Life At The Palace: A Necklace of Anecdotes by Joy Jobbins

$24.95 AUD

Category: Australian

Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music (HB) by Archie Roach

$50.00 AUD

Category: Australian

INDIE AWARD WINNER 2020A powerful memoir of a true Australian legend: stolen child, musical and lyrical genius, and leader. No one has lived as many lives as Archie Roach - stolen child, seeker, teenage alcoholic, lover, father, musical and lyrical genius, and leader - but it took him almost a lifetime to find out who he really was. Roach was only a few years old when he was forcibly removed from his family. Brought up by a series of foster parents until his early teens, his world imploded when he received a letter that spoke of a life he had no memory of. In this intimate, moving and often shocking memoir, Roach's story is an extraordinary odyssey through love and heartbreak, family and community, survival and renewal - and the healing power of music. Overcoming enormous odds to find his story and his people, Roach voices the joy, pain and hope he found on his path through song to become the legendary singer-songwriter and storyteller that he is today - beloved by fans worldwide. Tell Me Why is a stunning account of resilience and the strength of spirit - and of a great love story. ...Show more

Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing by David Leser

$30.00 AUD

Category: Australian

One of the most talked-about and widely praised articles of our time becomes the water-cooler book of the #MeToo era.

Top End Girl by Miranda Tapsell

$33.00 AUD

Category: Australian

'Ever since I was thirteen years old, all I wanted to do was perform. It was an unusual dream for a kid from the Northern Territory to have ... what I wanted for my life was a world away from what people knew and loved about the "Top End". Even though I've moved south to become an actor, the Territory h as never left me. It's the place I go to when I want to feel whole again.' From Kakadu to Cannes, Miranda Tapsell is one of Australia's favourite actors. A proud Larrikia woman, she built a stellar career on stage, and shot to fame in The Sapphires and then in Love Child and Doctor, Doctor. Growing up, Miranda often looked for faces like hers on our screens. There weren't many. And too often there was a negative narrative around Indigenous lives, and Aboriginal women especially. Now an award-winning actor, she decided to change things herself. Combining her love of romantic comedies with her love of Darwin, the Tiwi Islands and the Top End, Miranda wrote, produced and starred in the box office hit Top End Wedding. But who the hell co-writes, produces and acts in a film about a wedding in the same year they're having their own? Miranda Tapsell does! In this engaging and thought-provoking memoir, Top End Girl, Miranda shares the path she took to create a moving film about re-connection to family and culture at the same time as she was planning her own wedding. And, like all good story-tellers, she holds a mirror up to the society we live in to show the prejudice that too often surfaces. Miranda knows that the key to change is to understand and through the power of storytelling she is changing attitudes and expectations to unite us all. ...Show more

Unfettered and Alive by Anne Summers

$33.00 AUD

Category: Australian

'I was born into a world that expected very little of women like me. We were meant to tread lightly on the earth, influencing events through our husbands and children, if at all. We were meant to fade into invisibility as we aged. I defied all of these expectations and so have millions of women like me. ' This is the compelling story of Anne Summers' extraordinary life. It's a story that has her travelling around the world as she moves from jobs in newspapers and magazines, advising prime ministers, and global leader of Greenpeace, all the while leading feminist debates and writing memorable and influential books. Anne has not been afraid to walk away from success and to satisfy her constant restlessness by charging down new and risky paths. Whatever position she has held, she has expanded what's possible and helped us see things differently-often at high personal cost. Anne shares revealing stories about famous and powerful people she has worked with or reported on and is refreshingly frank about her own anxieties and mistakes. She shares a heart-breaking story of family violence and of the ultimate reconciliation with the father who had rejected her. Unfettered and Alive is a provocative and surprising memoir from someone who broke through so many boundaries to show what women can do. ...Show more

An Alice Girl by Tanya Heaslip

$33.00 AUD

Category: Australian

For fans of Tony Tapp Coutts' A Sunburnt Childhood and Mary Groves' An Outback Life, comes Tanya Heaslip's extraordinary story of growing up with her sister and brothers in the late 1960s and early 70s on the outback cattle property just north of Alice Springs.

Dancing Under the Southern Skies by Valerie Lawson

$60.00 AUD

Category: Australian

With its vivid narrative, Valerie Lawson's Dancing Under the Southern Skies goes far beyond what audiences see on stage to reveal what has been behind the red velvet curtain. The lives of the dancers who toured to Australia, among them Anna Pavlova and Margot Fonteyn, and of those who stayed and of thos e who created companies in Australia are presented in a fascinating mosaic of interviews, letters and personal stories from dancers, directors, producers, impresarios and critics. She also paints portraits of those who influenced Australia culture over nine decades, among them Laurence Olivier, Edouard Borovansky, Peggy van Praagh, Paul Keating and Graeme Murphy, and tells how the nation escaped from cultural dependence on Britain, fell in love with ballet troupes from the Soviet Union, and then watched the birth of the Australian Ballet, the Sydney Dance Company, Bangarra Dance Theatre and many other dance companies. ...Show more

