Australian Memoir

In 1977, Vera 'Toddie' Hays and Florice 'Beezie' Bessire thought they were about to embark on the trip of a lifetime when Vera's nephew, Vern Todd, offered them a campervan to drive from Germany to India. Little did the women know that Vern and his accomplices would secretly pack two tonnes of hashish into the vehicle along the way. This shocking inside story chronicles Toddie and Beezie's wild ride across continents and oceans to our shores, their arrest by Australian Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents and all that the women faced in the aftermath.

As a teenage orphan in England in 1791, Mary Reibey was sentenced to death for stealing a horse. When police cornered her, she was dressed as a boy, and she maintained that disguise until she was unmasked at her trial. Due to her 'tender age', Reibey was spared the hangman's noose and sentenced to seven years' transportation to the colony of New South Wales. With the odds stacked against her, Reibey went on to become Australia's first female business tycoon and the richest woman in the colony, founding the Bank of New South Wales, now one of the nation's biggest financial institutions.

When Tim Bowden went back to Tasmania to explore his state of origin for the first time in many years, he was reminded of his adolescent assertion that "Tasmania is the testicle of Australia, suffusing the mainland with strength and vigour. What a pity there is only one of them".

Heroes are hard to come by - but there's one man whose legend has stood the test of two centuries, and whose name sits on Australia's highest peak. Tadeusz Kosciuszko: freedom fighter, friend of Thomas Jefferson and champion of liberty on two continents. Bestselling author Anthony Sharwood finds out why he's the hero the world needs right now.

Chasing Dreamtime is the incredible true-life story of a young traveler's journey through memory and myth. In 1975, after college and a brief, disastrous marriage, Neva Sullaway attempts to escape her anguish as well as the post-Vietnam confusion of her generation by sailing alone around the world, but her plans are abruptly scuttled. A string of unlikely events occurs and sends her boat-hopping across the vast South Pacific. While sailing among the exquisitely beautiful Pacific atolls, Sullaway is arrested for a visa violation, hunted by sharks, stricken with tropical fever and held at ...

John Wood grew up in working-class Melbourne; when he failed out of high school, an employment officer told him, 'You have the mind of an artist and the body of a labourer.' And so John continued to pursue his acting dreams in amateur theatre, sustaining himself by working jobs as a bricklayer, a railway clerk and even in the same abattoir as his father. When he won a scholarship to NIDA, in Sydney, it moved John into a new and at times baffling world, full of extraordinary characters.

Over a decorated 34-year career, Commodore Scott served in 10 submarines, passed the most demanding military command course in the world and served as the Head of Profession of the Submarine Arm of the Royal Australian Navy. During that time his character was forged by the challenges of naval service, success and failure as a leader, catastrophic onboard disasters while dived, and life-threatening traumas. Along the way, he also endured personal battles with self-doubt, addiction, depression and anxiety.

Nat's What I Reckon was the tattooed lockdown saviour we didn't know we needed, rescuing us from packet food, jar sauce and total boredom with his hilarious viral recipe videos that got us cooking at home like champions again. Now that we've cooked our way out of lockdown and are wondering what the hell to do next, Nat's back - and he's ready to teach us more about life in this thoroughly unhelpful (but maybe actually kinda helpful) self-help guide.

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.

The gripping finale to Three Crooked Kings and Jacks and Jokers brings to a close Matthew Condon's best-selling true-crime trilogy. In 1983, the soon-to-be-knighted Police Commissioner Terry Lewis continues to turn a blind eye to the operation of The Joke, a highly organised system of graft payments from illegal gambling, prostitution and illicit drugs. As the tentacles of this fraudulent vice network spread, the fabric holding together the police, judiciary and political system starts to unravel.

Ed Stafford - adventurer extraordinaire and Guinness World Record holder for walking the length of the Amazon River - likes a challenge. Casting about for an adventure that would top the extraordinary feat he recounts in Walking the Amazon, Stafford decides to maroon himself on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. His mission: to survive for 60 days equipped with nothing - no food, water, or even clothing - except the video cameras he would use to document his time.

Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan were both happy, healthy, affluent, middle-class women from conservative, loving families. Such women are hardly ever among the ranks of the missing. They were not hitchhikers, or associates of drug dealers, or unhappy with their family relationships, or suffering from mental health issues. Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan came from different parts of Sydney, mixed in quite different circles, and led completely different lives.

In 1991 Andrew Daddo was sacked as an MTV presenter. Rather than slink back to Australia immediately, Andrew and a guy he'd met at a party named Ray O'Neal set off on a month-long motorcycle journey across America. That summer spent riding cross-country with Ray forged a friendship that Andrew thought would last a lifetime. But in February 2004, Ray died in an accident. He left behind a wife and a young daughter, Rose.

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.

Australian Encounters is a collection of firsthand accounts by Robert Kremnizer, who is a highly respected lawyer, businessman, and writer who is based in Sydney, Australia, portraying his interactions with the Rebbe, both in his professional capacity and in his private life....

For a man who has been firmly in the public eye for the past decade or more, Matt Preston has been very, very quiet about his past and private life. There are reasons for this. Now, in Big Mouth, Matt opens up about his early years for the first time—the good and the bad, the tragic and the ecstatic. Like the man himself, it's a story that's joyous, funny and larger than life. It's also, perhaps unexpectedly, filled with pathos and emotional depth, set to a pulsating 1980s soundtrack.

Discovering Kanye West is endorsing Adolf Hitler, John Safran heads to America to find out what's up. Kanye proves elusive, one thing leads to another, and John packs his duffle bags and moves in, squatting at one of Kanye's mansions in the rolling hills of Los Angeles. Will the neighbours get wise and snitch to the cops? Are the creatures in the woods behind the mansion a worry? More paranoid each day, John becomes convinced the house itself is turning against him.

As Australia's most distinguished criminal psychologist, 'Doc' Tim Watson-Munro has assessed over 30,000 'persons of interest' in some of the nation's most notorious court cases, including Hoddle Street gunman Julian Knight, corporate fraudster Alan Bond, Melbourne gangster Alphonse Gangitano and, in recent years, Australia's first terrorist convicts. But the front line of psychology is no place for the fainthearted.

When prominent US neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander goes into a coma after contracting a severe brain infection, his doctors tell his family to prepare for the worst - death or, at best, survival in a vegetative state. Remarkably, Dr Alexander wakes up seven days later with his faculties intact. Just as extraordinary is his detailed recall of a near-death experience. Based on all that is known about how the brain works, Dr Alexander had no capacity, while in the coma, to create thought; his neocortex, the part of his brain that makes us human, had effectively shut down.

In the high-stakes world of Formula One, only the fastest make it to the top. Few know this better than Australian Formula One legend Mark Webber. His career in F1 stretched an incredible 12 years, saw him earn 42 podium finishes and triumph in nine races, including twice-winning the crown jewel of F1, the Monaco Grand Prix. But the road to the top of F1 racing is long and full of deadly twists and strange turns. In his long-awaited Autobiography, Webber tells the incredible true story of the small town pizza delivery boy who climbed the apex of the world's most dangerous sport.