Gillard have some strong ideas about the impact of gender on the treatment of leaders. Women and Leadership takes a consistent and comprehensive approach to teasing out what is different for women who lead. 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.

In the long-awaited return to his bestselling true crime series on life behind bars, James Phelps has finally turned his attention to HM Prison Pentridge—the bluestone behemoth that was home to Victoria's worst criminals for more than a century. Beginning with a gang of guards and a handful of convicts, for more than 145 years Pentridge housed a who's who of Australian criminals and Melbourne's underworld including Ned Kelly and Mark 'Chopper' Read. This is gritty true crime storytelling, on steroids—about what life was really like behind the bluestone walls of Pentridge.

Like all military acquisition programs worth billions of dollars, Australia's decision to buy a new submarine fleet was expected to be a torturous process. But no one could have predicted the trail of wreckage it left behind, from the boulevards of Paris to the dockyards of Adelaide, as deep inside the Australian government a secret group conspired to overthrow the winning French bid. In this tale of treachery and intrigue, Andrew Fowler exposes the lies and deception that so outraged the President of France.

In this perceptive and often hilarious essay, Lech Blaine dissects some top blokes, with particular focus on Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, but stretching back to Bob Hawke and Kerry Packer. This is a riveting narrative of how image conquered politics, just as globalisation engulfed the Australian economy. While many got rich and entertained, look where we ended up.

Christopher Pyne has been many things and called many things throughout his long career in politics. Member for Sturt. Minister for defence. Manager of opposition business. Leader of the House. 'The Fixer'. Any Canberra story he doesn't know isn't worth telling. Now, after 26 years, the ultimate insider is outside the House and ready to burst the Canberra bubble with his trademark sharp wit.