The Australia Institute Essential Reading List

The Australia Institute Essential Reading List 2023

As the year draws to a close, the Australia Institute team has compiled a list of our favourite essential reads of 2023.

If you’re an avid reader, remember to join Australia’s Biggest Book Club for monthly webinars, special offers on the latest books and the chance to engage directly with renowned and prize-winning authors.

Non-Fiction

The Future of Free Speech

by Benjamin Walters

This book dives headfirst into the contemporary controversy over the limits of free speech. Changing conceptions of what constitutes legitimate harm coupled with the advent of the internet and social media have provided a challenging environment for defining the boundaries of acceptable speech in our contemporary society. This book argues that these problems emerge due to flaws in our free speech framework, leaving the argument for free speech vulnerable to becoming inverted into a justification for censorship. In response, this book argues for a version of free speech based on a framework of toleration. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Rainer Forst, a new justification for free speech is formulated – reflexive freedom of speech – which aims to overcome past issues and justify free speech in a way that is universal, consistent and just.

Gen F’d? How Young Australians Can Reclaim Their Uncertain Futures

by Alison Pennington

In Gen F’d? economist Alison Pennington shows how the most educated generation in Australia’s history stands to be the first generation worse off than their parents, and gives young people the tools to create the change we need.

Young people today are digital natives, encouraged to market their own uniqueness and success online, amid out-dated advice from parents and politicians: work hard and you’ll get ahead. But Australia’s celebrated ‘fair go’ has disintegrated, with millions of young people stuck on the rat-wheel of insecure work and crammed into share houses paying off boomers’ mortgages.

Against the backdrop of global warming and pandemic, young people have inherited a dysfunctional economy that consumes their futures. Gen F’d? plots a path forward for Australians to reactivate our democracy and create a new economy that provides hope and opportunity for all.

Consent Laid Bare: Sex, Entitlement & the Distortion of Desire

by Chanel Contos

In 2021, Chanel Contos posted on Instagram asking people to share their stories of sexual assault during their schooling years. This post unexpectedly went viral and almost 7000 people sent in testimonies describing behaviour that constitutes rape. Virtually none of these instances were reported, and almost all of them were by people they knew.

How and why is this happening in an era of growing equality? Chanel Contos argues that when it comes to sex, we are still working with an outdated social contract that privileges men’s pleasure at the expense of women’s humanity.

Consent Laid Bare challenges the lingering inequality that reinforces this behaviour. It asks if consent is possible in a world where female sexuality has been hijacked by forces such as porn, patriarchy and male entitlement. It gives girls and women the encouragement to seek sex that is truly enjoyable and equips them with the information they need to properly consent. It asks boys and men to become advocates for sex centered around intimacy rather than fuelled by aggression.

The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It

by Alan Kohler

One of the great mysteries of Australian life is that a land of sweeping plains, with one of the lowest population densities on the planet, has a shortage of land for houses. As a result, Sydney’s median house price is the second most expensive on Earth, after Hong Kong’s.

The escalation in house prices is a pain that has altered Australian society; it has increased inequality and profoundly changed the relationship between generations – between those who have a house and those who don’t. Things went seriously wrong at the start of the twenty-first century, when there was a huge and permanent rise in the price of housing. But what actually happened? And what to do now? As Alan Kohler explains, “the solutions are both complex and simple, difficult and easy: supply must be increased and superfluous demand reduced.”

In this crisp, clarifying and forward-looking essay, Alan Kohler tells the story of how we got into this mess – and how we might get out of it.

“The growth in the value of Australian land has fundamentally changed society, in two ways. First, generations of young Australians are being held back financially by the cost of shelter, especially if they live somewhere near a CBD and especially in Sydney or Melbourne; and second, the way wealth is generated has changed. Education and hard work are no longer the main determinants of how wealthy you are; now it comes down to where you live and what sort of house you inherit from your parents. It means Australia is less of an egalitarian meritocracy.” Alan Kohler, The Great Divide

We need to talk about America: An Alliance in Flux

by Sam Roggeveen, Emma Shortis, Michael J. Green, Dennis Glover, Andrew Carr, Mary-Louise O’Callaghan

The eighteenth issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines Australia’s evolving ties with the United States as the power balance in Asia changes and as Washington continues to face bitter domestic divides.

We Need to Talk about America looks at the future of the alliance in an era in which the US’s global role and stature – which once seemed so constant – are becoming less stable and less certain.

