In April 1995, a plain brown colt was passed in at the famous Easter Yearling Sales in Sydney, virtually unnoticed. He would grow up to become an icon of the Australian turf, a national treasure. Might and Power was a giant in a golden era of exceptional thoroughbreds: the horse of a lifetime for owner Nick Moraitis, the horse of hope for trainer Jack Denham, and the horse of redemption for jockey Jim Cassidy. [click to continue…]
John Sharpe
This is the story of the families of the plains – obsessed with their land and history, their culture and mythology – and of the man who ventured into their world. [click to continue…]
As a reporter, Moorehead witnessed many of the great historical events of the mid-20th century: the Spanish Civil War and both world wars, Cold War espionage, and decolonisation in Africa. He debated strategy with Churchill and Gandhi, fished with Hemingway, and drank with Graham Greene, Ava Gardner and Truman Capote. As well as being a regular contributor to the New Yorker, in 1956 Moorehead wrote the first significant book about the Gallipoli campaign. [click to continue…]
In The Best Australian Stories 2013, Kim Scott assembles the most exceptional short fiction of the last year and invites readers to build ‘a rare and intimate relationship’ with these talented writers, one that is ‘essential to storytelling in print, whether on paper or screen.’ [click to continue…]
The year is 1869. After a brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae is arrested for the crime.
A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but the police and the courts must decide what drove him to murder the local village constable. And why did he kill his other two victims? [click to continue…]
Davíd is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, with the guidance of the three sisters who own the farm where Simón and Inés work, Davíd is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. [click to continue…]
For millennia, humankind has searched for an intellectual Holy Grail – a unifying theory to explain the origins of the universe and our place in it.
In the early 1970s, Queensland was a haven for crooks from both sides of the law. It was into this hothouse that Ray Whitrod was controversially appointed as police commissioner in 1970. Just six years later he resigned from the head role of the Queensland Police Force, no longer willing to tolerate the interference of the Bjelke- Petersen government. It was a decision that the Fitzgerald Inquiry would later, gloriously, vindicate.
What if you saved a man’s life and he went on to play a leading role in one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times?
Ted Whittlemore, a radical Australian journalist, does just that. In the late ‘60s, he saves Nhem Kiry, soon to become known as ‘Pol Pot’s mouthpiece’. The consequences haunt him for the rest of his days. When the Khmer Rouge take power in Cambodia, Whittlemore watches, fascinated and horrified, as the ideals he holds dear are translated into unfathomable violence.
Aboriginal lawyer, writer and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island in 1836. In this deeply personal book, Behrendt uses Eliza’s tale as a starting point to interrogate how Aboriginal people – and indigenous people of other countries – have been portrayed in their colonisers’ stories.
