Australia Politics

How can you cheat… at drinking wine? It turns out you can. And when you do, a whole world of power, ego and money will unravel. Corked is the scandalous saga in the glamorous, competitive and mysterious world of fine wines.

All I Ever Wanted Was to Be Hot is a funny, provocative retrospective on the last thirty years of Western beauty standards. From the Pussycat Dolls to Victoria’s Secret, The Girls of the Playboy Mansion to Lara Bingle, the media of the 2000s was littered with high profile examples of hotness as the highest form of social currency. Is it any wonder a girl growing up in that era might believe “good looks” were as integral to womanhood as having a pulse?

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Prisoners of Geography, a fascinating, “refreshing, and very useful” (The Washington Post) follow-up that uses ten maps to explain the geopolitical challenges to today’s world powers and how they presage a volatile future. Tim Marshall’s...

One of Library Journal’s 10 Best Books of 2015 Following his acclaimed Atlantic and The Men Who United the States, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester offers an enthralling biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring our relationship with this...

Australia has forgotten what keeps it safe. So argues Michael Wesley in this sharp and compelling essay about our place in the world. Southeast Asia is the key to our national security and prosperity. If China dominates the region, as it plans to, Australia will be very vulnerable. So why are we following an American strategy that isolates and alienates us from our neighbours? Wesley argues that the focus on AUKUS and sticking with Trump is a dangerous distraction. Whereas the United States has little at stake in Southeast Asia, Australia has everything to lose.

The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometer walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal families at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth. Here Aboriginal children were instructed in the ways of white society and forbidden to speak their native tongue.

Australian politics is shifting. The two-party system was broken at the last federal election, and another minority government is a real possibility in the future. Politics-as-usual is not enough for many voters. In this richly insightful essay, George Megalogenis traces the how and why of a political realignment. This is an essay about the teals, the Greens and the Coalition.

Do you dream of passing for the first time, and finally holding that Australian passport? Maybe you've already lived here for years and it's time to make it official? Whatever your reason for calling Australia home—whether you came for work, family, or a fresh start—we get it.

From Manus to MONA to birds to the Black Summer, from the destruction of our natural world to the hope offered by Indigenous Australia to the growing corrosion of democracy, from Salman Rushdie to the Segal Report, family and love, Flanagan's non-fiction writings carry the author's trademark...

In ancient, pre-literate cultures across the globe, tribal elders had encyclopedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across a landscape, identify the stars in the sky, and recite the history of their people. Yet today, most of us struggle to memorize more than a short poem. Using traditional Aboriginal Australian song lines as a starting point, Dr. Lynne Kelly has since identified the powerful memory technique used by our ancestors and indigenous people around the world.

Paul Keating was one of the most forceful, controversial, and consequential leaders in modern Australian political history. From Bankstown to Blaxland, from the Treasury benches to the Lodge, Keating helped reshape the country’s economy, Labor’s identity, and Australia’s sense of itself. As Treasurer under Bob Hawke, he was central to the reforms that floated the Australian dollar, opened the financial system, reshaped taxation, and forced Australia out of the protected habits of the postwar order. Those reforms made the country more competitive and more exposed, more modern and more ...

“The body horror novel motherhood always deserved. . . . Comparable to Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch or Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, this novel is breathtaking in its world-building and devastating in its emotional precision.”—Shelf Awareness (starred) Set in an alternate reality...

Gough Whitlam changed Australia in less than three years. Elected in 1972 after twenty-three years of conservative rule, Whitlam entered office with the force of a delayed national future. His campaign slogan, “It’s Time”, captured a country ready for movement after decades of caution, deference, and political fatigue. His government ended conscription, recognised the People’s Republic of China, abolished university fees, created the foundations of universal health care, expanded legal aid, supported the arts, advanced multiculturalism, pushed Aboriginal land rights into national ...

John Howard was one of the most consequential and divisive prime ministers in modern Australian history. Dismissed more than once as too narrow, too suburban, too damaged by defeat, or too old-fashioned for the country, Howard waited longer than almost any rival expected. When his moment finally came in 1996, he did not arrive as a dazzling visionary or a grand national poet. He arrived as something more durable: a disciplined conservative who understood the battlers, borders, and economic confidence of middle Australia. John Howard: Battlers, Borders and the Long Boom tells the story of ...

Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent. Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the 20th century and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia.

“I love food” Nakkiah Lui says, and in the next breath whispers “so give us back our land”. In First Eat, a confrontational, raw and highly personal exploration of food politics, power and body sovereignty, Nakkiah Lui asks how our meals would look different if First Nations people owned the land from which the food came. First Eat is about more than just food, it’s an aural feast for a rich future.

We were promised a global village; we got a gladiatorial arena. No longer just a tool for connection, social media has spawned an entire outrage industry harvesting and monetising our worst impulses. Welcome to the era of Angertainment. Angertainment shows how our emotions are being hijacked to...

Stunning trade paperback edition of Grantlee Kieza's bestselling biography of Australia's greatest general It's December 1918 and the world war is over. General Sir John Monash attends a glittering banquet to dine with the King of England and the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill and...

The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works?

Liberals love to hate Ted Cruz. The outspoken Texas Senator has a knack for getting under their skin. His quotable remarks - and even more, his principled stands on numerous national issues -- have made him a political lightning rod and the most googled man in Washington. There is a simple...