Sam Roggeveen examines whether deeper US military ties and nuclear-powered submarines will leave Australia less safe.
Emma Shortis argues that Canberra has a rare historic opportunity to overhaul the US alliance.
Michael J. Green analyses the US’s evolving approach to Asia and its embrace of regional partners as it seeks to counter Chinese coercion.
Dennis Glover looks at the role of Australia in ensuring the US defends liberal democracy in the face of rising authoritarianism.
Andrew Carr explores the potential for state and local governments to have a greater involvement in Australia’s foreign policy and diplomacy.
Mary-Louise O’Callaghan ponders the achievements and missteps of the Australian-led RAMSI intervention in Solomon Islands.

The New Domino Theory: Does China really want to attack Australia?

by James Curran, Merriden Varrall, Margaret Simons, Yun Jiang, Phil Orchard, Jacqui Baker, Ryan Cropp

This issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines China’s ultimate goals as an emerging superpower, including the extent of its territorial ambitions.

The New Domino Theory looks at Australia’s place in China’s long-term plans and at the threat – if any – that Beijing poses to Australian security, politics and society.

Essays include:

James Curran explores the origins of Australia’s anxiety about China and options for dealing with the threat.
Merriden Varrall looks at whether the conventional wisdom that underpins our China policy is correct.
Margaret Simons tells the inside story of how Labor came to back AUKUS.
Yun Jiang analyses Australia’s approach to addressing foreign interference and its consequences.
Phil Orchard calls for Australia to play a greater role in addressing Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
Jacqui Baker examines the ongoing toll of corruption in Indonesia.
Ryan Cropp assesses Gough Whitlam’s foreign policy.

2023: A Year of Consequence

edited by Justin Bergman

2023 was a year of consequence, at home and across the world.

For Australia, the year was dominated by the Voice to Parliament, shifting security challenges, and the plight of everyday Australians grappling with a housing crisis, inflation and economic uncertainty.

Globally we saw continuing war in Ukraine and deadly new conflict in Israel, ethical considerations of artificial intelligence and devastating reports on climate change.

Working together, The Conversation’s academics and journalists covered these issues and more, providing evidence-based research to help guide policy-makers and everyday Australians to make informed decisions at a pivotal time.

This is a record of their work on the frontlines in this year of consequential decisions.

Contributors include:

Marcia Langton
Frank Bongiorno
Matthew Sussex
Brian Schmidt
Richard Denniss
Emma Beckett
Peter Martin
Kevin Brophy
Carol Lefevre
Sally Young
John Maynard
Emma Shortis
David Lindenmayer
Sandra Phillips
Jim Stanford

Foreword by Michelle Grattan.

Heat: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

The New York Times bestseller: a searing examination of the impact that temperature rise will have on our lives and what we can do to stop it

When heat comes, it’s invisible. It doesn’t bend tree branches or blow hair across your face to let you know it’s arrived… The sun feels like the barrel of a gun pointed at you.

Extreme heat is a first order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis. As the temperature rises, fault lines are revealed in our governments, politics, economy and values.

From award-winning author and Rolling Stone journalist Jeff Goodell, this book is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about the impacts of heat on everything from our food to disease outbreaks, our houses and our jobs.

It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days go from 30°C to 43°C. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event, one that culls the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.

Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling and interviews, Goodell tackles the big questions and uncovers how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

by Anna Funder

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own…

When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it’s a revelation. Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical nous saved his life. But why – and how – was she written out of the story?

Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer – and what it is to be a wife.

Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past.

‘So, she will live writing the letters she did – six to her best friend, and three to her husband. I know where she was when she wrote them. I know that the dishes were frozen in the sink, that she was bleeding, that he was in bed with another woman – and she knew it. . . .I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on set – the wiping of spectacles, the ash on the carpet, a cat pouring itself off her lap.’

Best Australian Political Cartoons 2023

edited by Russ Radcliffe

The year in politics as observed by Australia’s funniest and most perceptive political cartoonists. Featuring Dean Alston, Peter Broelman, Andrew Dyson, John Farmer, First Dog on the Moon, Matt Golding, Fiona Katauskas, Mark Knight, Jon Kudelka, Johannes Leak, Sean Leahy, Alan Moir, David Pope, David Rowe, John Spooner, Andrew Weldon, Cathy Wilcox, and the Australia Institute’s very own Judy Horacek. The three Horacek cartoons featured were all first published by the Australia Institute, so if you’re signed up to our newsletter you were among the first to see three of the best political cartoons of the year, delivered straight to your inbox!

‘In a world of shrinking column space, cartoons are resilient through their economy, relevance and wit… This excellent collection speaks truth through humour, a spoonful of sugar in increasingly bitter times.’ Kurt Johnson, The Saturday Paper

The Queen is Dead

by Stan Grant

‘History is not weighted on the scales, it is felt in our bones. It is worn on our skin. It is scarred in memory.’

The Queen reigned for seventy years. She came to the throne at the height of Empire and died with the world at a tipping point. What comes next after the death of what Stan Grant calls ‘the last white Queen’?

