Download or read book Where Song Began written by Tim Low and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative and entertaining exploration of Australia’s distinctive birds and their unheralded role in global evolution Renowned for its gallery of unusual mammals, Australia is also a land of extraordinary birds. But unlike the mammals, the birds of Australia flew beyond the continent’s boundaries and around the globe many millions of years ago. This eye-opening book tells the dynamic but little-known story of how Australia provided the world with songbirds and parrots, among other bird groups, why Australian birds wield surprising ecological power, how Australia became a major evolutionary center, and why scientific biases have hindered recognition of these discoveries. From violent, swooping magpies to tool-making cockatoos, Australia’s birds are strikingly different from birds of other lands—often more intelligent and aggressive, often larger and longer-lived. Tim Low, a renowned biologist with a rare storytelling gift, here presents the amazing evolutionary history of Australia’s birds. The story of the birds, it turns out, is inseparable from the story of the continent itself and also the people who inhabit it.

Download or read book One Hundred Years of Dirt written by Rick Morton and published by . This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Natural Way of Things written by Charlotte Wood and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A Handmaid’s Tale for the 21st century” (Prism Magazine), Wood’s dystopian tale about a group of young women held prisoner in the Australian desert is a prescient feminist fable for our times. As the Guardian writes, “contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.” Drugged, dressed in old-fashioned rags, and fiending for a cigarette, Yolanda wakes up in a barren room. Verla, a young woman who seems vaguely familiar, sits nearby. Down a hallway echoing loudly with the voices of mysterious men, in a stark compound deep in the Australian outback, other captive women are just coming to. Starved, sedated, the girls can't be sure of anything—except the painful episodes in their pasts that link them. Drawing strength from the animal instincts they're forced to rely on, the women go from hunted to hunters, along the way becoming unforgettable and boldly original literary heroines that readers will both relate to and root for. The Natural Way of Things is a lucid and illusory fable and a brilliantly plotted novel of ideas that reminds us of mankind's own vast contradictions—the capacity for savagery, selfishness, resilience, and redemption all contained by a single, vulnerable body. Winner 2016 Stella Prize 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Fiction An Australian Indie Best Fiction Book & Overall Book of the Year Winner Finalist 2017 International Dublin Literary Award 2016 Voss Literary Prize 2016 Victorian Premier's Award 2016 The Miles Franklin Award

Download or read book Adelaide Festival 60 Years written by Catherine McKinnon and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Adelaide Festival is as much shaped by people and place as it in turn shapes people and place; its identity is a weird and wild shifting thing. It is not owned by one individual, but belongs to everyone. Adelaide Festival 60 Years is an astounding cacophony of images and tales that revel in the life of the Festival since its founding in 1960 - remembering what it was, anticipating what it might be. The tales are told by the many - choreographers, actors, singers, artistic directors, audience members, writers, lighting designers, arts administrators, curators and more. Stunning full-colour photography captures moments in time, both sweeping and intimate, woven together to form an important story of culture and ideas across 60 years of history and 35 iconic festivals.

Download or read book Minotaur written by Peter Goldsworthy and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Goldsworthy's new novel features a blind detective determined to deliver justice to the man who shot him, even though his failed assassin has broken out of jail and is equally determined to finish the job. Cleverly structured around the five senses, and with the action confined to one week, it’s pacey and taut, with the cat-and-mouse tension leavened by lighter interludes. Goldsworthy is interested in all that his protagonist cannot see, as he is forced to meet evil, acting on a trust in his senses, and the ineluctable mystery that is memory.

Download or read book Time s Long Ruin written by Stephen Orr and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time's Long Ruin' is based loosely on the disappearance of the Beaumont children from Glenelg beach on Australia Day, 1966. It is a novel about friendship, love and loss; a story about those left behind, and how they carry on: the searching, the disappointments, the plans and dreams that are only ever put on hold.