Womerah Lane: Lives and Landscapes by Tom Carment

$39.95 AUD

Category: Australian

One Bright Moon by Andrew Kwong

$35.00 AUD

Category: Australian

   From famine to freedom, how a young boy fled Chairman Mao's China to a new life in Australia Andrew Kwong was only seven when he witnessed his first execution. The grim scene left him sleepless, anxious and doubtful about his fervour as a revolutionary in Mao's New China. Yet he knew if he devoted himself to the Party and its Chairman he would be saved. That's what his teacher told him. Months later, it was his own father on trial. This time the sentence was banishment to a re-education camp, not death. It left the family tainted, despised, and with few means of survival during the terrible years of persecution and famine known as the Great Leap Forward. Even after his father returned, things remained desperate. Escape seemed the only solution, and it would be twelve-year-old Andrew who undertook the perilous journey first. This is the poignant, resonant story of a young boy's awakening - to survival, education, fulfilment, and eventually to a new life of freedom. ...Show more

Merle Thornton: Bringing the Fight by Merle Thornton

$30.00 AUD

Category: Australian

   An engaging, lively, provocative and, above all, inspiring memoir from one of our home-grown, unsung feminist heroes, Merle Thornton, who has lived a life full of daring, defiance and activism.  Merle Thornton is one of Australia's most delightful, formidable and game-changing pioneer ing feminists - a woman who through her daring and defiance helped bring about positive change for generations of Australian women. In her most audacious act, in 1965 she chained herself to the bar at the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane to protest against the law that excluded women from public bars in Queensland, bringing about the end of segregated drinking in that state. The bar in the hotel is now called 'Merle's Bar.' But that's just one achievement, in a life full and rich in defiance, daring and determination. Warm, funny, rollicking - this is a memoir that is powerfully relevant to all women now.  ...Show more

Life in a Box - Traveller. Antiques Dealer. Mother. Model. Iconoclast by Sarah Jane Adams

$40.00 AUD

Category: Australian

The wonderfully compelling and unorthodox memoir of 63-year old international model and iconoclast, @mywrinklesaremystripes' Sarah Jane Adams. Auction catalogues can reveal a lot about a person: their life, their loves and their style. Antique jewellery dealer Sarah Jane Adams became an international mo del and overnight Instagram sensation in her sixties. She tells her story through a lifetime's collection of rare pieces and worthless objects, as well as personal photographs and effects from her 'estate'. Told with wit, pathos and charm. Life In A Box illustrates the deeply personal connection that we have with our belongings: they are laden with rich meaning and adventure and, above all, redolent of our stories. ...Show more

Daddy Cool: Finding My Father, the Singer Who Swapped Hollywood Fame for Home in Australia by Darleen Bungey

$33.00 AUD

Category: Australian

A captivating, generous and exquisitely written memoir of family and a daughter discovering her father's multi-layered life. 'Every family has secrets. Ours also has an award-winning biographer. My sister's discoveries astonished me.' Geraldine Brooks Who can ever truly know their parents? He was a glamorous heart-throb, a famous American singer performing in front of Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable and other stars at the Academy Awards. In the 1930s, his recording of 'Hawaiian Paradise' outsold those of Bing Crosby and Guy Lombardo. So how did he become an Australian infantryman, fighting alongside and performing for his fellow Diggers in Palestine, Beirut, Egypt and New Guinea? Why did he leave Hollywood and the ritziest hotels in America for a modest Californian bungalow in suburban Sydney? And what caused him to cease his endless drifting from one woman to another, one marriage to another, and settle with the love of his life?  She was a strong Aussie woman, a talented radio broadcaster and publicity agent. Why did she take a chance on this reckless vagabond and notorious womaniser? Seeking answers, Darleen Bungey turns her biographical skills on her own family, exploring her father's multi-layered and at times tempestuous life with a truthful eye and loving heart. 'This memoir does maximum honour to the idea that each family is its own unique story. And in the case of Darleen Bungey, the tale she tells of Robert Cutter/ Lawrence Brooks, her father, is a charming and engrossing record of an exuberant, gifted, contradictory and brave man whose nationality was as varied as his gifts and who kept his daughters enriched and fascinated to the end. In an era of catastrophic family confessions, it reads like silk.' Tom Keneally 'This is something beautiful. Bungey's writing is as spellbinding and wondrous as the subject she has so bravely, forensically, gracefully explored. Further evidence that the most interesting people in our worlds were always waiting outside our bedroom doors.' Trent Dalton 'A daughter's tender tribute uncovers her father's past life of Hollywood glamour and scandal, reminding us that our parents had other lives, loves and secrets before we came along.' Caroline Baum 'A family story, beautifully told, of an American singer who turned his back on fame to live the life he needed in the suburbs of Australia. Daddy Cool is unexpected, sweet and raw.' David Marr ...Show more