From one of our most respected and award-winning journalists, Stan Grant, The Queen is Dead is a searing, viscerally powerful, emotionally unstoppable, pull-no-punches book on the bitter legacy of colonialism for indigenous people. Taking us on a journey through the world’s fault lines, from the war in Ukraine, the rise of China, the identity wars, the resurgence of white supremacy, and the demand that Black Lives Matter, The Queen is Dead is a full-throated, impassioned argument on the necessity for an end to monarchy in Australia, the need for a Republic, and what needs to be done – through the Voice to Parliament and beyond – to address and redress the pain and sorrow and humiliations of the past.

Momentous and timely, The Queen is Dead carries an urgent, undeniable and righteous demand for justice, for a reckoning, and a just settlement with First Nations people.

Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking

by Tyson Yunkaporta

Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta’s bestselling debut, cast an Indigenous lens on contemporary society. It was, said Melissa Lucashenko, ‘an extraordinary invitation into the world of the Dreaming’.

Right Story, Wrong Story extends Yunkaporta’s explorations of how we can learn from Indigenous thinking. Along the way, he talks to a range of people including liberal economists, memorisation experts, Frisian ecologists, and Elders who are wood carvers, mathematicians and storytellers.

Right Story, Wrong Story describes how our relationship with land is inseparable from how we relate to each other. This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’

And, as he argues, story is at the heart of everything. But what is right or wrong story? This exhilarating book is an attempt to answer that question. Right Story, Wrong Story is a formidably original essay about how we teach and learn, and how we can talk to each other to shape forms of collective thinking that are aligned with land and creation.

Killing for Country: A Family Story

by David Marr

A gripping reckoning with the bloody history of Australia’s frontier wars David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result – a soul-searching Australian history.

This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world – of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country – a war still unresolved in today’s Australia.

‘This book is more than a personal reckoning with Marr’s forebears and their crimes. It is an account of an Australian war fought here in our own country, with names, dates, crimes, body counts and the ghastly, remorseless views of the ‘settlers’. Thank you, David.’ —Marcia Langton

Joe vs Elan School: A True Cult Classic

by Joe Nobody

A graphic webcomic about the abuses of state and institutional power that happened at Elan Schol, a residential modification program in Maine, Unites States.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?

Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us—and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now—and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

The Big Con

by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington

A vital and timely investigation into how the consulting industry has made its way to the heart of our economies and governments – and what to do about it

There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and hollowed-out, risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies’ reliance on companies such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown. The ‘Big Con’ is possible in today’s economies because of the unique power that consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks – as advisors, legitimators and outsourcers – and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. The Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies.

Mazzucato and Collington expertly debunk the myth that consultancies always add value to the economy. With a wealth of original research, they argue brilliantly for investment and collective intelligence within all organizations and communities, and for a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good. We must recalibrate the role of consultants and rebuild economies and governments that are fit for purpose.

Technofeudalism: What killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis explains how capitalism has been usurped by a technologically enhanced form of feudalism.

No one noticed when capitalism died.

Perhaps we were too distracted by the implosion of global finance, or the rise of populism, or the demise of the planet – or all of those cute cats on Instagram. But gradually, quietly, a yet more exploitative new system has taken hold: techno-feudalism.

Written in the form of a letter to his late father, who first taught him about the power of new technologies to shape human history, Yanis Varoufakis explains how Big Tech has effected an invisible but fundamental transformation in all our lives.

Drawing on stories from Greek Myth and pop culture, from Mad Men to Karl Marx, he explains how the key ingredients of capitalism – profit and markets – have both been replaced. And he exposes the hidden connection between your personal data and the transformative power of ‘cloud capital’ which means that without our realising it, we are all working every day for the tech giants, for free.

Against Inequality: A practical and ethical case for abolishing the superrich

by Tom Malleson

Stark inequality is a problem the world over, one that has been worsening over the past 30 years, particularly in rich, economically developed countries. To acquire the same amount of wealth as Elon Musk, the average American worker would have to work for more than four and a half million years.

Is this inequality morally acceptable, and is it feasible to actually reduce inequality in the real world? This book makes the case for rejecting meritocracy, presenting a strong defense against the claim that individuals “deserve” their wealth. The book argues that people, especially rich people, do not morally deserve the bulk of their income because it does not, by and large, come from anything they themselves do but is largely thanks to the vast understructure of other people’s labor, in addition to their lucky possession of bodily talents and efforts.

Furthermore, the book brings to light extensive historical and comparative evidence to show that raising taxes on both income and wealth is practically feasible and that any costs of doing so are far outweighed by the truly enormous benefits that such taxes could bring in terms of environmental sustainability, democratic equality, equal opportunity, and reduced racism and xenophobia.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian

Look at a map of the world and you’ll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalization has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities: tax havens, free ports, city-states, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These new spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation – and with them, ultracapitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether.

