Pat and Ruth Beckett have retired from Sydney to the sublime landscape of the far south coast. To their garden, to their books, to their island in the lake. They want no part of the madness of Harbourside Grammar, monstrous celebrity billionaire Buckets Barrington, or the sinister Magnareach Corporation. But the madness wants a part of them. Can great books, small black ducks, perfectly formed compost and proper placement of the apostrophe be enough to defend their paradise?

In the summer of 1936, over just four weeks, it all went wrong – for democracy and for Spain, even for the British royals. Politicians failed, and Hitler was emboldened to plan a new European war, and more. When some army generals sought to overthrow Spain’s elected government, Francisco Franco quickly emerged as their leader; Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supported him with men and materiel; pusillanimous politicians in Britain and the United States, even in France, turned a blind-eye – and the Spanish Civil War was on. Edward VIII took a scandalous holiday cruise with Mrs Simpson, Berlin staged the greatest sporting event of modern times, the alternative Peoples’ Olympiad never came to be, and Barcelona was transformed into a unique workers’ paradise. All this in four weeks. It was an incongruous, at times brilliant, juxtaposition of events.

Famed shoe designer Manolo Blahnik once claimed that Australia in the 1970s was ‘the most creative place in the world’. He was referring to the fashion and art worlds created by the principal characters in this book, first in Melbourne and then in Sydney, in the 1970s-90s. Four friends in particular are at the heart of this book: fashion designers Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson and artists Peter Tully and David McDiarmid.

“[The Australian artist] Percy Leason possessed an extraordinarily inquisitive mind. He was constantly developing new ideas and ways of thinking and eventually he developed a pioneering study in the role of visual perception in art. He was an art philosopher and theorist before his time. In the early 20th century, modernism was challenging to all artists but Leason saw modernism as a threat to the very survival of Art. To counteract the subjective validation of any practice being accepted as Art, he constructed an objective approach. This is the core of his treatise the Theory of Perceptual Art. By using objective criteria, Leason hoped to safeguard the future of art. He was disturbed by the dismissal of the centuries-old accumulated art experience by modernist practices and he sought to put in place a solid theory to maintain art practices for the future.” - from the Preface by Margot Tasca

T. H. Rigby, ‘Harry’ Rigby to many colleagues and friends, was a leading pioneer in Soviet Studies during the Cold War. In this memoir he recounts his career as researcher, teacher, public intellectual and sometime adviser to MI6. He includes fascinating accounts of his time in the British Embassy in Moscow in the 1950s and of his later visits to the USSR, whose leadership labelled him a ‘bourgeois falsifier’, a title he wore with some pride. His story is also of a family and his inauspicious beginnings in a working-class district of Melbourne, his education in the 1930s and 1940s, war service in New Guinea and early interest in political thought. He writes of his beloved wife Norma and their growing family against a background of sweeping change in 20th century Australia.

To take you down to the sea in ships, to go tramping over a thousand hills, to huddle against a man-made cyclone in the jungle scrub of the Lamington Plateau, to go film-making with Charles and Elsa Chauvel - that’s the object of this book. In these pages you will share Elsa’s dramatic years beside her film-producer husband, helping to pioneer a struggling motion picture industry. You will sail with them to lonely Pitcairn Island, where they face hazardous seas to bring back, for the first time, film footage of the hiding place of the Bounty mutineers. You will travel with the dedicated, adventure-loving pair to film in the rugged interior of the Northern Territory. You will listen to the thunder of hooves as they film the unforgettable, world-acclaimed charge of Forty Thousand Horsemen, and you will read of the stars discovered and created by Charles Chauvel: Errol Flynn, Mary Maguire, Chips Rafferty, Peter Finch, Michael Pate, Betty Bryant, Tudawali and Ngarla Kunoth of 'Jedda' fame.

A national hero, Douglas Mawson is famous as an Antarctic explorer who narrowly escaped death on the ice. Many books have been written about him. Artefacts from his expeditions are on public display and Mawson’s Huts at Cape Denison in the Australian Antarctic Territory have been preserved as a heritage site. His exploits are known to us, and yet he is enigmatic and cloaked in controversy. In this book, Emma McEwin, Mawson’s great-granddaughter, reflects on her forebear’s public and private persona. Inspired by letters and portraits and other material traces of his legacy, she writes intimately about his effect on generations of his family and the making and unmaking of myths about him. “What do things tell us about a person? This is the question that set me off in search of my great-grandfather. I knew that there was more I wanted to find out about him, not only as an explorer, but as a husband, father, scientist and academic, and about the lives of those who knew him, in particular, his wife Paquita and his daughters, Pat and Jessica. Fortunately, Mawson was a great hoarder of all kinds of things, from letters to books to scientific specimens, all of which reveal something, either about the kind of person he was or about how he is remembered.”

‘Who is Colnett?’ So asks Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s Far Side of the World. Who indeed. As an adventurous teenager, James Colnett had sailed with Cook in the Resolution. He later became a pioneer in the Pacific sea otter trade, nearly starting a war with Spain in the process. He attempted to force Japan and Korea to admit British trade, and failing that smuggled pelts into China. He conducted a whaling reconnaissance to the Galapagos Islands and transported convicts to New South Wales. One way or another, James Colnett managed to intersperse fighting his country’s enemies in the American and French wars with thirteen years plying the South Seas. Seeing himself as a latter-day Argonaut, he reflected that his working life had been devoted to ‘enlarging the bounds of Navigation and Commerce’. The Pacific gave him ample scope.

