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Beautiful balts: from displaced persons to new Australians
By Jayne Persian. 2017
Over 170000 Displaced Persons arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952-the first non-Anglo-Celtic mass migrants. Under the slogan of 'populate…
or perish', Australia's first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, scoured post-war Europe for 'white' refugees, Displaced Persons he characterised as 'Beautiful Balts' - yet as this book shows, many of the 'Beautiful Balts' were not Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian. Amid the White Australia Policy, the tensions of the Cold War and the national need for labour, these people would transform not only Australia's immigration policy, but the country itself. Beautiful Balts tells the extraordinary story of these Displaced Persons. It traces their journey from the chaotic camps of Europe after the Second World War to a new life in a land of opportunity where prejudice, parochialism, and strident anti-communism were rife. Persian investigates who they really were, why Australia wanted them and what they experienced after migrating halfway across the world.Lucky child: a daughter of Cambodia reunites with the sister she left behind
By Loung Ung. 2006
"After enduring years of hunger, deprivation, and devastating loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, ten year old Loung…
Ung became the "lucky child", the sibling chosen to accompany her eldest brother to America while her one surviving sister and two brothers remained behind. In this poignant and elegiac memoir, Loung recalls her assimilation into an unfamiliar new culture while struggling to overcome dogged memories of violence and the deep scars of war. In alternating chapters, she gives voice to Chou, the beloved older sister whose life in war-torn Cambodia so easily could have been hers. Highlighting the harsh realities of chance and circumstance in times of war as well as in times of peace, Lucky Child is ultimately a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and to the salvaging strength of family bonds."Anita Cobby: the crime that shocked the nation
By Alan Whiticker. 2015
February 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of one of the shocking murders in Australia's criminal history. On a hot summer…
night in 1986, beautiful young Sydney nurse Anita Cobby alighted from a train at Blacktown station and set off to a horrific fate. Updated with more information, previously unpublished, about the crime, this book is a must-have for those with an interest in the more morose details of human nature and crime.The worst woman in Sydney: the life and crimes of Kate Leigh
By Leigh Straw. 2016
Matriarch of the criminal underworld ...or the Robin Hood of inner Sydney? The legend of Kate Leigh, Sydney's famed brothel…
madam, sly grog seller and drug dealer, has loomed large in TV's Underbelly and every other account of Sydney's criminal history from the 1920s to the 1960s. But she has never had a biography of her own. Despite having more than 100 criminal convictions to her name, Kate Leigh is also remembered as a local hero, giving money to needy families and supporting her local community through the hard times of Depression and war. Here, novelist and historian Leigh Straw teases out the full story of how this wayward Reformatory girl from Dubbo made a fortune in eastern Sydney and defied the gender stereotyping of the time to become a leading underworld figure.Tampering with asylum: a universal humanitarian problem
By Frank Brennan. 2003
By denying the Tampa and its cargo of asylum seekers permission to dock at the nearest landfall of Christmas Island,…
Australia signalled that it was dramatically closing its national borders. Trading on fear, and using mandatory detention in the Pacific, John Howard and Philip Ruddock effectively excluded asylum seekers from the Australian courts. Frank Brennan argues that the Australian government’s response was a massive overreaction, possible only because Australia is a remote country with few asylum seekers and no land borders. Governments around the world are understandably anxious to maintain orderly migration programs in the face of unscrupulous people-smuggling operations. Brennan compares Australia’s response with that of the United States and Europe and provides a practical blueprint for countries wanting to humanely protect asylum seekers.In December 2013, child/neo-natal psychiatrist Emma Adams travelled to Darwin and then on to Blaydin detention centre as a representative…
of ChilOut (Children Out of Immigration Detention). The trip was confronting for obvious and not so obvious reasons, and Emma and her colleague both left feeling extremely distressed. She returned to her Canberra family - her doctor husband, Rob, and her three sons - and became consumed by the idea that she must help one of the boys she met at Blaydin. So followed eighteen months of lobbying on the part of Emma and her husband to bring Abdul, a 16-year-old Hazara boy from Afghanistan, to live with them as part of their family. Emma is an indigenous Australian and Rob is the child of Hungarian refugees. Four years later, Abdul is one of Emma's boys. He is doing his HSC, just like one of Emma's other sons, but the decision he makes about future study will revolve around what will give him the best chance of winning a coveted temporary protection visa. Emma is one of only a handful of Australians, including Julian Burnside, who have managed to foster a child from one of the detention centres.The forgotten rebels of Eureka
By Clare Alice Wright. 2013
The Eureka Stockade. The story is one of Australia’s foundation legends, but until now it has been told as though…
only half the participants were there. What if the hot-tempered, free-wheeling gold miners we learnt about in school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? And what if there were women and children inside the Eureka Stockade, defending their rights while defending themselves against a barrage of bullets? As Clare Wright reveals, there were thousands of women on the goldfields and many of them were active in pivotal roles. The stories of how they arrived there, why they came and how they sustained themselves make for fascinating reading in their own right. But it is in the rebellion itself that the unbiddable women of Ballarat come into their own.Eggshell Skull: A well-established legal doctrine that a defendant must 'take their victim as they find them'. If a single…
punch kills someone because of their thin skull, that victim's weakness cannot mitigate the seriousness of the crime. But what if it also works the other way? What if a defendant on trial for sexual crimes has to accept his 'victim' as she comes: a strong, determined accuser who knows the legal system, who will not back down until justice is done? Bri Lee began her first day of work at the Queensland District Court as a bright-eyed judge's associate. Two years later she was back as the complainant in her own case. This is the story of Bri's journey through the Australian legal system; first as the daughter of a policeman, then as a law student, and finally as a judge's associate in both metropolitan and regional Queensland-where justice can look very different, especially for women. The injustice Bri witnessed, mourned and raged over every day finally forced her to confront her own personal history, one she'd vowed never to tell. And this is how, after years of struggle, she found herself on the other side of the courtroom, telling her story.Hell on the way to Heaven: An Australian Mother's Love - The Power Of The Catholic Church, And A Fight For Justice Over Child Sexual Abuse
