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Christine Nixon: Fair Cop reveals the remarkable rise through police ranks of Australia's first female Chief Commissioner. Christine Nixon has been a police officer for more than 30 years. After cutting her teeth in the New South Wales Police Force, where she attained the rank of Assistant Commissioner, Nixon was appointed Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police in April 2001. Her eight-year tenure has been characterised by her tough anti-corruption stance, her frequently acrimonious relationship with the Police Association and her h... read more

This is an original take on a classic story - how a child of immigrants moves between two cultures. In place of piety and predictability, however, Unpolished Gem offers a vivid and ironic sense of both worlds. It combines the story of Pung's life growing up in suburban Footscray with the inherited stories of the women in her family - stories of madness, survival and heartbreak. Original and brave, this is a girl's own story that introduces an unforgettable voice and captures the experience of Asian immigrants to Australia.

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Hazel Hawke is one of Australia's best-loved and most respected women. As the wife of a prime minister she brought a down-to-earth warmth to Canberra that influenced everyone she came into contact with. Whether it was working to help the disadvantaged, supporting the arts community or passionately advocating her belief in equality and social inclusion, we all felt her energy, her practicality, her special warmth and her immense capacity for humour and enjoyment. This intimate, beautiful biography of a special woman is written by Ha... read more

Asian-Australians are known to each other and the outside world by many labels: Quiet Achiever. FOB. Gangster Chigger. Mainlander. Banana. But are these labels based on some degree of truth, or only fiction? What is it like to grow up Asian in Australia? Unpredictable, honest, reflective and irreverent, this collection throws out the cliches and takes us behind the stereotypes. A young man tentatively steps towards manhood with Mariah Carey blasting in his ears, while two primary-school misfits stage a playground revolt. A white Au... read more

Splints to Silk recounts the life of Francis Walsh AM, QC, from his early life in rural Victoria, overcoming childhood polio and learning to walk at the age of seven, through his long and distinguished legal career, culminating in his appointment as judge of the County Court of Victoria.

Douglas Mawson is the best known of Australia's Antarctic explorers. After an apprenticeship on an expedition with Ernest Shackleton, which saw Mawson lead a small team to the South Magnetic Pole for the first time, his own expedition of 1911-14 captured the imagination of Australians, at a time when knowledge of Antarctica was scant and the frozen continent still largely unexplored. Douglas Mawson: The Life of an Explorer puts Antarctic exploration into the context of the times, and makes fantastic reading and viewing for anyone i... read more

A memoir of love, laughter, loss and billycarts. Peter FitzSimons's account of growing up on the rural outskirts of Sydney in the 1960s is first and foremost a tribute to family. But it is also a salute to times and generations past, when praise was understated but love unstinting; work was hard and values clear; when people stood by each other in adversity. Above all, in the FitzSimons home, days were for doing. In this rollicking and often hilarious memoir, Peter describes a childhood of mischief, camaraderie, eccentric c... read more

Seeing Geoffrey Rush play his father Harold in Swimming Upstream, written and co-produced by his brother Tony, was the catalyst for John Fingleton to uncover the story no one had told, of what made his father the man he was. Nothing could have prepared him for what he discovered. By the age of eleven when Harold was not out desperately foraging for food for himself and his sisters he was trying to avoid the regular beatings doled out by his drunken and abusive mother Maggie - until he was forcibly removed to a state orphanage. The ... read more

Michael Lawriwsky's insightful Hard Jacka breathes life into the real man behind the legend - 'Jacka' to his superiors, 'Bert' to his mates, 'our Albert' to his proud mother. Michael Lawriwsky has written a superb account of the man whose acts of selfless heroism at Gallipoli would win him a VC, and whose bravery in the battlefields of France would win him the unswerving loyalty of his mates. Hard Jacka is a rich and fascinating story about Albert Jacka and the Great War, its heroes and anti-heroes, their sacrifice, determina... read more