Historian Quinn Slobodian follows the most notorious radical libertarians – from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel – around the globe as they search for the perfect home for their free market fantasy. The hunt leads from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the medieval City of London, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled.

Crack-Up Capitalism is a propulsive history of the recent past, and an alarming view of our near future.

A New Australia: Discarding delusions and organising for the wellbeing of all

by Geoff Davies

Australia is ruled by false ideas.

That is why things are not working. That is why our society is disintegrating and the land is degrading.

Neoliberalism has been an economic failure and a social disaster. Our rulers are stuck in colonial mentalities and propelling us towards a catastrophic war. The climate is rapidly worsening.

A New Australia dissects fallacies and signposts a better path: a coherent web of well-based ideas that can benefit everyone, repair society and regenerate the land.

People are innately social. Absent irrational fear, people can get along. Markets and money can be harnessed for good. The world is abundant. …

We can live not just in hope, but in the knowledge we are making the world better.

We, the people, have the power.

A New Australia is not interested in tweaking politics-as-usual: if we don’t know where we need to get to we will never find the ways to get there.

It does not just wish for better values, it presents the evidence that we are much better than our public conversation commonly implies, why we fall so short and how we can cultivate our better angels.

It does not just complain about mainstream economics, it brings rigorous analysis to its discrediting and replacement.

Lifeboat: Disability, Humanity and the NDIS

by Micheline Lee

Caring or careless? In this powerful and moving essay, Micheline Lee tells the story of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a transformative social change that ran into problems. For some users it has been “the only lifeboat in the ocean,” but for others it has meant still more exclusion.

Lee explains what happened, showing that the NDIS, for all its good intentions, has not understood people with disabilities well enough. While government thought the market could do its job, a caring society cannot be outsourced. Lee draws deeply on her own experience, on diverse case studies, as well as insights from moral philosophy and the law. She begins by considering what it is to be disabled. And since to be disabled is part of the human condition, she also considers what it is to be human.

This is an essay about common humanity and effective, lasting social change. “Unless you change how people think about things, you’re not really going to change their actions or responses.”

“How people understand disability transforms how they respond to it. When they saw us as cursed or contaminated, they banished us, euthanised us or left us on the streets to perish. When they saw us as requiring protection, they institutionalised us. When they saw us as defective and in need of a cure, we were hospitalised and medicalised. When they saw us as tragic, they treated us as objects of charity. Now the NDIS has given us a new identity: consumer”—Micheline Lee, Lifeboat

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (published 27 Dec2023)

by Vincent Bevins

From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other point in human history. Why has success been so elusive?

From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, the second decade of the twenty-first century was propelled by explosive mass demonstrations. But few people got what they wanted. In too many cases, the protests led to the opposite of what they asked for.

If We Burn is a stirring work of global history built around that strange but fundamental paradox. Acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins interviewed hundreds of people around the world, and weaves their insights and recollections into a fast-paced, gripping narrative. We follow his own troubling experiences in Brazil, where a protest movement ignited by leftists and anarchists led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.

In the mass protest decade, humanity demonstrated a deep desire for change, and brave individuals started something that has been left unfinished. In this ground-breaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors offer urgent lessons for those who wish to understand geopolitics today, and create a better world tomorrow.

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

by Martin Wolf

A reckoning of how and why the marriage between democracy and capitalism is coming undone all over the world, and what can be done to save it.

We are living in an age when economic failings have shaken faith in global capitalism. Political failings have undermined trust in liberal democracy and in the very notion of truth. The ties that ought to bind open markets to free and fair elections are being strained and rejected, even in democracy’s notional heartlands. Around the world, democratic capitalism, which depends on the determined separation of power from wealth, is in crisis. Some now argue that capitalism is better without democracy; others that democracy is better without capitalism.

This book is a forceful rejoinder to both views. It analyses how the marriage between capitalism and democracy has become so fraught and yet insists that a divorce would be an almost unimaginable calamity. Martin Wolf, one of the wisest public voices on global affairs, argues that for all its recent failings – slowing growth, increasing inequality, widespread popular disillusion – democratic capitalism, though inherently fragile, remains the best system we know for human flourishing. Capitalism and democracy are complementary opposites: they need each other if either is to thrive. Wolf’s superb exploration of their marriage shows us how citizenship and a shared faith in the common good are not romantic slogans but the essential foundation of our economic and political freedom.

Free and Equal

by David Chandler

An uplifting vision of a new, egalitarian liberalism, and a bold practical programme for how we can reinvigorate democracy and transform capitalism.

