Non-freedom to the Western mind is inevitably linked with images of backwardness - Soviet tractors, East German Trabants, Kim Jong Il's haircut. But non-freedom these days is also iPads, iPhones and a dazzling array of less iconic but ubiquitous consumer goods that flood our stores, our homes and which increasingly are used to define our ideas of worth and happiness. It is a full-lipped smile achieved with the aid of collagen made from skin flensed from dead Chinese convicts. The Australian Disease is Richard Flanagan's perceptive, hilarious, searing expose of the conformity that afflicts our public life. From Weary Dunlop to Vassily Grossman, from David Hicks to Craig Thomson, Flanagan takes us on a wildly entertaining and unsettling trip. If we are to find hope, he says, we must take our compass more from ourselves and less from the powerful. Richard Flanagan's most recent novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the 2014 Man Booker Prize."

Short Black 1: The Australian Disease: On the Decline of Love and the Rise of Non-Freedom

Politics & Social Sciences

FLANAGAN, Richard

Social Sciences

Black Inc. Short Blacks

Short Black 2: Fat City

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Hitchcock, Karen

Diets & Weight Loss

Short Black 3: The War of the Worlds

History

Pearson, Noel

Americas

They say that tourist ships to Antarctica, even more than ordinary human conveyances, are loaded down with aching hearts. Deceived wives and widowers, men who've never been loved and don't know why, Russian crew forced to leave their children behind for years at a time ... And then there are the married couples: how calm the old ones, how eager the new! - but isn't a couple the greatest mystery of all? Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice is the tale of a journey to Antarctica aboard the Professor Molchanov. With unmatched eloquence, Helen Garner spins a tale of ships, icebergs, tourism, time, photography and the many forms of desolation. Helen Garner has written novels, short stories, screenplays and many acclaimed works of journalism. She was the recipient of the 2006 Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach, Joe Cinque's Consolation, The Spare Room and This House of Grief.

Short Black 4: Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

Business & Money

GARNER, HELEN

Industries

There are few original ideas in politics. In the creation of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was responsible for one. This essay reveals the making of Julian Assange - both his ideas and his world-changing actions. Robert Manne explores Assange's unruly childhood and then his involvement with the revolutionary cypherpunk underground, all the way through to the creation of WikiLeaks. Pulling together the threads of his development, Manne shows how Assange became one of the most influential Australians of our time. Robert Manne's many books include Making Trouble and The Words That Made Australia (as co-editor). He is the author of three Quarterly Essays, In Denial, Sending Them Home and Bad News.

The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange; Short Black 9

Biographies & Memoirs

Manne, Robert

Professionals & Academics

On the last day of 1985, I went home to live in Bunyah, the farming valley I had left some twenty-nine years earlier. My wife and our younger children followed two days later ... at last I was going home, to care for my father in his old age and to live in the place from which I'd always felt displaced. What I didn't know was that I was heading home in order to go mad. Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray's frank and courageous account of his struggle with depression. Since this essay first appeared, hosts of readers have drawn insight from his account of the disease, its social effects and its origins in his family's history. Murray describes how patches of daylight now balance out those of darkness in his life. Les Murray lives in Bunyah, near Taree in New South Wales. He has published some thirty books. His work is studied in schools and universities around Australia and has been translated into several foreign languages.

Short Black 10: Killing the Black Dog

MURRAY, Les

Mental Health

In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu Sadhu, leaving behind family and wealth to live as a beggar; the pilgrims of Compostela walking away their sins; the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora; the Hajj. What could this ritual journeying be but symbolic, idealised versions of the foraging life? By taking to the road we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves. After many thousands of years, the nomads are disappearing, swept away by modernity. Robyn Davidson has spent a good part of her life with nomadic cultures. In this fascinating and moving essay she evokes a vanishing way of life, and notes a paradox: that even as classical nomads are disappearing, hypermobility has become the hallmark of contemporary life. In a time of environmental peril, she argues, the nomadic way with nature still offers valuable lessons. No Fixed Address is part lament, part evocation and part exhilarating speculative journey. Robyn Davidson is an award-winning writer who has travelled and published widely. Her books include Tracks, Desert Places, Quarterly Essay 24: No Fixed Address - Nomads and the Future of the Planet and, as editor, The Picador Book of Journeys and The Best Australian Essays 2009. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the Monthly, the Bulletin and Griffith Review, amongst others.

No Fixed Address (Short Black)

Davidson, Robyn

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