In The Man Who Loved Crocodiles and Stories of Other Adventurous Australians, fifteen fiercely independent men and women who have lived life exuberantly cast a revealing light on a fast vanishing Australia. These subjects share their unique experiences with a cocky modern world often focused more on youth. What's it like to hunt wild buffalo on horseback, or to hover calmly underwater to avoid the bends while being circled by bronze whaler sharks? What's it like to escape twice from Nazi SS camps, or to capture rogue saltwater croc... read more

Bill King is a modern-day explorer who took everyday Australians along for the ride. Often literally walking in the footsteps of Burke and Wills, Leichhardt, Sturt and Stuart thousands of Australians have experienced the adventure of a lifetime in Bill King's capable hands.

In Come the Revolution, journalist Alex Mitchell gives a rollicking account of life in newspapers and his radical past as a Trotskyist. From the cut-throat era of Sydney tabloids, he graduated to Fleet Street as an investigative reporter, taking part in the exposure of Soviet double agent Kim Philby. Giving up his job to become editor of Britains Trotskyist daily, he entered a world of class struggle politics and national liberation movements. With fellow revolutionary Vanessa Redgrave he travelled the US and the Middle East, meeti... read more

In the early 1930s, Nancy Wake was a young woman enjoying a bohemian life in Paris. By the end of the Second World War, she was the Gestapo's most wanted person. As a naive, young journalist, Nancy Wake witnessed a horrific scene of Nazi violence in a Viennese street. From that moment, she declared that she would do everything in her power to rid Europe of the Nazis. What began as a courier job here and there became a highly successful escape network for Allied soldiers, perfectly camouflaged by Nancy's high-society life in Marsei... read more

Breaking the Sheep's Back is the untold story of Australia's biggest business disaster. It involves government complicity, and it is a political scandal that reaches into the offices of Cabinet ministers and prime ministers across six federal governments. In only twenty years, from 1989 to the present, the Australian wool industry - once the nation-building iconic representation of the country - has been cut to only a third of its size, due in large part to this disaster. When the Australian Wool Corporation's Reserve Price Scheme ... read more

The eighteenth century was an era when brave mariners took their ships beyond the horizon in search of an unknown world. Those chosen to lead these expeditions were exceptional navigators, men who had shown brilliance as they ascended the ranks in the Royal Navy. They were also bloody good sailors.
From ship's boy to vice-admiral, discover how much more there was to Captain Bligh than his infamous bad temper. Meet a 24-year-old Master Bligh as he witnesses the demise of his Captain and mentor Cook; a 34-year-old Lieutenant B... read more

It is a summer's night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them. Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Roa... read more

Breaking the Sheep's Back is the untold story of Australia's biggest business disaster. It involves government complicity, and it is a political scandal that reaches into the offices of Cabinet ministers and prime ministers across six federal governments. In only twenty years, from 1989 to the present, the Australian wool industry - once the nation-building iconic representation of the country - has been cut to only a third of its size, due in large part to this disaster. When the Australian Wool Corporation's Reserve Price Scheme ... read more

This book contains a collection of nature poems and art work, lovingly designed and crafted by Melbourne-based artist, Bee Williamson. The work huddles around her love of Nature, where she finds peace, joy and the inspiration to write and draw, deep within the source and solace of nature's gentle hand. Her grandfather, acclaimed nature writer Henry Williamson, encouraged Bee, through his undeniable spiritual presence, to reveal her deep expresison and concerns within this work, her second ublished book, "Nature - a gift". The simpl... read more

A quarter of a century ago, the Australian Geographic journal began documenting an Australia only thrown a passing glance by other media: a land of red dirt, big skies and faces etched with experience of this sometimes harsh and unforgiving land. Founder Dick Smith's love for the Aussie bush manifested itself in a not-for-profit Society committed to exploration, conservation and adventure, and a quarterly journal dedicated to presenting a positive view of Australia. From the first issue that appeared in December 1985, Australian Ge... read more