Australian Studies

#MeToo is not just about famous people ... If #MeToo is going to ultimately make the big difference we all want to see, it's got to mean something for [any] woman who gets harassed.- Julia Gillard

This is the first collection that aims to make sense of the #MeToo movement in Australia. A collection that follows Julia Gillard's imperative to listen to the stories of every women who faces sexual abuse, exploitation and harassment. Contributors cross boundaries of colour and class, ability and disability, region and industry.

Like the movement itself, this is an anthology about unearthing and listening to the things that happen away from the public eye, in one-on-one moments, and that we can only know about when women speak up. But it is also an attempt to grapple with how this movement has evolved, about toxic masculinity, cyberhate, rape culture, a gendered economy. It is a collection that tries to create a forum for what happens next. Where we can go from here.

Above all, this is an anthology that resists victimhood.

Imprint: PICADOR
RRP: $32.99

For over 200 years Australia’s official history has focused on English colonisation and ‘discovery’, with tales of British explorers and first generation white Australians navigating the vast and unfriendly land. But what of the millennia before the English claimed Australia as their own and wrote the history books. 1787 traces the journey of Australia before the infamous 1788 date, to explore just how ‘discovered’ the southern continent was by not only the Indigenous Australians who had lived and prospered for thousands of years, but also the sailors, traders, fishermen and many others who had visited our shores.

This is not about voyages of ‘discovery’, cartography, geography, or hero-captains and their sailing ship adventures. This is a bigger history—of the rise and fall of empires, the shifts in global economies, and their impact on Australia. By charting the encounters with Australia and its original people by several major groups of visitors, primarily the Portuguese, Dutch, Malay, French, and British from the late Middle Ages, 1787 reveals the stories of first encounters between Indigenous Australians and foreigners, placing Indigenous Australians back into our known history rather than a timeless pre-historical one. It’s a fascinating story that shifts focus away from post-colonial history and engages the reader in the eventful and lively stories of Australia as a vast and active land participating in a global history.

Imprint: HARDIE GRANT BOOKS
RRP: $29.99

A painting, a frog cake, a landmark, a statue, a haunting newspaper photograph, a bucket of peaches, pink shorts in parliament, concert tickets, tourist maps.

Kerryn Goldsworthy's Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of iconic objects. Adelaide navigates her southern home, discovering its identifying curios and passing them to the reader to touch, inspect and marvel at. These objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark and contradictory history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the homey friendliness. They all paint a lively portrait of her home city as remembered, lived in, thought about, missed, loved, hated, laughed at, travelled to and from, seen from afar and close up by assorted writers, citizens and visitors but mainly as it exists in her memory and imagination.

Imprint: NEW SOUTH
RRP: $29.99

Remember childhood visits to the Adelaide Zoo with a ride in the elephant cart? School lunches and a glass bottle of sun-warmed milk? spending Saturday night at Downtown or Tilt to play arcade games or go rollerskating? rides at Magic Mountain or Dazzleland, dances at local clubs with local bands, early TV shows and sleeping on the lawn on a hot Adelaide summer night?
Adelaide Remember When is the city we remember, in pictures and words. The best of Bob Byrne's hit Facebook page and much more, Adelaide Remember When is a bumper book that shows us bits of Adelaide we've forgotten, local identities and landmarks we loved and reminds us that the best parts of the city haven't changed.

Imprint: NEW SOUTH
RRP: $18.00

An illustrated history of present and past sporting sites around Adelaide including such places as Adelaide Oval, Football Park, Memorial Drive, Rowley Park Speedway, Hindmarsh Stadium, Morphetville Racecourse, Mallala, Oakbank, the parklands, the Torrens and Port rivers, the metropolitan beaches and many more.

Imprint: CONSIGNMENT STOCK
RRP: $40.00

Politics in Australia is in a dire state. The Coalition government is led by its third prime minister in four years, two of whom were toppled by their own party. Before that, the Labor government ousted two prime ministers. Voters' trust in politicians is at an all-time low, there is policy inertia on key issues, and ideology and internal politics too often trump good government.


We have the diagnosis, but what's the cure? In this collection of essays, the country's best academic minds look at the key issues and chart a way forward. They examine how Australia's taxation system could be fairer; the priorities in progressing Indigenous Australians' rights; the absurdity of the constant 'left versus right' debate; how to fix private health insurance; and how to settle the conflict between population and migration policies.


Here are innovative and bold ideas to advance Australia.

Imprint: MELBOURNE UNI PRESS
RRP: $19.99

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. All Fall Down offers an unprecedented insight into the Fitzgerald Inquiry and Lewis's subsequent years in prison, and explores the real story behind the dramatic exit of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Drawing from interviews with key players who have, until now, been afraid to speak publicly, All Fall Down celebrates the bravery of those unsung heroes who risked everything to expose the truth.

This epic trilogy provides the definitive account of an unforgettable period in Queensland's history. The devastating consequences of those decades of corruption still reverberate today.

Imprint: UNI OF QUEENSLAND PRESS
RRP: $32.99

As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of the media. But one particular string of bad news stories - and a terrifying brush with her own mortality - sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-changing event. What are our chances of actually experiencing one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next?

