Australia Politics

Have you ever wondered if time travel is actually possible? Or where the Australian accent came from? Or what it feels like to have dementia? If you're an inquisitive person who likes to understand how things came to be the way they are, this collection of thought-provoking explainers from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald has got you covered. Explain That answers some of the year's - and life's - most baffling questions.

Quentin Kenihan is living proof that superheroes don't need capes, just the right attitude. When he was a kid, Quentin loved Superman. Ironic, really. Quentin didn't need kryptonite to reveal his weakness - born with a rare bone disorder, osteogenesis imperfecta, his bones broke all on their own. When Quentin was seven, Mike Willesee made a documentary about him. Australians fell in love with his wit and never-say-die attitude. Over the years he grew up before our eyes. But there was a dark side to his life. The true story was never told...until now.

The story of how gold miners rebelled against British authority, beginning a process that would ultimately lead to democracy in Australia. The Eureka Stockade. It's one of Australia's foundation legends - yet the story has always been told as if half the participants weren't there. But what if the hot-tempered, free-spirited gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? What if there were women and children right there beside them inside the Stockade when the bullets started to fly?

It's been said that 'well-behaved women seldom make history', but the handful of white boys who wrote our history books conveniently left most of them out. Whoops! To rectify this situation, Eliza Reilly is setting out to revive the forgotten stories of the badass sheilas of Australian history. Chain yourself to pub counters with the determined Merle Thornton, fight for Indigenous rights alongside Faith Bandler and lure forlorn sailors with swimmer-slash-mermaid Annette Kellerman.

Buraadja provides a powerful account of the Liberal Party’s approach to indigenous affairs. The party’s record of successes and failures is frankly evaluated as an important basis for developing effective approaches to persistent problems.

She is an iconic member of the British Royal Family, beloved for her beauty and charitable works, resented by her former husband and his mother, the Queen of England. When a bomb explodes aboard her holiday yacht, British intelligence turns to one man to track down her killer: legendary spy and assassin Gabriel Allon. Gabriel's target is Eamon Quinn, a master bomb maker and mercenary of death who sells his services to the highest bidder. Fortunately Gabriel does not pursue him alone; at his side is Christopher Keller, a British commando turned professional assassin.

Counter terrorism expert Sid Allen knows nothing good ever comes from a phone call at five a.m. Politician Dan LeRoi, chairman of the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, has been shot. Four bullets to the head. The crime scene is chaotic. Homicide. Counter Terrorism. Media. And for Sid, hunting the killer is going to get complicated. Journalist Zephyr Wilde is complicated. She's tenacious and she's got Sid's number. Sid knows the gossip: how Zephyr's mother was murdered when Zephyr was a kid. He doesn't know that Zephyr is still getting letters from her long-dead mother.

When the main course is heavy going or unappetising, the 'bits on the side' make life really delicious. Our small, meaningful selections are the ones that make life glorious, and the side dish is the perfect metaphor for what many of us need right now. A Bit on the Side is Virginia's ode to joy, filled with wisdom, stories, memories and recipes, all told with her renowned insight and wicked sense of humour.

Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing is booming globally. Neighbours that are siblings in spirit, vastly different in landscape, antipodean authors offer readers and listeners a blend of exotic and familiar, seasoned by distinctive senses of place, outlook, and humour, and roots that trace to the earliest days of our genre. Southern Cross Crime is the first comprehensive guide to modern Australian and New Zealand crime writing.

Darwin longgrassers have been living large since the beginning. They come from all over the Territory to camp in the public spaces around town, to catch up with family and friends, attend health and legal matters, holiday and shop, and drink. Especially drink. And the whitefellas don’t like it. They think they’re noisy and dirty and rude. So, they try to move them on. For 150 years they’ve been trying to move them on. But the longgrassers won’t go. Yet beneath this running battle between the settled and the free lurks an undeniable truth about colonisation that is almost Newtonian in style.

