Title search results
Showing 15961 - 15975 of 15975 items
Patrick White: a life (Quick Fix Ser.)
By David Marr. 1991
Authorised biography of the famous Australian writer, winner of the Nobel Prize. The central fact of White's life as an…
artist, his homosexuality, which formed the view of himself as an outcast, a stranger, is explored in detail.Big things grow: a memoir of teaching on Country in Wilcannia
By Sarah Donnelley. 2022
This red dirt, it takes a hold of you. The blue skies, the sunsets, the starry nights, the river... Country…
holds onto you. Then you meet the people. Within one week of living in Wilcannia, I had signed up to stay until the end of the year. When Sarah Donnelley left Sydney to take up a teaching post in Wilcannia, a small town two hours east of Broken Hill, she had no idea what to expect. Determined to shrug off Wilcannia's rumoured reputation for danger and dysfunction, she threw herself into her new role. Four fulfilling years later, Sarah is an active member of a rich, complex school community that is transforming the idea of a conventional classroom experience. Making deep connections with Indigenous elders and local families, Sarah has focused her teaching practice on empowering, listening and creating space for respectful conversations. She takes her students out on Country as often as she can, enlisting aunties and uncles in the community to share their wisdom - everything from hunting for emu eggs and cutting canoes from trees to working with local artists and learning the history of the river. Big Things Grow is a powerful memoir about community, music and passion, laying bare the beauty and challenges of living in a part of Australia that is often overlooked.Jacqui Lambie is a senator but not a politician. She's passionate, fiery, forthright and combative - traits that saw her…
re-elected to the Senate in the 2016 election by her Tasmanian constituents. Her story of serving her country yet having to battle the army and the DVA for compensation over a crippling injury sustained as a soldier, of experiencing and overcoming addiction and depression, of raising two children as a single mother, has resonated not just with her voters, but with the wider Australian public. Now she tells the full story of her life in a memoir that is as fascinating, honest, surprising and headline-grabbing as the woman herself.My father and other animals: how I took on the family farm
By Sam Vincent. 2022
A moving and hilarious fish-out-of-water memoir of a millennial leaving his inner-city life to take over the family farm. Sam…
Vincent is a twenty-something writer in the inner suburbs, scrabbling to make ends meet, when he gets a call from his mother: his father has stuck his hand in a woodchipper, but 'not to worry -- it wasn't like that scene in Fargo or anything'. When Sam returns to the family farm to help out, his life takes a new and unexpected direction. Whether castrating a calf or buying a bull -- or knocking in a hundred fence posts by hand when his dad hides the post-driver -- Sam's farming apprenticeship is an education in grit and shit. But there are victories, too: nurturing a fig orchard to bloom; learning to read the land; joining forces with Indigenous elders to protect a special site. Slowly, Sam finds himself thinking differently about the farm, about his father and about his relationship with both. By turns affecting, hilarious and utterly surprising, this memoir melds humour and fierce honesty in an unsentimental love letter. It's about belonging, humility and regeneration -- of land, family and culture. What passes from father to son on this unruly patch of earth is more than a livelihood; it is a legacy.Paper paradise: do what you want to do
By Glenn Wheatley. 2022
A roller coaster ride through the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the '60s and '70s to the high-flying…
business world of the '80s and into the '90s and beyond - with someone who lives it all right up to today. It is a book about ambition, hunger, desperation, success and the fruits thereof. Oh yes, it is also about failure and fighting back.Charting the extraordinary life and times of Glenn Wheatley, from working class boy to rock star of the 1960s and 1970s as a member of one of Australia's most successful early bands, the Masters Apprentices, now immortalised in the ARIA Hall of Fame. In their heyday, the Masters drew bigger crowds than the Beatles in Australia. In the 1980s he soared from rock star to star manager of the Little River Band and Whispering Jack, John Farnham. He also pioneered the FM Radio industry with the first FM radio station to go to air in Australia, EON FM in Melbourne. He then went on to build the foundation of what is now the Triple M radio network. It is a narrative littered with casualties and is an actual account of a self-protective society that has its own Kings and Queens, its own iconography, its own language. After a meteoric rise in the fast lane, and an equally spectacular fall, he is back on top and determined to stay there. Glenn is the ultimate rock and roll survivor.Provocateur: a life of ideas in action
