Biographies & True Stories

Autobiography or fiction? This question has shadowed the work of enigmatic Australian author Eve Langley since her death in 1974. Was her writing the truth, or false, or somewhere in between? What did it mean when she described her father as 'evil' and...

Not many can boast of careers that lasted successfully for nearly seventy years, but that is what both Googie Withers and John McCallum achieved. She acted everything from brazen murderesses to Lady Bracknell, taking in blonde nitwits, wartime Resistance...

Who was the most innovative general of World War One? For Tim Fischer, the answer has to be Australia's 'Maestro' John Monash, a man who, for all the recognition he received in his lifetime and after, has arguably not been given his proper due.Fischer...

This book brings together essays from leading Australian and international historians, in an analysis of the monumental Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, edited by NJB Plomley and republished in...

All lives have two things in common: they begin and they end.But within each life, there are thousands of little openings and little closings, all happening at once. The day you make the decision to move abroad; the moment a relationship comes to a...

Time, Tide and History: Essays on the Writing of Eleanor Dark is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark's fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark's writing...

This is the first collection in print of the letters of Australian colonial poet Charles Harpur (181368) and his circle. Supported by extensive annotation newly prepared for this edition, the 200 letters and life-documents open up successive phases of...

War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre of war literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remains the privileged (and only canonised) war story.In Australia, although women have written...

She loved to rule up red margins and write in black ink on white - deciphering texts and decoding maths problems. Marginalia: writing in the margins, around the edges of pages. Students produce a lot of it. It's often critiques or interpretations of the...

Patrick White within the Western Literary Tradition is a collection of essays demonstrating the strong influence of European, British, and American cultures on White's work. Representing the author's interest spanning over thirty-five years, the essays...

The year was 1945. The place was San Francisco. The topic was the world.Ashley Hogan tells the story of a moment in human history when Australia became known for its courage and liberalism. At the conference that founded the United Nations, Australia...

'Open it up, this catalogue of memory in black-and-white, where the mind may wander ...'Take the passage through the cellar door, as the pages of this anthology lead you down dark steps into a room lit up with ideas, words and wonder. Skip across...

Despite several landmarks across the state bearing his name, John Hunter, the second governor of New South Wales, remains somewhat of an enigma. His solitary, career-driven life on land and at sea was tumultuous. As a governor, he had a tough time making...

Since its publication in 1903, Joseph Furphy's Such is Life has become established as an Australian classic. But which version of the novel is the authoritative text, and what does its history reveal about Australian cultural life?From Furphy's...

Animal Dreams collects David Brooks' thought-provoking essays about how humans think, dream and write about other species. Brooks examines how animals have featured in Australian literature and culture, from The Man from Snowy River to Phar Lap to...

South Flows the Pearl is a fascinating journey through the history of Chinese Australia. Taking the reader from Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta to Sydney, Perth, Cairns, Darwin, Bendigo and beyond, it explores the struggles and successes of Chinese...

Though there exist many biographical dictionaries of the achievements of Chinese people throughout history, few women feature. Since the mid-1980s, researchers from the University of Sydney's Department of Chinese Studies have been collecting the life...

A wave of life stories and autobiographical narratives by Aboriginal women began in the late 1970s and gained momentum a decade later with the publication of Sally Morgan's My Place (1987), which became a bestseller. While some of the books of the first...

This absorbing biography traces the newspaper career of Frank's father R.C. Packer from Hobart and the outback to the founding of Smith's Weekly in 1919. Overshadowed by his brilliant father, Frank was an academic failure at school and...

Climate change is here, and how we react in the present will alter the course of the future; we can no longer deny that this is a key challenge for our times. Over the past two years, Australia has seen its worst bushfire season in recorded history,...

From the late nineteenth century, academic disciplines emerged in universities, marking boundaries of knowledge, teaching and research. Education became a transnational academic discipline, developing across Britain, Europe and North America and...

For nearly a millennium, universities have searched for knowledge, understanding and truth. Internationally renowned neuroscientist, Professor Maxwell Bennett, evaluates the work of 20 of the greatest scholars in the University of Sydney's history and...

We are living in the moment of the essay. The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in essays that interrogate personal experience; contemporary Australian writers are using their lives to think through the ways we connect, remember, and live,...

Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett offers readers a stunning array of Hewett's writings on literature, theatre and politics. It is both an engaging glimpse into Australian political history and activism and an enlightening point of access to one of our...

Biographer Suzanne Falkiner presents a fascinating portrait of English writer E. L. Grant Watson, whose experiences as a young man in Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century shaped his later years as a novelist.Enlisted in 1910 by a Cambridge...

A pioneer for women in international diplomacy, Sue Boyd shares this account of her life in foreign service.'An engaging account of life at the coalface by one of Australia's most active and effective diplomats and real pathfinder in leading our...

Butcher Joe Nangan was one of those charismatic people who exercised a most profound impact on all who met him.Having spent his life acquiring the ritual knowledge and lore, not only of his own Nyikina and Walmajarri forbears but also that pertaining to...

Randolph Stow (19352010) was a writer who resisted critical containment. His complete oeuvre of eight novels, a children's novella, a libretto, translation work and several collections of poetry presents an accomplished and impressive literary legacy.The...

*Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2020: Non-Fiction*Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author'sexperiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as...

What was it like, living through the social, cultural and political upheaval of the last fifty years of the twentieth century in this Lucky Country? With life flying forward into the future, what could be held onto, and what self (that place which is...

An Australian writer and a Mexican scientist fall in love reading great Latin American books aloud. But it takes a decade of journeys across the region, together and apart, for them to learn to read each other.Requiem with Yellow Butterflies is a love...

During a 1952 electric storm off Wattamolla NSW a waterspout drew in the CSIRO Cloud Physics Dakota, atomising all those aboard, including the writer's father. Or did it? When his living body has disappeared, what to make of the uniformed man on the...

This book is not a guide. It won't give advice on birth, breastfeeding, or bonding. And it's not aimed solely at parents. Dangerous Ideas about Mothers is a book about motherhood as a cultural construct.Mothers are a topic on which almost everybody has...

A baby cries; a mother exits, leaving her family behind; a child finally begins to talk; a father stops breathing.Rozanna Lilley is a social anthropologist, autism researcher, and Oscar's mum. Oscar is on the autism spectrum, which means he has a...

Aileen Palmer poet, translator, political activist, adventurer was the daughter of two writers prominent in Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Vance and Nettie Palmer were well known as...

Some plants have sustained empires and sparked wars. Some have ignited public outrage. Think tea, opium, tulips and thistles. Yes, thistles. In 1852 South Australia passed its Thistle Act, probably the first weed control legislation anywhere in the world...

Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian writers of his generation. His novel To the Islands - written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission - won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after...

In September 2013 just before the weatherturned even more intense a group of intrepid writers made their wayto three Australian desert settings to work with groups and individualswishing to write. Both Aboriginal people with a...

Written from the late years of an extraordinary life, Ann Moyal's biography is a spirited narrative of her career as an eminent historian of Australian science and technology, her three marriages, travelling the globe, the people she has encountered, and...

With deep roots in the Kimberley region, Olive Knight shares her story of growing up with the Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri peoples of north-western Australia. As the daughter of a half-caste father, she was nearly killed on the day of her birth, as was...

A heartbreaking account of enduring suffering and loss.When Cindy Gambino dropped her three boys off at their dad's on Father’s Day 2005 she had no idea she would never see them again. By day’s end, their bodies lay at the bottom of an icy dam, a tragedy...

A gripping look at teaching in the volatile world of juvenile detention.   Inside Juvie plunges readers into the eye-opening journey of Tommy, a former state schoolteacher now navigating the tumultuous world of juvenile detention. Transitioning...

In the early years of the Second World War, Australian women began lobbying to contribute to the nation’s wartime effort. From 1940, women were signing up to serve in the Royal Australian Nursing Service, and in 1941, an Auxiliary arm of the Royal...

In the turbulent years from 1922 to 1952, Australia witnessed a chilling toll as twenty-two dedicated police officers sacrificed their lives in the line of duty. Others fell with them.Emerging from the shadows of World War I, the nation, newly minted and...

Over one hundred and fifty years ago, on 1st August 1871, the Colony of New South Wales raised its first permanent Battery, known as the New South Wales Artillery. This battery complemented existing colonial volunteer batteries. The previous year, the...