Imagine: you are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it – rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?

This is the revolutionary thought experiment proposed by the twentieth century’s greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. As economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler argues in this hugely ambitious and exhilarating intervention, it is by rediscovering Rawls that we can find a way out of the escalating crises that are devastating our world today.

Taking Rawls’s humane and egalitarian liberalism as his starting point, Chandler builds a careful and ultimately irresistible case for a progressive agenda that would fundamentally reshape our societies for the better. He shows how we can protect free speech and transcend the culture wars; get money out of politics; and create an economy where everyone has the chance to fulfil their potential, where prosperity is widely shared, and which operates within the limits of our finite planet.

This is a book brimming with hope and possibility – a galvanising alternative to the cynicism that pervades our politics.

The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement, Race, and Gender

by Matthew Sharpe

Challenging widespread misunderstandings, this book shows that central to key enlightenment texts was the practice of estranging taken-for-granted prejudices by adopting the perspective of Others.

The enlightenment’s key progenitors, led by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, were more empiricist than rationalist, and more critical than utopian. Moreover, each was an artful exponent of the ‘proto-postmodernist’ practice of asking Europeans to review what they considered unquestionable through the eyes of Others: Persians, women, Tahitians, Londoners, natives and naïves, the blind, and even imaginary extra-terrestrials. This book aims to show that this self-estrangement, as a means to gain critical distance from one’s taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the enlightenment, and remains vital for critical and constructive sociopolitical thinking today.

The Train family murders

by Sarah Krasnostein

Were last year’s killings in remote Wieambilla, Queensland, the result of a new age of radicalisation?

The Train family murders is an essay by Sarah Krasnostein published in The Monthly this year.

Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled

by Kate Fullagar

Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.

Fullagar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire.

To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.

Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia

by Frank Bongiorno

In this compelling and comprehensive work, renowned historian Frank Bongiorno presents a social and cultural history of Australia’s political life, from pre-settlement Indigenous systems to the present day.

Depicting a wonderful parade of dreamers and schemers, Bongiorno surveys moments of political renewal and sheds fresh light on our democratic life. From local pubs and meeting halls to the parliament and cabinet; from pamphleteers and stump orators to party agents and operatives – this enthralling account looks at the political insiders in the halls of power, as well as the agitators and outsiders who sought to shape the nation from the margins.

A work of political history like no other, Dreamers and Schemers will transform the way you look at Australian politics.

Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand

by Jared Davidson

Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard-labour men guarded by other men with guns. Men moving heavy metal. Men picking at the earth. Over and over again. This was the reality of nineteenth-century New Zealand.

Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand’s urban centres and rural landscapes, and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profound and unsettling ways. Yet these stories are largely unknown: a hidden history in plain sight.

Blood and Dirt explains, for the first time, the making of New Zealand and its Pacific empire through the prism of prison labour. Jared Davidson asks us to look beyond the walls of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons to see penal practice as playing an active, central role in the creation of modern New Zealand. Journeying from the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands through to Milford Sound, vast forest plantations, and on to Parliament itself, this vivid and engaging book will change the way you view New Zealand.

Shattered Nation: Inequality and the geography of a failing state

by Danny Dorling

Britain is broken, but how did it become so divided?

Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer Danny Dowling shows that they are growing further and further apart. Visiting sites across the British Isles and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, he exposes a new geography on inequality. Middle England has been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, and even people doing comparatively well are struggling stay afloat. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Before COVID, life expectancy had dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.

Fifty years ago, the UK led the world in child health; today, twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU countries have better mortality rates for newborns. No other European country has such miserly unemployment benefits; university fees so high; housing so unaffordable; or a government economically so far to the right. In the spirit of the 1942 Beveridge Report, Dorling identifies the five giants of twenty-first-century poverty that need to be conquered: Hunger, Precarity, Waste, Exploitation, and Fear. He offers powerful insights into how they got here and what they must do in order to save Britain from becoming a failed state.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention

by Johann Hari

Is your ability to focus and pay attention in free fall?

You are not alone. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for just three minutes. But it’s not your fault. Your attention didn’t collapse. It has been stolen.

Internationally bestselling author Johann Hari shows twelve deep factors harming our focus. Once we understand them, together, we can take back our minds.

You’ll be a Wonderful Parent: Advice and Encouragement for Rainbow Families of all Kinds

by Jasper Peach

Jasper Peach provides a practical and emotional guide for LGBTIQA+ families around the arrival of a new baby.

Becoming a parent is already a challenging time, even more so if you don’t see yourself reflected in mainstream parenting resources, culture or even language. But alphabet soup families are also in the unique position of being able to intentionally build their own family structure and create an environment of huge love and belonging for their children. This little book holds the reader’s hand through the journeys of both birth and non-birth parents, with advice on everything from to dealing with other’s definitions of your family, to finding the right medical care and communities, and of course making sure that you take a lot of naps before the baby is born.

