Australia Politics

While doing fieldwork on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, anthropologist Gregory Forth came across people talking about half-apelike, half-humanlike creatures that once lived in a cave on the slopes of a nearby volcano. Over the years he continued to record what locals had to say about these mystery hominoids while searching for ways to explain them as imaginary symbols of the wild or other cultural representations. We follow Forth on the trail of this mystery hominoid, and the space they occupy in islanders' culture as both natural creatures and as supernatural beings.

According to the Australian government’s website, at the time of first contact with Europeans, there were some 500 distinct Indigenous nations, speaking different languages and following their own religious and cultural practices. As with all human societies, that of the Indigenous Australians is abounding in stories. Stories of how the world came to be the way it is, stories of heroism and perfidy, stories about animals and birds, and stories about love and hate all have parts to play in the wide array of myths, legends, and tales created by Indigenous Australians.

A thriving monarchy had ruled over Hawaii for generations. Taro fields and fish ponds had long sustained native Hawaiians but sugar plantations had been gradually subsuming them. This fractured, vulnerable Hawaii was the country that Queen Lili‘uokalani, or Lili‘u, inherited when she came to power at the end of the nineteenth century.

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?

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.

When Mark McKenna set out to write a history of the centre of Australia, he had no idea what he would discover. One event in 1934 - the shooting at Uluru of Aboriginal man Yokunnuna by white policeman Bill McKinnon, and subsequent Commonwealth inquiry - stood out as a mirror of racial politics in the Northern Territory at the time. But then, through speaking with the families of both killer and victim, McKenna unearthed new evidence that transformed the historical record and the meaning of the event for today.

Australia is different - a vast island continent with distances so great that the capital of Western Australia is closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney. The landscape embraces magnificent tropical rainforests and deserts the size of several European states; temperate areas that sustain a flourishing wine industry, making Australia the world's fourth largest wine exporter; and a 16,000-mile coastline of breathtaking beaches. Plus its unique fauna is testament to the country's down-underness.

Talya and Samuel have to find a man - the one they call the Puppeteer. They know it is the only way for them to clear their names from the accusation of treason against the State of Israel that has pursued them for nearly two years now. Although Mossad made sure they were cleared of the accusation during a recent trial in Washington, D.C., the director of the Israeli agency still has some doubts about Talya and Samuel's innocence. David Bernstein doesn't like coincidences.

Lachlan Macquarie is credited with shaping Australia's destiny, transforming a harsh, foreboding penal colony into an agricultural powerhouse and ultimately a prosperous society. He also helped shape Australia's national character. An egalitarian at heart, Macquarie saw boundless potential in Britain's refuse, and under his rule many former convicts went on to become successful administrators, land owners and businesspeople.

Growing Up Disabled in Australia is the fifth book in the highly acclaimed, best-selling Growing Up series. It includes interviews with prominent Australians such as Senator Jordon Steele-John and Paralympian Isis Holt.

Set in an alternate reality where pregnancy endows women with exceptional powers, one new mother uncovers terrifying truths about herself and life in this philosophical and propulsive tale of a woman and mother in crisis. In a world where drastic measures have averted the global environmental...

The gripping finale to Three Crooked Kings and Jacks and Jokers brings to a close Matthew Condon's best-selling true-crime trilogy. In 1983, the soon-to-be-knighted Police Commissioner Terry Lewis continues to turn a blind eye to the operation of The Joke, a highly organised system of graft payments from illegal gambling, prostitution and illicit drugs. As the tentacles of this fraudulent vice network spread, the fabric holding together the police, judiciary and political system starts to unravel.

In the history of Australian diplomacy, the Jakarta post between 2004 and 2007 looms larger than any other. In the span of just a few years, a terrorist bomb attack partially destroyed the Embassy compound, killing eleven; the Boxing Day tsunami wreaked havoc on an almost incomprehensible scale; a bombing in Bali killed twenty, including four Australians; Schapelle Corby divided public opinion; members of the Bali Nine were executed; and a Garuda flight crashed and exploded in Yogyakarta, killing twenty, including members of the Australian diplomatic corps.

For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South Australia's forensic pathology services. In cases of unexpected or unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their final breath, and whether they had died naturally - or not. But Manock did not have the necessary training for such a specialist role, and made serious errors in several major cases. The full extent of his wrongdoing, and the exact number of cases impacted by it, remain a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired.

Like all military acquisition programs worth billions of dollars, Australia's decision to buy a new submarine fleet was expected to be a torturous process. But no one could have predicted the trail of wreckage it left behind, from the boulevards of Paris to the dockyards of Adelaide, as deep inside the Australian government a secret group conspired to overthrow the winning French bid. In this tale of treachery and intrigue, Andrew Fowler exposes the lies and deception that so outraged the President of France.

From one of Australia's leading Indigenous journalists comes a collection of fierce and powerful essays proving why the media need to believe Black witnesses and showcasing ways that journalism can be used to hold the powerful to account and make the world a more equitable place. Black Witness is the essential collection of First Nations journalism that we need right now – and always have.

Kill Bills! is the bible for saving thousands of dollars on your major household bills. From power bills to telco, mortgage, insurance, credit cards, petrol and groceries, it describes the 9 Insider Tricks You Need to Win the War on Household Bills. You'll start saving straight away thanks to...

Between 2013 and 2022, Tony Abbott begat Malcolm Turnbull, who begat Scott Morrison. For nine long years, Australia was governed by a succession of Coalition governments rocked by instability and bloodletting, and consumed with prosecuting climate and culture wars while neglecting policy. By the end, among his detractors—and there were plenty—Morrison was seen as the worst prime minister since Billy McMahon. Morrison failed to accept the mantle of national leadership, or to deal adequately with the challenges of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gladys Berejiklian was Australia's rockstar premier. The first woman elected to lead NSW, she steered the state through devastating bushfires, drought and a once-in-a-generation pandemic with a steady hand. To many, she was 'The Woman Who Saved Australia' for the way in which she navigated the...

Provoked by a half-hidden account, Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’ has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence.