Faced with difficult challenges – an uncertain tropical environment, the tyranny of distance and a shortage of money – Queensland’s colonial education systems became rather like armies in their organisation and behaviour. [click to continue…]
Autobiography
Lesley Williams was forced to leave the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement and her family at a young age to work as a domestic servant. Apart from pocket money, Lesley never saw her wages – they were kept ‘safe’ for her and for countless others just like her. She was taught not to question her life, until desperation made her start to wonder, where is all that money she earned? And so began a nine-year journey for answers.
Born on a remote island to a migrant Chinese father and an indigenous mother, Julius Chan overcame poverty, discrimination and family tragedy to become one of Papua New Guinea’s longest-serving and most influential politicians. His 50-year career, including two terms as Prime Minister, spans a crucial period of the country’s history, particularly its coming of age from an Australian colony to a leading democratic nation in the South Pacific.
An exquisite, compelling story of courage, destiny and the search for home.
Lithuania,1913. Haunted by memories of the pogroms, Jacob Frank leaves his village in the hope of a better life, and boards a ship bound for New York. Twenty-five years later, his daughter Bertha sets sail for South Africa to marry a man she has never met, unaware of the tumult that lies ahead. In time, her granddaughter Shelley, following those very steps in reverse, flees the violence of apartheid to live in America, before at last finding home in Australia.
Call me Eve. It’s the name I call myself when I think back to that time when I was a young wife – so very young, so very hungry. I picked the fruit and ate and drank until I was drunk with freedom and covered in juice and guilt.’
Dawood Amiri is an ethnic Hazara who, as a young man, made the fateful decision to flee the terror being inflicted on his people and seek asylum in Australia. He arrived in Indonesia in 2010, but was eventually captured when he was about to board a boat headed for Christmas Island. After a long stint in detention, where immigration processes failed to help him, he escaped and began working for people-smugglers to aid his fellow asylum-seekers and to raise money for his own passage to Australia. [click to continue…]
One eveing in 1952, a young woman walked down to the Mekong River carrying her baby boy in a home-made basket. She lit a candle and stood it in the basket, then set her baby adrift on the stream. Miraculously, the child was rescued by a fisherman and taken to a Catholic mission on the island of Cu Lao Gieng. The little boy was named ‘Ty’, meaning ‘billion’, because the odds against his survival were a billion to one. [click to continue…]
Captain Bill Anderson, Qantas Pilot 1967-2007, was a member of the Qantas Cadet Pilot Training Scheme. [click to continue…]
“People were supposed to remember who they were and where they lived. They were supposed to remember who loved them and who did not and where their grandmothers were born. Martin Jeremiah Westley didn’t remember any of it, including the fact that he was Martin Jeremiah Westley.” [click to continue…]
Ray Martin needs no introduction. Well known as the face of the Midday Show, A Current Affair, 60 Minutes, Carols by Candlelight… If you trust anyone on Australian television, you trust Ray Martin.
But Ray’s was a less than stellar introduction to the glamorous world of television. Before he had even got to high school, he had lived in thirteen different places, in three Australian states, mostly in the bush. [click to continue…]