In the search for the deeper causes of the ‘War to end all wars’ the reading public has been presented with countless titles by military, diplomatic and intellectual historians. Some of these have, however, been motivated by a desire to show how their authors would have preferred the past events to have been, so as to promote some present-day agenda. This is the fallacy of ‘presentism’. John Moses was trained at the Universities of Munich and Erlangen by professors committed to the Rankean tradition of showing ‘how it actually was’, as far as humanly possible, based on diligent archival research and with the strictest objectivity and emotional detachment. Consequently, both Moses and Overlack have been at pains to identify the essential peculiarity of the Kaiser’s Germany and have focused sharply on the question of how its war planning impinged on Australasia.

This edition of a work of the first of its kind to be published in Australia in 2006 is an updated analysis of what happened to soldiers who suffered psychologically in the First World War. Madness and the Military compellingly revisits this long-ignored aspect of Australian military history and suggests a link with so-called shell shock and moral injury. Hailed by experts as both compassionate and instrumental in opening a whole new field of Australian history, it tries to make sense of that forgotten generation of war veterans. It also effectively challenges a number of long-cherished myths surrounding both the commemoration of that war and the treatment of wartime psychological casualties.

The southern hemisphere is mainly land. So said medieval Europeans, raised on a heady brew of folklore, biblical revelation and geographical theory. It is how they imagined it. So powerful was the hold of this received wisdom that when geographical discoveries, however insignificant, were made in the southern oceans, they were greeted as evidence that the expected continental landmasses, rich and fertile, might at last have been found. This predisposition was mercilessly exploited by writers with a view to propound or a barrow to push. The history of southern maritime exploration is therefore one of frustration, deception and self-deception, a process of eliminating the corners in which something bigger and better might still be hiding. This book tells the story of the inventors who sent the dream abroad and the discoverers who brought the reality home, sometimes in spite of themselves.

Guy Gaunt’s infiltration of America’s leadership changed the course of history. When the Great War began he was the British naval attaché in Washington, beached for recklessness at sea. Taking over a network of disaffected immigrants he thwarted all efforts by the powerful German-American establishment in the United States to stop America from supporting the Allies. The exposure of a sinister German underground showed President Woodrow Wilson that America could not remain neutral. The Foreign Office never forgave him for outclassing its fledgling Secret Service. Toughened by early life in the turbulent Australian goldfields, Guy built a career by playing outside the rules. As well as dodging his way up the ranks of the Royal Navy, he married for money, snatched up a country estate, won a seat in Parliament and faked his disappearance to run off with the wife of the King’s doctor. His half-dozen siblings also made their mark in the world. Stirring accounts of her intrepid solo journeys across West Africa and China made the oldest, Mary, a literary star. The youngest, Lucy, ran Australia’s first university college for women. Cecil became a colonel in a prestigious British regiment. Ernest, an admiral as Guy would also become, led his ships at the Battle of Jutland. Clive was the Crown Prosecutor of Burma, Lancelot a Singapore legal wizard. There was never a family like these Gaunts. The others, however, could not outshine Guy. He was active again - new life, new wife - in World War II. But the Whitehall mandarins took a cruel revenge.

‘Australian history..

Founded as a sovereign Commonwealth in 1901, a dominion in the British Empire, Australia set out immediately to present itself to the world as a nation with a great future. This book relates the untold story of how Australia’s first diplomatic mission was conceived, designed and built. Its international showcase was to be Australia House, a splendid purpose-built building at the Aldwych in the very heart of London, the Imperial capital, and of world trade and prosperity. Commenced in 1913, Australia House was opened in 1918 while the Great War still raged. It is a story of ambitions and achievements – global, imperial, local and personal. ‘This meticulous and engaging study, remarkable for the depth and breadth of its scholarship, shows that the new Federation’s projection of its growing national pride and self-assurance via an imposing stone building was also part of the quest to make of London a city that fully expressed the ambition, achievement and grandeur of empire.’ Frank Bongiorno FRHistS FASSA, Professor of History, Australian National University ‘The story of the building [of Australia House] and the wider context of the Holburn to Strand improvements at Aldwych of which it formed part is here brilliantly told.’ David M. Walker, Dictionary of Scottish Architects

Audrey Donnithorne was born in Sichuan province China of British missionary parents and is an economist and writer who has held academic posts at University College London and at the Australian National University, working mainly on the economy of China. In her long life she has been a sharp-eyed observer of a changing Asia and Western world: of China in the era of the war lords, the Guomindang and the war against Japan, Mao and the post-Maoist resurgence; of Britain at War and in the last days of Empire; Singapore and Malaya soon after the War; Indonesia in the early days of independence; and decolonisation. She observed the Cold War from several angles and has also been an active Catholic laywoman in the Culture Wars of the 20th century in Britain and Australia and in helping the beleaguered Catholics in China. This is her memoir.

Martin Kern has a special sensitivity to fonts, a skill that he uses to solve typographical crimes. When a local printer is found dead in his workshop, his body in the shape of an X, Martin and his co-investigator, journalist Lucy Tan, are drawn into a mystery that is stranger than anything they have encountered before. Someone is leaving typographical clues at the scenes of a series of murders. All the trails lead back to Pieter van Floogstraten, a Dutch design genius who disappeared without trace in the 1970s, and who has since been engaged in a mystical scheme to create the world’s most perfect font, which is concealed in locations around the globe. But is he really the killer, and how are the crimes connected to his secret font? In solving the mystery, Martin and Lucy may have to expose Martin’s hero as a psychopath. The main plot of the novel unfolds in Melbourne, while interleaved chapters set variously in a Tibetan monastery, on the plains of Peru, in London, Naples and Amsterdam, gradually reveal the story of Floogstraten in flashback. Other characters include a noir-style private font investigator, a typographical monk from the Renaissance, a Dutch prog rock group named I Am A Dolphin, and a collective of Italian typo-terrorists. This novel takes the reader into the arcane world of typographers and their typefaces, of symbols, swashes and glyphs, where the difference between a serif and sans serif could mean life and death.