In this wise and layered book, Leigh talks intimately with people who've faced the unimaginable, from terrorism to natural disaster to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expecting broken lives, she instead finds strength, hope, even humour. Leigh brilliantly condenses the cutting-edge research on the way the human brain processes fear and grief, and poses the questions we too often ignore out of awkwardness. Along the way, she offers an unguarded account of her own challenges and what she's learned about coping with life's unexpected blows.

Warm, candid and empathetic, this book is about what happens when ordinary people, on ordinary days, are forced to suddenly find the resilience most of us don't know we have.

Imprint: HAMISH HAMILTON
RRP: $34.99

The Arsonist takes readers inside the hunt for a fire-lighter. After Black Saturday, a February 2009 day marked by 47 degree heat and firestorms, arson squad detectives arrived at a plantation on the edge of a 26,000-hectare burn site. Eleven people had just been killed and hundreds made homeless. Here, in the Latrobe Valley, where Victoria's electricity is generated, and the rates of unemployment, crime and domestic abuse are the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn't know.

The Arsonist tells a remarkable detective story, as the police close in on someone they believe to be a cunning offender; and a puzzling psychological story, as defence lawyers seek to understand the motives of a man who, they claimed, was a na'f that had accidentally dropped a cigarette.

It is the story not only of this fire - how it happened, the people who died, the aftermath for the community - but of fire in this country. What it has done, what it has meant, what it might yet do. Bushfire is one of Australia's deepest anxieties, never more so than when deliberately lit. Arson, wrote Henry Lawson, expresses a malice 'terrifying to those who have seen what it is capable of. You never know when you are safe.'

As she did in The Tall Man, Chloe Hooper takes us to a part of the country seldom explored, and reveals something buried but essential in our national psyche. The bush, summertime, a smouldering cigarette - none of these will feel the same again.

Imprint: HAMISH HAMILTON
RRP: $34.99

In September 2016 it will be 60 years since the first British mushroom cloud rose above the plain at Maralinga in South Australia. The atomic weapons test series wreaked havoc on Indigenous communities and turned the land into a radioactive wasteland.

In 1950 Australian prime minister Robert Menzies blithely agreed to atomic tests that offered no benefit to Australia and relinquished control over them – and left the public completely in the dark. This book reveals the devastating consequences of that decision. After earlier tests at Monte Bello and Emu Field, in 1956 Australia dutifully provided 3200 square kilometres of South Australian desert to the British Government, along with logistics and personnel.

How could a democracy such as Australia host another country’s nuclear program in the midst of the Cold War? In this meticulously researched and shocking work, journalist and academic Elizabeth Tynan reveals how Australia allowed itself to be duped. Maralinga was born in secret atomic business, and has continued to be shrouded in mystery decades after the atomic thunder stopped rolling across the South Australian test site. This book is the most comprehensive account of the whole saga, from the time that the explosive potential of splitting uranium atoms was discovered, to the uncovering of the extensive secrecy around the British tests in Australia many years after the British had departed, leaving an unholy mess behind.

Imprint: NEW SOUTH
RRP: $34.99

John Rickard’s Australia: A Cultural History, first published in 1988, is still the only short history of Australia from a cultural perspective. It has also acquired a reputation as an introduction to the development of Australian society and was listed by the historian and public intellectual John Hirst in his ‘First XI: The best Australian history books’.

Although arranged chronologically, this book is not a chronicle, still less a laborious detailing of governors and governments: rather, it focuses on the transmission of values, beliefs, and customs amongst the diverse mix of peoples who are today’s Australians. The story begins with sixty thousand years of Aboriginal presence and their continuing material and spiritual relationship with the land, and takes the reader through the turbulent years of British colonisation and the emergence, through prosperity, war, and depression, of the cultural accommodations which have been distinctively Australian. This third edition concludes with a critical review of the challenges facing contemporary Australia and warns readers that ‘we may get the future we deserve’.

Imprint: MONASH UNIVERSITY PRESS
RRP: $39.95

As uncomfortable as it is, we need to reckon with our history. On January 26, no Australian can really look away. There are the hard questions we ask of ourselves on Australia Day.

Since publishing his critically acclaimed, Walkley Award-winning, bestselling 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 reconciliation and the indigenous struggle for belonging and identity in Australia, and about what it means to be Australian. A sad, wise, beautiful, reflective and troubled book, Australia Day asks the questions that have to be asked, that no else seems to be asking. Who are we? What is our country? How do we move forward from here?



Praise for Talking to My Country:

'A story so essential and salutary to this place that it should be given out free at the ballot box' The Australian
'Deeply disturbing, profoundly moving' Hobart Mercury
'Grant will be an important voice in shaping this nation' The Saturday Paper

Talking to My Country won the 2016 Walkley Book Award and the Special Award at the 2016 Heritage Awards, and was shortlisted in the 2016 Queensland Literary Awards, the Nib Waverley Library Awards and the 2017 ABIA Awards.

Imprint: HARPER COLLINS
RRP: $34.99