In January 2019, then 18-year-old Saudi woman Rahaf Mohammed escaped from her family while holidaying in Kuwait. She was fleeing systematic abuse of her human rights as a woman growing up in Saudi Arabia and, specifically, her family's threats to kill her because she desired the freedoms Western women take for granted. Rebel is a passionate story by a woman who refused to allow a system to define who she was and what she could be.

In 1996, when Akuch Kuol Anyieth is five, her mother flees to Kakuma with her children, intent on finding safety and freedom for her family, while her husband stays behind in South Sudan to fight in the civil war. The family spends nine years in the camp, eking out an existence amidst famine, disease, unbearable heat and chronic violence. Despite their suffering, Akuch never loses hope or her sense of humour. She’s a bright student who loves learning and does well at the local school.

The Raising Girls Workbook provides the best information about girls at every age, alongside simple questionnaires to determine your daughter’s unique needs. Build on your family’s strengths and find new strategies to help your daughter grow up happy and healthy.

Natalie Kon-yu was nine weeks pregnant when the trembling began. Two weeks later she checked herself into a mental health unit. Though she was in crisis, the GPs, nurses and psychiatrists couldn't see beyond Natalie's precious cargo. She was made to feel that her pregnancy outweighed her mental health. This loss of agency lingered long into her early years of motherhood. In that time, she discovered that she was far from alone. In fact, her experience typifies the harsh inequalities endured by child-bearing women, as well as the devaluation of what is still perceived as ‘women's work'.

For many years Josephine Moon struggled with the question of eating meat, fervently wishing to live as a vegetarian yet requiring meat in her diet. From Josephine’s philosophical, spiritual and physical battle with eating meat came, Buddhism for Meat Eaters - a book for animal lovers, the environmentally and ethically conscious, and generally thoughtful people who eat meat but perhaps aren’t entirely comfortable doing so.

This anthology is a diverse collection of explainers by some of the finest writers from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. It tackles quintessentially Australian topics (where does the term 'mate' come from?) as well as questions being grappled with around the world (what will our homes be powered by in the future?). Inquisitive readers love the explainer columns for their strong and surprising storytelling, deeply researched reporting and inventive illustrations.

In 1999, Sierra Leone was in the midst of a brutal civil war where mindless violence, vicious amputation and the rape of young enslaved women were the everyday weapons of bloody conflict. It was also where rebel soldiers snatched the young Aminata Conteh-Biger from her father's arms, then held her captive for months. After she was released, the UNHCR recognised that her captors still posed a serious threat to her safety. So, still in her teens, she was put on a plane and flown to Australia to start afresh as a refugee in a land she knew nothing about.

Blazing her trail at the dawn of the 20th century, Vida Goldstein remains Australia's most celebrated suffragette and social reformer. Her life - as a campaigner for women's rights and suffrage in Australia, Britain and America, an advocate for peace, a fighter for social equality for all and a shrewd political commentator - marks her as one of Australia's foremost women of courage and principle. In 1903 she became the first woman in Australia to stand for the Senate and the the first woman in the Western world to stand for a national Parliament.

On average, at least one woman is murdered by a current or former partner every week in Australia. Far too many Australian women have experienced physical or sexual violence. Only rarely do these women capture the attention of the media and the public. What can we do to stem the tide of violence and tragedy? Finally, we are starting to talk about this epidemic of gendered violence, but too often we are doing so in a way that can be clumsy and harmful. Victim blaming, passive voice and over-identification with abusers continue to be hallmarks of reporting on this issue.

Shame is a difficult emotion, and most of us do what we can to avoid it. But veteran psychologist Joseph Burgo shows us how we can use shame - which is an inevitable part of being human - as a tool for better understanding ourselves and our relationships with others. Encounters with embarrassment, guilt, self-consciousness and remorse are an unavoidable part of everyday life, and they sometimes have lessons to teach us - about our goals and values, about the person we expect ourselves to be.