Download or read book The Doctor written by Robert Icke and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-13 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First, do no harm. How do we defend the "truth" when no one agrees what it is and many have reason to undermine it? Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke's gripping moral thriller uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality. After a critically acclaimed run at London's Almeida Theatre, The Doctor transferred to the West End in September 2022. This revised and updated edition was published to coincide with the new production.

Download or read book Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture written by Millicent Weber and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been a proliferation of literary festivals in recent decades, with more than 450 held annually in the UK and Australia alone. These festivals operate as tastemakers shaping cultural consumption; as educational and policy projects; as instantiations, representations, and celebrations of literary communities; and as cultural products in their own right. As such they strongly influence how literary culture is produced, circulates and is experienced by readers in the twenty-first century. This book explores how audiences engage with literary festivals, and analyses these festivals’ relationship to local and digital literary communities, to the creative industries focus of contemporary cultural policy, and to the broader literary field. The relationship between literary festivals and these configuring forces is illustrated with in-depth case studies of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Port Eliot Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and the Clunes Booktown Festival. Building on interviews with audiences and staff, contextualised by a large-scale online survey of literary festival audiences from around the world, this book investigates these festivals’ social, cultural, commercial, and political operation. In doing so, this book critically orients scholarly investigation of literary festivals with respect to the complex and contested terrain of contemporary book culture.

Download or read book Loop Tracks written by Sue Orr and published by Upswell. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlie at 16 is pregnant. Circumstances blow up the normal life awaiting her. Loop Tracks follows simple twists of fate around history and women's lives, in an utterly compelling novel. 'A world full of human damage and human courage' -Bill Manhire, Emeritus Professor, Victoria University of Wellington It's 1978. Charlie is sixteen and pregnant and the only legal abortion clinic in Auckland has been forced to close. She has to fly to Sydney, but the plane is delayed on the tarmac. It's 2019. Charlie's quiet life in Wellington with her neurodivergent grandson is shattered by the arrival of his first girlfriend and the father he has never met. As the Covid-19 pandemic takes hold and the country goes into lockdown, Charlie must counsel her grandson through his new relationships and confront the choices she made decades earlier. Told in a dry and playful tone, Loop Tracks is utterly compelling. Ingrid Horrocks says- 'It's about abortion and euthanasia, conspiracy theories and intergenerational guilt, but mainly it's about the love between a grandmother and her grown-up grandson.' Loop Tracks is a major New Zealand novel, written in real time as the Covid-19 pandemic, New Zealand general election and euthanasia referendum in 2020 unfolded.

Download or read book What Days Are For written by Robert Dessaix and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2016-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, 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."

Download or read book The Second Cure written by Margaret Morgan and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This hypnotic debut novel brilliantly captures the unease of our times.' Jane Caro 'Wildly entertaining and frighteningly plausible.' James Bradley 'A whip smart thriller with big ideas and big heart.' Steven Amsterdam A pandemic is racing through our world, changing people subtly but irrevocably. The first sign for some is losing their faith. For others it comes as violent outpourings of creativity, reckless driving and seeing visions. Scientist Charlotte Zinn is close to a cure when her partner becomes infected. Overnight her understanding of the disease is turned upside down. Should she change the path of evolution? As Australia is torn apart, reporter Brigid Bayliss is determined to uncover the dark truth behind the religious response to the outbreak. Brigid and Charlotte find themselves on the frontline of a world splintering into far left and far right, with unexpected power to change the course of history. But at what cost? Dark, thrilling and compulsively readable, The Second Cure is a provocative debut about control, courage and belief.

Download or read book On Father written by John Birmingham and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Birmingham's father died. And his life fell apart. The next six months were spent grinding through the black forests of depression until he finally emerged out of the darkness onto sunlit upland. A unique yet universal story, On Father reaches out to everyone who has experienced and survived deep grief. 'Deeply moving. Beautifully written. I wept. For John's dad, and anew - for the loss of my own.' PETER FITZSIMONS

Download or read book Gender and Prestige in Literature written by Alexandra Dane and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture explores the relationship between gender, power, reputation and book publishing’s consecratory institutions in the Australian literary field from 1965-2015. Focusing on book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes, this work analyses the ways in which these institutions exist in an increasingly cooperative and generative relationship in the contemporary publishing industry, a system designed to limit field transformation. Taking an intersectional approach, this research acknowledges that a number of factors in addition to gender may influence the reception of an author or a title in the literary field and finds that progress towards equality is unstable and non-linear. By combining quantitative data analysis with interviews from authors, editors, critics, publishers and prize judges Alexandra Dane maps the circulation of prestige in Australian publishing, addressing questions around gender, identity, literary reputation, literary worth and the resilience of the status quo that have long plagued the field.

Download or read book A Passage North written by Anuk Arudpragasam and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A young man journeys into Sri Lanka’s war-torn north in this searing novel of longing, loss, and the legacy of war from the author of The Story of a Brief Marriage. “A novel of tragic power and uncommon beauty.”—Anthony Marra “One of the most individual minds of their generation.”—Financial Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND NPR A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances—found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani’s funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek. Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam’s masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.

Download or read book The Inner Self written by Hugh Mackay and published by Macmillan Publishers Aus.. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'How can I get in touch with this real self, underlying all my surface behaviour? How can I become myself?' Carl Rogers, US psychotherapist The Inner Self is a book about the ways we hide from the truth about ourselves and the psychological freedom we enjoy when we finally face that most searching question of all: 'Who am I, really?' Hugh Mackay explores our 'top 20' hiding places - from addiction to materialism, nostalgia to victimhood. He explains how it is our fear of love's demands that drive us into hiding. He argues that love is our highest ideal, the richest source of life's meaning and purpose, and the key to our emotional security, personal serenity and confidence. Yet Mackay exposes the great paradox of human nature, that while love brings out our best, we don't always want our best brought forward. Powerfully written and drawing on a lifetime of research, The Inner Self is a work of extraordinary insight by one of Australia's most respected psychologists.

Download or read book The Science of Fate written by Hannah Critchlow and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 'A truly fascinating - if unnerving - read' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Acute, mind-opening, highly accessible - this book doesn't just explain how our lives might pan out, it helps us live better' BETTANY HUGHES 'A humane and highly readable account of the neuroscience that underpins our ideas of free will and fate' PROFESSOR DAVID RUNCIMAN *** So many of us believe that we are free to shape our own destiny. But what if free will doesn't exist? What if our lives are largely predetermined, hardwired in our brains - and our choices over what we eat, who we fall in love with, even what we believe are not real choices at all? Neuroscience is challenging everything we think we know about ourselves, revealing how we make decisions and form our own reality, unaware of the role of our unconscious minds. Did you know, for example, that: * You can carry anxieties and phobias across generations of your family? * Your genes and pleasure and reward receptors in your brain will determine how much you eat? * We can sniff out ideal partners with genes that give our offspring the best chance of survival? Leading neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow draws vividly from everyday life and other experts in their field to show the extraordinary potential, as well as dangers, which come with being able to predict our likely futures - and looking at how we can alter what's in store for us. Lucid, illuminating, awe-inspiring The Science of Fate revolutionises our understanding of who we are - and empowers us to help shape a better future for ourselves and the wider world.

Download or read book The Boys Club written by Michael Warner and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Boys' Club is the must-read inside story behind the power and politics of AFL, Australia's biggest sport. Revealing how the fledgling state administrative body evolved into the Australian Football League and its meteoric rise to become one of the richest and most powerful organisations in the land, award-winning investigative journalist Mick Warner delivers a fascinating insight into key figures and their networks. Tracking the rise of the game and the AFL figureheads, The Boys' Club lifts the lid on the scandals, secrets and deal making that have shaped the Australian game.