Blue Dog

Louis de Bernières

Literature & Fiction

Knopf Australia

In this witty, engrossing and sometimes poignant memoir, a sequel to his best-selling The Justice Game, Australia’s inimitable Geoffrey Robertson charts his progress from pimply state schoolboy to top Old Bailey barrister and thence onwards and upwards to a leading role in the struggle for human rights throughout the world. He wryly observes the absurdities of growing up as one of ‘Ming’s kids’; the passion of student protest in the sixties and his early crusades for ‘Down Under-dogs’, before leaving on a Rhodes Scholarship to combat the British establishment, with the help of John Mortimer of ‘Rumpole’ fame. There are dramatic accounts of fighting for lives on death rows, freeing dissidents and taking on tyrants, armed only with a unique mind and a passion for justice – on display whenever he boomeranged back to Australia to conduct Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals. His is an amazing life story of David and Goliath battles – riveting, laugh-out-loud tales filled with romance and danger, featuring a cast of characters ranging from General Pinochet to Pee-Wee Herman; from Malcolm Turnbull to Mike Tyson; from Nigella Lawson to Kathy Lette and Julian Assange. Throughout his exploits – recounted here with irreverent humour and dashes of true wisdom – Geoffrey Robertson has remained determinedly independent and his own man. He has also, in respect of human rights, changed the way we think.

Rather His Own Man: Reliable Memoirs

Biographies & Memoirs

ROBERTSON, GEOFFREY

Leaders & Notable People

A celebration of a great Australian love affair, 'The Drover's Wife' in the Australian imagination- stories, performances and images. Since Henry Lawson wrote his story 'The Drover's Wife' in 1892, Australian writers, painters, performers and photographers have created a wonderful tradition of drover's wife works, stories and images. The Russell Drysdale painting from 1945 extended the mythology and it, too, has become an Australian icon. Other versions of the Lawson story have been written by Murray Bail, Barbara Jefferis, Mandy Sayer, David Ireland, Madeleine Watts and others, up to the present, including Leah Purcell's play and Ryan O'Neill's graphic novel. In essays and commentary, Frank Moorhouse examines our ongoing fascination with this story and has collected some of the best pieces of writing on the subject. This remarkable, gorgeous book is, he writes, 'a monument to the drovers' wives'.

The Drover's Wife

Arts & Photography

MOORHOUSE, FRANK

History & Criticism

Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths

Lamb, Matthew

Humor & Entertainment

I was prime minister for three years and three days. Three years and three days of resilience. Three years and three days of changing the nation. Three years and three days for you to judge. On Wednesday, June 23, 2010, with the government in turmoil, Julia Gillard asked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for a leadership ballot. The next day, Julia Gillard became Australia's 27th prime minister, and their first female leader. Australia was alive to the historic possibilities. Here was a new approach for a new time. It was to last three extraordinary years. This is Julia Gillard's chronicle of that turbulent time, a strikingly candid self-portrait of a political leader seeking to realize her ideals. It is her story of what it was like—in the face of government in-fighting and often hostile media—to manage a hung parliament, build a diverse and robust economy, create an equitable and world-class education system, ensure a dignified future for Australians with disabilities, all while attending to our international obligations and building strategic alliances for our future. This is a politician driven by a sense of purpose—from campus days with the Australian Union of Students, to a career in the law, to her often gritty, occasionally glittering rise up the ranks of the Australian Labor Party. Refreshingly honest, peppered with a wry humor and personal insights, Julia Gillard does not shy away from her mistakes, admitting freely to errors, misjudgements, and policy failures as well as detailing her political successes. Here is an account of what was hidden behind the resilience and dignified courage Gillard showed as prime minister, her view of the vicious hate campaigns directed against her, and a reflection on what it means—and what it takes—to be a woman leader in contemporary politics. Here, in her own words, Julia Gillard reveals what life was really like as Australia's first female prime minister.

My Story

Gillard, Julia

Witty, acerbic, insightful musings from Robert Dessaix, one of Australia's finest writers One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a t-shirt that says FUCK YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital, with tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him. While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkin’s poem "Days." What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved, and why? This is vintage Robert Dessaix. His often surprisingly funny recollections range over topics as eclectic as intimacy, travel, spirituality, enchantment, language, and childhood, all woven through with a heightened sense of mortality.

What Days Are For

LGBTQ+ Books

Dessaix, Robert

Everything is Teeth

May 27, 2015 brings the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Henry Parkes. After he died, the London Times described him as "a colonial colossus." Henry Parkes received little schooling and worked on a rope-walk, breaking stones, as an ivory and bone turner, ironmonger, laborer, and on the wharves before trying business life and ultimately politics. He and his first wife traveled to Australia on an assisted passage. There has never been anyone else like Sir Henry Parkes in Australian public life. Not only was he the father of federation, but his friends included Thomas Carlyle, fellow poet Lord Tennyson, and British Prime Minister Gladstone. He convinced Florence Nightingale to send trained nurses to Australia. He conceived the international rabbit competition, which led to the Pasteur affair and put Australia at the forefront of microbiology. He encouraged talented men to enter politics, yet he shunned the limelight, rarely attending social functions.Whenever he received begging letters, (which he did, daily), Parkes always wrote back enclosing money. No wonder he went bankrupt three times! Yet he was Premier of New South Wales 5 times, leaving its finances well in the black every time. He married three times, the last time to a 23-year-old beauty. Clearly, Parkes loved women, and they loved him. He encouraged women to attend political meetings, even though they didn't have the vote. But not everyone loved Sir Henry; he had a long-running feud with poet Henry Lawson's mother after Parkes wouldn't give young Lawson the help she demanded, and he constantly wrestled with political aspirants chasing his seat.

Sir Henry Parkes: The Australian Colossus

DANDO-COLLINS, Stephen

Arts & Literature

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

FLANAGAN, Richard

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