Van Diemen’s Land is a new, groundbreaking history of the settlement of Tasmania. James Boyce’s book is filled with new facts and new ideas about one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of British colonialism. [click to continue…]
Australiana
In this fascinating collection, John Hirst has assembled the key assessments of the national character of Australia and Australians. There are insiders and outsiders. There is celebration and criticism. There is the difference between what Australian think of themselves and what they are really like. [click to continue…]
What are the qualities at the heart of Australian culture? How did they arise? What distinguishes us from other nations beyond a fondness for calling each other ‘mate’? And what do such national quirks reveal about our society, our past and our attitudes towards it? [click to continue…]
It is 1939 and, although Australia is about to go to war, it doesn’t quite realise yet that the situation is serious. Deep in the working- class Melbourne suburb of Richmond it is business – your own and everyone else’s – as usual. And young Kip Westaway, failed scholar and stablehand, is living the most important day of his life. [click to continue…]
Peter Kennedy is a very large man who is remarkably happy with his life. [click to continue…]
In ‘The Wind and Other Children’, a girl searches for her lost grandmother while her parents quarrel at home; in ‘Extra Time’, a man contemplates inertia after toxic contamination changes life in a remote Australian town; a woman imagines a mother’s love for her autistic son in ‘The Air you Need’; and in ‘Hello, Satan’, a boy awaits his destiny at a roundabout at midnight, on the edge of a small town. [click to continue…]
Born in 1903 to a pioneering Irish-Catholic family, Bernard O’Reilly spent his first twelve years in the secluded Kanimbla Valley of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. The family then moved to the wild and largely unexplored McPherson Ranges in southern Queensland. Here the innate O’Reilly pioneering spirit eventually succeeded in establishing a haven for guests in the midst of a rainforest paradise. Bernard O’Reilly died in 1975. [click to continue…]
Families wax and wane through the decades of an ever changing hectic world, but the O’Reilly family have remained true to their core vales and strengths throughout the generations and above all else maintained the brave and generous spirit forged by the late and great Bernard O’Reilly and his predecessors. Charles Darwin once wrote after visiting Australia that it was not the most intelligent or strongest of species that survive, but the species most able to adapt to change. [click to continue…]
Asian-Australians have often been written about by outsiders, as outsiders. In this collection, compiled by award-winning author Alice Pung, they tell their own stories with verve, courage and a large dose of humour. These are not predictable tales of food, festivals and traditional dress. The food is here in all its steaming glory – but listen more closely to the dinner-table chatter and you might be surprised by what you hear. [click to continue…]
For several years now, Nicolas Rothwell has travelled the length and breadth of Northern and Central Australia. This book tells the story of desert journeys and encounters with mystics and artists, explorers and healers. [click to continue…]