By Clive Hamilton. 2022
Clive Hamilton has spent a life asking why. In his unique memoir, Provocateur, he shows us why questioning the status…
quo matters, how powerful arguments can change the country, and how the life of ideas in action actually works. From why climate change matters to how we understand ourselves as Australians and the dangers to us of the new authoritarianism - all this and more has been shaped, for better or worse, by public researchers and writers like Hamilton. His work, and that of the Australia Institute he founded, made him many friends as well as powerful enemies. He's been denounced in federal parliament, black-handed by the Chinese Communist Party and sued by an angry corporation. He's had to call in the police after death threats and take a crash course in counter-surveillance techniques. But he has also influenced the quality of the air Australians breathe, the cost of our education and how we see Australia's place in the world. In Provocateur, we see the passions, the doubts, the strategizing, the fears, the victories, the mistakes and the questioning. Here is a blueprint for changing public debate in our increasingly uncertain times - proof that ideas are powerful and that a different way into the future is possible.No finish line
By Johnny Ruffo. 2022
A rags-to-riches memoir of a cheeky tradie who stole Australia's hearts on The X Factor and Home and Away, then…
faced the biggest battle of his life: brain cancer. Johnny Ruffo came to Australia's attention when he entered The X Factor in 2011. A concreter with a cheeky smile and long-held passion for music, he won millions of hearts and eventually placed third. Sony Music rushed to sign him up and he was offered a guest spot on Australia's favourite soap, Home and Away, which turned into a three-year role. But the sudden rise to fame took its toll. Johnny found it hard to resist the weekend-long parties, drugs, alcohol and fair-weather friends that came with the territory. He had started suffering from severe headaches when his girlfriend, Tahnee, noticed something was also wrong with his speech. Johnny was rushed to hospital, where doctors prepped him for immediate surgery to deal with a 7-centimetre-long tumour. Johnny was ultimately diagnosed with a rare brain cancer, with which - despite a period of remission, he still battles today. But in a strange way Johnny thinks the cancer actually saved his life ...Kath Koschel has faced almost unimaginable hurdles. In her mid-twenties, she broke her back and was told she may never…
walk again. Shortly afterwards, she lost her beloved partner to suicide. Then, just as she was piecing her life back together, she was hit by a car while cycling and forced to relearn to walk a second time. In the midst of these harrowing experiences, Kath created the Kindness Factory on social media to share her small acts of kindness, hoping to inspire a groundswell of people to join her. Her idea went viral: millions of acts have since been logged, giving birth to the 'Kindness Curriculum'—a blueprint for happiness, resilience and connection that has now launched in schools across three countries. In 2016 Kath put her beliefs to the ultimate test, leaving home with nothing but a change of clothes, her phone and a toothbrush—no food, money or water. Her goal? To see how long she could survive on the kindness of strangers. Her journey took her to every state in Australia, where she met with people from all walks of life to share her kindness manifesto. Part stirring memoir and part empowering call to action, Kindness is a timely reminder that there is always light to be found, if only we look hard enough.Empire, war, tennis and me
By Peter Charles Doherty. 2022
For those who look, and think deeply, new connections emerge. Peter Doherty, one of the world's foremost authorities on immunology,…
recipient of the Nobel Prize for medicine, and an active and respected commentator on public health, reflects in this book on empire, war and tennis. Doherty identifies the origins of modern tennis within its imperial context, relating seemingly unlikely connections between the sport, its players and national militaries. He traces the fate of tennis-and its players-as a nascent force for internationalism and cultural tolerance within the context of World War II. And he personalises this account through an unsentimental but revealing depiction of his tennis-loving Queenslander uncles, at war and in captivity in the Pacific. As Doherty shows, tennis and war have threaded their way through the lives of many people since the nineteenth century, in a way intriguingly unique to this sport. This is part of Peter's story. And, as we come to realise, it is also part of the story of our world.Through her eyes: Australia's women correspondents from Hiroshima to Ukraine
By Melissa Roberts, Trevor Watson. 2022
As Russian rockets slam into a Ukraine hospital, Kabul falls to Taliban fanatics, millions flee upheaval and democracy is under…
assault - Australia's women correspondents are there, reporting the stories that shake our world. With empathy they also tell of ordinary people swept up in chaos; the quest for love in war-torn Gaza; a boy's search for his lost mother; women robbed of their dreams by religious zealots. And, for the first time, Australia's most acclaimed women correspondents, many of them still in the field, tell their own personal stories behind the stories. Australian women journalists fought their way from the social page to the front page with courage and single-minded determination. Through her eyes reveals the qualities they bring to our understanding of a turbulent world.The search for Harold Lasseter: the true story of the man behind the myths
By Murray Hubbard. 1993
Was Lasseter mad, a visionary or opportunist? The author has been meticulous in his research and found that Lasseter actually…
predicted World War II. Nothing seemed too hard except his search for the lost gold reef in Central Australia.Outback teacher: the inspiring story of a remarkable young woman, life with her students and their adventures in remote Australia
By Sally Gare, Freda Marnie Nicholls. 2022
The year is 1956. Sally Gare is twenty. She's just out of teachers' college, and has been sent to work…
at a two-teacher school more than 3000 kilometres from Perth. With the head teacher away, she starts out alone with a class of forty-five Aboriginal children, ranging in age from five years to thirteen. Thus begins the career of a remarkable teacher and a life-changing adventure in remote Australia. Outback Teacher is the story of the challenges and delights of teaching in outback schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Sally's interaction with her students and the local Aboriginal communities is affectionate and heart-warming, although it isn't without its misunderstandings. But the tensions aren't just confined to the school and the local community. Some of the characters with whom Sally shares her less than comfortable housing are as eccentric and as curiously interesting as any escapee to the outback. Full of warmth, humour and kindness, this generous book reminds us how bush people have always found their own solutions to the problems isolation throws at them. But most importantly, and in the most personal way, it confirms how inspiring and passionate teachers can change livesTongerlongeter: First Nations leader and Tasmanian war hero
By Henry Reynolds, Nicholas Clements. 2022
Tongerlongeter is an epic story of resistance, sorrow and survival. Leader of the Oyster Bay nation of south-east Tasmania in…
the 1820s and ’30s, Tongerlongeter and his allies prosecuted the most effective frontier resistance ever mounted on Australian soil, inflicting some 354 casualties. His brilliant campaign inspired terror throughout the colony, forcing Governor George Arthur to counter with a massive military operation in 1830. Tongerlongeter escaped but the cumulative losses had taken their toll. On New Year’s Eve 1831, having lost his arm, his country, and all but 25 of his people, the chief agreed to an armistice. In exile on Flinders Island, Tongerlongeter united remnant tribes and became the settlement’s ‘King’ — a beacon of hope in a hopeless situation.The flying nurse: saving lives and swaddling babies from outback Australia to Africa and beyond
By Prudence Wheelwright, Alley Pascoe. 2023
Nurse and midwife Prue Wheelwright has worked in the most remote parts of Australia and around the world. In isolated,…
far-flung locations and on dangerous frontlines, this passionate and dedicated nurse has put her heart, and often her safety, on the line, day after day, year after year. Prue shares all the challenges, the joys and the heartbreaks in her life as a travelling nurse, from working in outback Australia to developing a paediatric HIV project in Tajikistan, setting up a 24-hour maternity hospital in an Ethiopian refugee camp and working with the Saudi royal family. Most recently she has joined the Royal Flying Doctor Service, combining her love of travel, adventure and healthcare. In her work Prue has witnessed the extremes of humanity: the extraordinary highs and devastating lows. A highly skilled nurse with a huge heart, Prue will inspire you and move you with her tales of life at its most raw and real.Jack of Hearts: QX11594
By Jackie Huggins, Ngaire Jarro. 2022
Born an only child in North Queensland, Jack Huggins had an idyllic childhood in Ayr, where his family somehow escaped…
the harsh Queensland government treatment of First Nations' peoples. His father was in the army in World War I and Jack followed in his footsteps into World War II. He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and spent much of the war on the notorious Burma-Thailand railway.The narrative and personal reflections give insight into love, loss and the need to understand one man's journey, as seen through the eyes of his children seeking to learn more. It is an affectionate portrait and a moving account of courage in wartime which helps a reader understand the sacrifices made by our soldiers.