Australian Memoir

Chasing Dreamtime is the incredible true-life story of a young traveler's journey through memory and myth. In 1975, after college and a brief, disastrous marriage, Neva Sullaway attempts to escape her anguish as well as the post-Vietnam confusion of her generation by sailing alone around the world, but her plans are abruptly scuttled. A string of unlikely events occurs and sends her boat-hopping across the vast South Pacific. While sailing among the exquisitely beautiful Pacific atolls, Sullaway is arrested for a visa violation, hunted by sharks, stricken with tropical fever and held at ...

John Wood grew up in working-class Melbourne; when he failed out of high school, an employment officer told him, 'You have the mind of an artist and the body of a labourer.' And so John continued to pursue his acting dreams in amateur theatre, sustaining himself by working jobs as a bricklayer, a railway clerk and even in the same abattoir as his father. When he won a scholarship to NIDA, in Sydney, it moved John into a new and at times baffling world, full of extraordinary characters.

Discovering Kanye West is endorsing Adolf Hitler, John Safran heads to America to find out what's up. Kanye proves elusive, one thing leads to another, and John packs his duffle bags and moves in, squatting at one of Kanye's mansions in the rolling hills of Los Angeles. Will the neighbours get wise and snitch to the cops? Are the creatures in the woods behind the mansion a worry? More paranoid each day, John becomes convinced the house itself is turning against him.

Christopher Pyne has been many things and called many things throughout his long career in politics. Member for Sturt. Minister for defence. Manager of opposition business. Leader of the House. 'The Fixer'. Any Canberra story he doesn't know isn't worth telling. Now, after 26 years, the ultimate insider is outside the House and ready to burst the Canberra bubble with his trademark sharp wit.

Ed Stafford - adventurer extraordinaire and Guinness World Record holder for walking the length of the Amazon River - likes a challenge. Casting about for an adventure that would top the extraordinary feat he recounts in Walking the Amazon, Stafford decides to maroon himself on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. His mission: to survive for 60 days equipped with nothing - no food, water, or even clothing - except the video cameras he would use to document his time.

Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan were both happy, healthy, affluent, middle-class women from conservative, loving families. Such women are hardly ever among the ranks of the missing. They were not hitchhikers, or associates of drug dealers, or unhappy with their family relationships, or suffering from mental health issues. Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan came from different parts of Sydney, mixed in quite different circles, and led completely different lives.

In 1991 Andrew Daddo was sacked as an MTV presenter. Rather than slink back to Australia immediately, Andrew and a guy he'd met at a party named Ray O'Neal set off on a month-long motorcycle journey across America. That summer spent riding cross-country with Ray forged a friendship that Andrew thought would last a lifetime. But in February 2004, Ray died in an accident. He left behind a wife and a young daughter, Rose.

Bella Green is a Sunday-afternoon sex worker. Divorced dads, IT nerds, international students - she's here for the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour, for soothing the lonely. But really for the cash. From an entrepreneurial kid to a young woman trying to find herself (and desperate to stay out of call centres), Bella started sex work for the glamour and the taboo. Instead, she found her place in this surprisingly mundane and often entertaining industry, where the hierarchy is strict, the names are fake, and spare towels always come in handy.

Hugh Riminton was a small-town New Zealand teenager with a possible drinking problem and a job cleaning rat cages when a chance meeting with a radio news director changed his life. The news man took a chance on him, and at 17 Riminton became a cadet reporter. Over nearly 40 years he has been shot at, blown up, threatened with deportation and thrown in jail. He has reported from nearly 50 countries, witnessed massacres in Africa, wars and conflicts on four continents, and every kind of natural disaster.

Written and read by Jessica Watson, this is the story of a remarkable girl who followed her dream and conquered the world. There is something different about adventurers, about the way their minds work. They look at the world as a place of challenges and though they know what fear is, they refuse to be hindered by it.

As Australia's most distinguished criminal psychologist, 'Doc' Tim Watson-Munro has assessed over 30,000 'persons of interest' in some of the nation's most notorious court cases, including Hoddle Street gunman Julian Knight, corporate fraudster Alan Bond, Melbourne gangster Alphonse Gangitano and, in recent years, Australia's first terrorist convicts. But the front line of psychology is no place for the fainthearted.

When prominent US neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander goes into a coma after contracting a severe brain infection, his doctors tell his family to prepare for the worst - death or, at best, survival in a vegetative state. Remarkably, Dr Alexander wakes up seven days later with his faculties intact. Just as extraordinary is his detailed recall of a near-death experience. Based on all that is known about how the brain works, Dr Alexander had no capacity, while in the coma, to create thought; his neocortex, the part of his brain that makes us human, had effectively shut down.

In the high-stakes world of Formula One, only the fastest make it to the top. Few know this better than Australian Formula One legend Mark Webber. His career in F1 stretched an incredible 12 years, saw him earn 42 podium finishes and triumph in nine races, including twice-winning the crown jewel of F1, the Monaco Grand Prix. But the road to the top of F1 racing is long and full of deadly twists and strange turns. In his long-awaited Autobiography, Webber tells the incredible true story of the small town pizza delivery boy who climbed the apex of the world's most dangerous sport.

On Australia Day, 26 January 1966, Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont were abducted from Colley Reserve, Glenelg, South Australia and never seen again, leading to one of Australia's most extensive police investigations and manhunts. Five decades later, no trace of the children has ever been found. Over the years, several individuals have been put forward and investigated as suspects, resulting in false leads and dead ends and with no real suspect until now: Harry Phipps.

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.

This is the truly remarkable life story of the notorious Ethel Livesey, a serial fraudster and confidence trickster who became a media sensation after she ran out on her society wedding in 1945 and later was arrested for obtaining goods by false pretences. With a prologue by Ethel Livesey's granddaughter, this extraordinary tale of Australia's greatest fraudster is told for the first time in rich and fascinating detail.

As a teenage orphan in England in 1791, Mary Reibey was sentenced to death for stealing a horse. When police cornered her, she was dressed as a boy, and she maintained that disguise until she was unmasked at her trial. Due to her 'tender age', Reibey was spared the hangman's noose and sentenced to seven years' transportation to the colony of New South Wales. With the odds stacked against her, Reibey went on to become Australia's first female business tycoon and the richest woman in the colony, founding the Bank of New South Wales, now one of the nation's biggest financial institutions.

In an incredible 25-year career as a homicide detective, Ron Iddles' conviction rate was 99 percent. Yet that only partly explains why Iddles is known to cops and crims alike as 'The Great Man'. Tough, inventive and incorruptible, stoic in the face of senseless horror yet unafraid to shed tears for a victim, Ron has applied his country cunning and city savvy to over 320 homicide cases - some of them the most infamous, compelling and controversial crimes in the nation's history. To the victims of crime, Ron is both a shoulder to cry on and an avenging angel.

Tara Costigan was the woman next door. A hard worker. Quick to laugh and easy to like. She was happy, confident, strong. A woman who always looked after herself and her kids. Close with her family and her friends, she was much loved. Then, in 2013, she met Marcus Rappel. A local tradie, he was charming and sincere, they dated and fell in love. That should have been the end of a happy-ever-after story. But for Tara, it was much uglier. And for her family it would be devastating.

Honest, funny, brave and inspired, Macca shares her story here for the first time: the family and first-believers who supported and challenged her from the beginning; the coaches and mentors who pushed her beyond her comfort zone and provided the blueprint of a champion; the rivals and teammates who transformed the Matildas into a global force to be reckoned with.