By Paul Kennedy, Chrissie Foster. 2010
An Australian mother's love. The power of the Catholic Church. A fight for justice over child sexual abuse. Chrissie and…
Anthony Foster were like any other young family, raising their three daughters in suburban Melbourne with what they hoped were the right values. Chrissie could not have known that the stranger-danger she feared actually lurked in the presbytery attached to the girls' Catholic primary school. Father Kevin O'Donnell, a long-term paedophile, lived and worked there. Two of their young daughters became victims of O'Donnell. And once the truth was revealed, the Fosters began a battle to find out how this could have happened. The Church offered silence, lies, denials and threats. Meanwhile, their daughters tried to piece together their fractured lives.This is the chilling true story that made national and international headlines. Chrissie Foster's heartbreaking account of her family's suffering, and their determination to stand up for themselves against the might of the Catholic Church, is testament to the strength of a mother's love, and the resilience of the human spirit.Into the darkness: the mysterious death of Phoebe Handsjuk
By Robin Bowles. 2016
On 2 December 2010, the body of a 24-year-old woman was found at the bottom of the rubbish chute in…
the luxury Balencea tower apartments in St Kilda Road, Melbourne, twelve floors below the apartment she had shared with her boyfriend, Antony Hampel. Within minutes, the sound of sirens filled the hall as police cars from the nearby police station filled the front forecourt in response to the day manager's call. So began the so-called investigation into the sudden death of a young woman called Phoebe Handsjuk. From then, the case became weirder and weirder. Phoebe, it turned out, was a beautiful but damaged young woman who'd been in a fraught relationship with a well-connected and wealthy lover almost twice her age, who was related to the elite of Melbourne's judiciary. The police botched their investigation, so Phoebe's grandfather, a former detective, decided to run one of his own. And in December 2014, after a 14-day inquest, the Coroner delivered a finding that excluded both suicide and foul play, a ruling that shocked her family and many others who had been following the case. How did Phoebe Handsjuk die? In this book, Robin Bowles uses her formidable array of investigative and forensic skills to tell a tale that is stranger than fiction.In my skin: a memoir
By Kate Holden. 2006
"I watched the glaze of headlights, the windscreens of oncoming cars: a series of trapezoids with the silhouette of a…
single male driver. One pulled up in front of me; I reached over and opened the door, slid in. The smell of an unfamiliar car. A middle-aged man looking at me. 'Hi', I said. 'How are you?"...There was no single moment when someone looked at Kate Holden and said, 'Why don't you have some?' No one made her try heroin. There was only the sense, with her friends setting out on this forbidden adventure, that she would lose something if she didn't. Just once: to know. So this book is the story of a journey. From a loving family home to the streets of St Kilda; from a shy, bookish life to the ambivalent glamour of an inner-city brothel, Kate Holden describes with breathtaking lyricism and poignancy her travels in an unknown world. Contains explicit sexual scenes.No friend but the mountains: writing from Manus prison
By Omid Tofighian, Behrouz Boochani. 2018
"Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the…
land of mountains." In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. People would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile. Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains?They cannot take the sky
By Michael Green, Angelica Neville, Andrea Dao, Dana Affleck, Sienna Merope. 2017
For more than two decades, Australia has locked up people who arrive here fleeing persecution - sometimes briefly, sometimes for…
years. In They Cannot Take the Sky those people tell their stories, in their own words. Speaking from inside immigration detention on Manus Island and Nauru, or from within the Australian community after their release, the narrators reveal not only their extraordinary journeys and their daily struggles but also their meditations on love, death, hope and injustice. Their candid testimonies are at times shocking and hilarious, surprising and devastating. They are witnesses from the edge of human experience.The first-person narratives in They Cannot Take the Sky range from epic life stories to heartbreaking vignettes. The narrators who have shared their stories have done so despite the culture of silence surrounding immigration detention, and the real risks faced by those who speak out. Once you have heard their voices, you will never forget them.The pyjama girl case: a tale of sex, crime and intrigue
By Hugh Geddes. 2005
A crowd gathers at dawn on a Sydney beach, clustering around the body of a beautiful young woman. The only…
clue to her identity is the strand of yellow fabric on her naked body. As the murder investigation continues, the girl's wanton, wild life is revealed...This tale takes its lead from one of Australia's most famous and enduring true-life murder mysteries - the Pyjama Girl case took police ten years to solve.Dr Munjed Al Muderis grew up in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's reign. He went to school with Saddam's sons, then…
started his medical training at Basra University just as the Iran. Iraq War began. One day, as he was working as a trainee surgeon at the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre, he and his colleagues were ordered to remove the tops of the ears of army deserters. He could not bring himself to act in defiance of the medical code of conduct and cause intentional harm, so he had no choice but to flee Baghdad that same day. In Kuala Lumpur he paid people smugglers to get him to Australia, where he was incarcerated in a detention centre and known only as '982'. After nine months of being repeatedly brutalised for standing up for himself and other detainees, Munjed was finally freed. But he had to start his medical training again, from scratch. Now, 15 years later, Munjed is at the forefront of orthopaedic medicine as he pioneers a new form of prosthesis that, ironically, transforms the lives of soldiers mutilated in the Iraq War. 'Walking Free' is the extraordinary story of a clever young man, born into one of Iraq's ruling families, who was forced to flee the country of his birth and forge a new and extraordinary life in Australia.