Beautifully illustrated by Quince Frances, You’ll Be a Wonderful Parent is unlike any other book on the market in its inclusive and celebratory approach to queer parenting, and there is something for everyone to learn from the values and experiences of rainbow families. Full of warmth and personality, this is the perfect book for new or expecting parents of all descriptions.

Good Life Growing: How to grow fruit and veg anywhere in Australia

by Hannah Moloney

Good Life Growing provides the inspiration and know-how to grow your own fruit and veg in any Australian climate. This bountiful guide from Gardening Australia presenter Hannah Moloney is packed with practical solutions for all conditions and every gardener. Whether you’re getting started with a pot or developing a plot, you’ll find everything you need to hone your skills, fire your imagination and have good, fresh food all year round.

Eventually Everything Connects: Eight Essays on Uncertainty

by Sarah Firth

WTF is going on? How can I find joy in these precarious times? Is my smartphone hijacking me? Why am I so horny? What do I do with this grief? What’s it like being the slug that lives in my bathroom sink?

Eventually Everything Connects is Sarah Firth’s debut graphic novel, a collection of interconnected visual essays created over eight years. Sarah invites you into her wild mind as she explores ways to see with fresh eyes, to face the inevitability of change, and to find freedom in sensuality.

With raw honesty and vulnerability, Firth reminds us that the profane and the sacred, the tender and the cruel, the rigorous and the silly, all coexist in dynamic tension. This book is a delicious mix of daily life, science, philosophy and irreverent humour that is comforting, confronting and mind-expanding in equal measure.

Wear Next: Fashioning the Future

by Clare Press

What will you be wearing tomorrow? Will your jacket have been grown in a lab, or your jeans coloured using bacteria? Will we still have shops? What does the future of work look like for the people who make our garments?

The current fashion system is wasteful, environmentally harmful and exploitative. And, if we carry on as we do now, it could account for a quarter of global emissions by 2050. But creative thinkers are dreaming up new ways to craft our sartorial identities that don’t wreck the planet.

Vogue‘s first sustainability editor, Clare Press, introduces us to the fascinating innovators who are redesigning fashion from the ground up and changing it in the most fundamental ways.

A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods

by Margaret Cook

When floods devastated South East Queensland in 2011, who was to blame? Despite the inherent risk of living on a floodplain, most residents had pinned their hopes on Wivenhoe Dam to protect them, and when it failed to do so, dam operators were blamed for the scale of the catastrophic events that followed.

A River with a City Problem is a compelling history of floods in the Brisbane River catchment, especially those in 1893, 1974, 2011 and 2022. Extensively researched, it highlights the force of nature, the vagaries of politics and the power of community. With many river cities facing urban development challenges, historian Margaret Cook makes a convincing argument for what must change to prevent further tragedy.

In this updated edition, Cook investigates the 2022 floods to illustrate how no two floods are the same.

Our Fragile Moment

by Michael Mann

In this sweeping work of science and history, the renowned climate scientist and author of The New Climate War shows us the conditions on Earth that allowed humans not only to exist but thrive, and how they are imperilled if we veer off course.

For the vast majority of its 4.54 billion years, Earth has proven it can manage just fine without human beings. Then came the first proto-humans, who emerged just a little more than 2 million years ago — a fleeting moment in geological time. What is it that made this benevolent moment of ours possible? Ironically, it’s the very same thing that now threatens us — climate change.

The drying of the tropics during the Pleistocene period created a niche for early hominids, who could hunt prey as forests gave way to savannahs in the African tropics. The sudden cooling episode known as the ‘Younger Dryas’ 13,000 years ago, which occurred just as Earth was thawing out of the last Ice Age, spurred the development of agriculture in the fertile crescent. The ‘Little Ice Age’ cooling of the 16th–19th centuries led to famines and pestilence for much of Europe, yet it was a boon for the Dutch, who were able to take advantage of stronger winds to shorten their ocean voyages.

The conditions that allowed humans to live on this earth are fragile, incredibly so. Climate variability has at times created new niches that humans or their ancestors could potentially exploit, and challenges that at times have spurred innovation. But there’s a relatively narrow envelope of climate variability within which human civilisation remains viable. And our survival depends on conditions remaining within that range.

In this book, renowned climate scientist Michael Mann arms readers with the knowledge necessary to appreciate the gravity of the unfolding climate crisis, while emboldening them — and others — to act before it truly does become too late.

A Bloody Good Rant: My passions, memories and demons

by Thomas Keneally

Following a lifetime observing Australia and its people, Tom Keneally turns inwards to reflect on what has been important to him.

