Australian Memoir

Keith Banks was a member of the Queensland Police Force when not everyone with a badge could be trusted. After serving as an undercover cop and declining an opportunity to participate in a lucrative and totally corrupt enterprise, Keith found himself sidelined from the drug squad. In 1984, he was transferred to the Taringa Criminal Investigation Branch as a detective senior constable. That had its moments, but he wanted more. He missed the adrenaline charge of his days as an undercover cop.

Surf Life Saving Australia is the nation's largest volunteer organisation, with over 300 affiliated clubs and more than 198,000 members – that's 198,000 Australians each with amazing stories to tell. From the golden sands of Bondi to the remote coastlines of Arnhem Land and the chilly waters of Tasmania, Bill 'Swampy' Marsh has gathered some of the best of those stories. Each story shines a light on the unwavering dedication, community spirit and extraordinary experiences of everyday Australians who selflessly devote their time to protect others.

As a cop, I used to sit on one side of the interview room table facing murderers, child abductors and rapists. Now I'm sitting on the other side: disgraced, forced out of the police and judged to be a criminal. I want to show you what the world looks like from here.

In A Human's Guide to the Future, Dr Jordan takes us on a journey through the big innovations being developed around the world, along the fun and amazing rollercoaster of his own adventures and to envisage where our collective future is headed. Written by one of this generation's most exciting voices, this is a book that will deepen your understanding of new and emerging technologies and fuel your imagination at the dawn of what will be the most transformative era in human history.

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.

Julie Goodwin was catapulted into our hearts as the first-ever winner of MasterChef Australia. In many ways her win was unlikely. As a child Julie adored music and art, but her career began in youth work, including in a juvenile detention centre housing troubled boys and a toxic all-male staff. After her three sons were born, she and her husband started an IT business. Then came MasterChef - a record-breaking juggernaut of a show. It was by all appearances, a successful, rewarding life. But under the surface relentless pressure from Julie's outer and inner worlds was taking its toll.

Alexandra Collier was a writer living in a light-filled Brooklyn brownstone in New York with the man she loved. But when she woke up to a ravenous hunger to have a baby that her partner didn't share, she had to make a choice between love or a future family. From defying her family's expectations to searching for sperm and navigating pregnancy alone, Ally deftly takes us through the ecstatic, complicated and demanding path to becoming a solo mother by choice.

When Tim Bowden went back to Tasmania to explore his state of origin for the first time in many years, he was reminded of his adolescent assertion that "Tasmania is the testicle of Australia, suffusing the mainland with strength and vigour. What a pity there is only one of them".

As the first Muslim woman in any Australian parliament, the 100th woman in the senate and the only engineer in the senate, Mehreen has a unique and crucial perspective on our country and how things are changing for the better or worse. This is the story of a Brown, migrant Muslim woman breaking into a white man's world and striving to change it without being changed. It is an honest, no-holds-barred account of what happens when reality meets perception and when you shatter long-held stereotypes and confront a system steeped in privileged hierarchies, racism and sexism.

In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests - most of them university students - had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died.

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.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Born a poor black tobacco farmer, her cancer cells - taken without her knowledge - became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta's family did not learn of her 'immortality' until more than 20 years after her death, with devastating consequences....

In 1977, Vera 'Toddie' Hays and Florice 'Beezie' Bessire thought they were about to embark on the trip of a lifetime when Vera's nephew, Vern Todd, offered them a campervan to drive from Germany to India. Little did the women know that Vern and his accomplices would secretly pack two tonnes of hashish into the vehicle along the way. This shocking inside story chronicles Toddie and Beezie's wild ride across continents and oceans to our shores, their arrest by Australian Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents and all that the women faced in the aftermath.

How far would you go for someone you love...on a unicycle? Brothers and sisters often dare each other to do things – it's what siblings do. However, when Connie Johnson dared her brother, Samuel, to embark on a one-wheeled odyssey around Australia, she knew it was a big ask. But Connie knew exactly what she was doing and was sure he wouldn't say no. Not this time. Born a year apart, Connie and Samuel Johnson have always been close.

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 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.

For over a century, the Ned Kelly legend has grown and grown. He's become Australia's Robin Hood, and leader of a colonial Irish resistance. How much of the legend is true? This is the real story of the hunt for the Kelly Gang over two long years. As gripping as any police procedural, it is an account of poorly trained officers unfamiliar with the terrain, in pursuit of the most dangerous men in the state. By recounting the story from the perspective of the law, David Dufty gets to the heart of the story and finds answers to many unresolved questions.

It was Rachel Signer's dream to be that girl: the one smoking hand-rolled cigarettes out the windows of her 19th-century Parisian studio apartment, wearing secondhand Isabel Marant jeans and sipping a glass of Beaujolais redolent of crushed roses with a touch of horse mane. Instead she was an under-appreciated freelance journalist and waitress in New York City, frustrated at always being broke and completely miserable in love. When she tastes her first pétillant-naturel (pét-nat for short), it sets her on a journey of self-discovery.

Young, petite, boyish and full of charm, Alice was the only woman in Australia to successfully pull off an almost impossible feat: without family or husband to back her financially, she built a garage to her own specifications and established the country's only motor service run entirely by women.

Wearing the colour red and having the patch with the emblem of the mighty bulldog on your back was what ex-Mongrel Mob leader Tuhoe 'Bruno' Isaac called being True Red. "Because all levels of society hated us we created a new society of hatred symbolised by the bulldog. Its ferocious habits were engraved on our hearts", Tuhoe says, "If you weren't a mobster you weren't worth knowing." He lived this way for 17 years. However, constantly living for the bash, beer, prison and the possibility of dying in a pool of blood eventually saw Tuhoe search for another way of doing life.