‘When I was born in 1935 I grew up, despite the Depression and World War II, with a primitive sense of being fortunate… The utopian strain was very strong… if we weren’t to be a better society, if we were simply serfs designed to support a system of privilege, what was the bloody point?’

Thomas Keneally has been observing, reflecting on and writing about Australia and the human condition for well over fifty years. In this deeply personal, passionately drawn and richly tuned collection he draws on a lifetime of engagement with the great issues of our recent history and his own moments of discovery and understanding.

He writes with unbounded joy of being a grandparent, and with intimacy and insight about the prospect of death and the meaning of faith. He is outraged about the treatment of Indigenous Australians and refugees, and argues fiercely against market economics and the cowardice of climate change deniers. And he introduces us to some of the people, both great and small, who have dappled his life.

Beautifully written, erudite and at times slyly funny, A Bloody Good Rant is an invitation to share the deep humanity of a truly great Australian.

Broke: A story about love, when love is all you have

by Sam Drummond

A memoir about downward mobility, disability and the power of hope.

Sam always knew he was starting life on the back foot. When his parents split, Sam, his mother and his brother had to learn to survive in a world not built for single-parent families. Add to that Sam’s diagnosis with a form of dwarfism and the odds seemed stacked against them. As surgeons kept breaking and resetting Sam’s legs in attempts to keep him walking, disability and poverty collided, and it took all the family’s strength not to crumple in the impact.

With each change in circumstance – jobs gained and lost, relationships starting and ending, moving between city and country and from school to school – Sam tried to make sense of the adult decisions that kept shaking his world. Armed with hope, the support of friends and teachers, and the unwavering love of his mum, he began to claw his way to a brighter future.

In Broke, lawyer and disability advocate Sam Drummond weaves a poignant, stirring and deeply compassionate tale of life on the fringes. It’s a story of broken families, broken bodies and a broken system that constantly lets vulnerable Australians down.

My Father and Other Animals: How I Took on the Family Farm

by Sam Vincent

A moving and hilarious fish-out-of-water memoir of a millennial leaving his inner-city life to take over the family farm.

Sam Vincent is a twenty-something writer living in the inner suburbs, scrabbling to make ends meet, when he gets a call from his mother: his father has stuck his hand in a woodchipper, but ‘not to worry – it wasn’t like that scene in Fargo or anything’. When Sam returns to the family farm to help out, his life takes a new and unexpected direction.

Whether castrating calves or buying a bull – or knocking in a hundred fence posts by hand when his dad hides the post-driver – Sam’s farming apprenticeship is an education in grit and shit. But there are victories, too: nurturing a fig orchard to bloom; learning to read the land; joining forces with Indigenous elders to protect a special site. Slowly, Sam finds himself thinking differently about the farm, about his father and about his relationship with both.

By turns affecting, hilarious and utterly surprising, this memoir melds humour and fierce honesty in an unsentimental love letter. It’s about belonging, humility and regeneration – of land, family and culture. What passes from father to son on this unruly patch of earth is more than a livelihood; it is a legacy.

The Villain Edit: A Memoir about reality tv and taking control

by Alisha Aitken-Radburn

A memoir about identity and authenticity in the smoke-and-mirror worlds of politics, reality TV and social media, from Bachelor star Alisha Aitken-Radburn.

When former government staffer Alisha Aitken-Radburn was given a ‘villain edit’ on her first season of The Bachelor, she wasn’t entirely surprised—after all, there are only a handful of character tropes producers can manipulate into storylines. But the backlash on social media was unexpectedly intense, and Alisha found her sense of identity completely rocked by a single comment: ‘You are a bad person’.

Determined to shake the ‘villain’ label, she returned to reality TV screens, and this time, she got a different edit. She was met with praise and empathy, and her portrayal led to a third and final season, where she met the man she would marry.

But along Alisha’s rocky path in the reality TV spotlight, the line between truth and fiction blurred. She cared about other people’s opinions more than her own, and her insatiable quest for external validation saw her outsourcing her decisions and her self-worth to everyone from anonymous forum-lurkers to journalists and politicians.

The Villain Edit charts Alisha’s journey through the smoke-and-mirrors worlds of politics, reality TV and social media. Navigating the secrets, lies and hard truths that are laced through even the most fairytale of endings, it reveals how the perceptions of others can rewrite the story of who we think we are, and how important it is to know when to go off-script and take control of the narrative.

Did I Ever Tell You This? A Memoir

by Sam Neill

In this unexpected memoir, written in a creative burst of just a few months in 2022, Sam Neill tells the story of how he became one of the world’s most celebrated actors, who has worked with everyone from Meryl Streep to Isabel Adjani, from Jeff Goldblum to Sean Connery, from Steven Spielberg to Jane Campion.

By his own account, his career has been a series of unpredictable turns of fortune. Born in 1947 in Northern Ireland, he emigrated to New Zealand at the age of seven. His family settled in Dunedin on the South Island, but young Sam was sent away to boarding school in Christchurch, where he was hopeless at sports and discovered he enjoyed acting.

But how did you become an actor in New Zealand in the 1960 and 1970s where there was no film industry? After university he made documentary films while also appearing in occasional amateur productions of Shakespeare. In 1977 he took the lead in Sleeping Dogs, the first feature made in New Zealand in more than a decade, a project that led to a major role in Gillian Armstrong’s celebrated My Brilliant Career.

And after that Sam Neill found his way, sometimes by accident, into his own brilliant career. He has worked around the world, an actor who has moved effortlessly from blockbuster to art house to TV, from Dr Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park movies to The Piano and Peaky Blinders.

Did I Ever Tell You This? is a joy to read, a marvellous and often very funny book, the work of a natural storyteller who is a superb observer of other people, and who writes with love and warmth about his family. It is also his account of his life outside film, especially in Central Otago where he established Two Paddocks, his vineyard famous for its pinot noir.

The Jaguar

by Sarah Holland-Batt

With electrifying boldness, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief.

Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.

Here, Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising: these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. The Jaguar is an indelible collection by a poet at the height of her powers.

Fiction

At the Foot of the Cherry Tree

by Alli Parker

A stirring story of love and hope, based on the incredible true story of Australia’s first Japanese war bride and a love that changed a nation forever.

Gordon Parker is an eager eighteen-year-old Australian boy desperate to fight for his country, and Nobuko ‘Cherry’ Sakuramoto is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling to survive in Japan in the aftermath of World War II. But when they fall in love, they change the course of history.

When Gordon arrives in Japan, he expects ruthless samurai, angry Japanese men ready to kill Australians at every corner. Instead, he finds Cherry, terrified of ex-enemy soldiers, a survivor of the atomic bomb. Against all the rules and all the odds, they fall in love. But when Gordon discovers the White Australia Policy prevents Cherry coming home with him as his war bride, he does what any 20-year-old soldier would do. He vows to fight. Leaving Cherry alone and pregnant in post-war Japan, Gordon has to convince his family to accept his marriage and wage a desperate campaign against a xenophobic and war-scarred government to allow his wife and children to come home.

A sweeping story spanning seven years and two countries reeling from the aftermath of war, At the Foot of the Cherry Tree is a powerfully moving novel about faith, trust, and the power of a love that alters history – written by Gordon and Cherry’s granddaughter, accomplished scriptwriter, Alli Parker.

Age of Vice

by Deepti Kapoor

This is the age of vice, where pleasure and power are everything, and the family ties that bind can also kill.

New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the kerb, and in the blink of an eye five people are dead. It’s a rich man’s car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Nor can he foresee the dark drama that is about to unfold.

Deftly shifting through time and perspective in contemporary India, Age of Vice is an epic, action-packed story propelled by the seductive wealth, startling corruption, and bloodthirsty violence of the Wadia family-loved by some, loathed by others, feared by all.

In the shadow of lavish estates, extravagant parties, predatory business deals, and calculated political influence, three lives become dangerously intertwined: Ajay is the watchful servant, born into poverty, who rises through the family’s ranks. Sunny is the playboy heir who dreams of outshining his father, whatever the cost. And Neda is the curious journalist caught between morality and desire. Against a sweeping plot fuelled by loss, pleasure, greed, yearning, violence, and revenge, will these characters’ connections become a path to escape, or a trigger of further destruction?

Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption. It is binge-worthy entertainment at its literary best.

Yellow Face

by R. F. Kuang

What’s the harm in a pseudonym? Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

Lola in the Mirror

by Trent Dalton

A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from police and the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat. They’ve found themselves a home inside a van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the edge of the Brisbane River.

The girl has no name because names are dangerous when you’re on the run. But the girl has a dream. A vision of a life as an artist of international acclaim. A life outside the grip of the Brisbane underworld drug queen ‘Lady’ Flora Box. A life of love with the boy who’s waiting for her on the bridge that stretches across a flooding, deadly river. A life beyond the bullet that has her name on it. And now that the storm clouds are rising, there’s only one person who can help make her dreams come true. That person is Lola and she carries all the answers. But to find Lola, the girl with no name must first do one of the hardest things we can ever do. She must look in the mirror.

From international bestselling author Trent Dalton, Lola in the Mirror is a big, moving, blackly funny, violent, heartbreaking and beautiful novel of love, fate, life and death and all the things we see when we look in the mirror: all our past, all our present, and all our possible futures.

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