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I’m a Wathaurong man. I’m an artist who draws on life in this big red and yellow and black country. Stan “Yarra” Yarramunua: artist, musician, actor, social worker, businessman. From growing up in poverty in Swan Hill – and sometimes on the road, with his itinerant father – Yarra had a tumultuous and often rough childhood. He learnt early how to lift a wallet or two, and grew into a ratbag who looked set to follow in his father’s footsteps: fall into one too many skirmishes with the law; have one too many drinks, sliding down the path to alcoholism. Yet after years of addiction, Stan gave up drinking, discovered painting and found his true name of Yarramunua. Soon he was sellin...
Tells of five young Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents, brought up in a repressive children's home and trained for domestic service and other menial jobs. This tender and moving story goes further than any previous account to bring the tragic human story of the Stolen Generations to the Australian stage.
A ferocious novel, Caged Warrior is like a great fight movie, a tour-de-force of relentless conflict, but one that is leavened with rich characters and meaningful and loving relationships. McCutcheon Daniels' life is full of bone-cracking violence. As a star fighter in the gritty underground Mixed Martial Arts circuit in the poorest section of Detroit, McCutcheon fights under the tutelage of his volatile and violent father, not so much for himself but to survive as protector of his beloved five-year old sister, Gemma. As McCutcheon battles opponents who are literally trying to kill him, he struggles to find a way to protect her and himself. Along the way, he decides to trust a teacher who has taken an interest in him and begins to redirect the path his life is taking. Until he discovers the truth about his mother who seemingly disappeared on his thirteenth birthday.
My revenge on Hitler is a lifetime in which delight has reached me from a hundred sources, and been welcomed.' - Vera Wasowski. A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life. Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her family into the Lvov Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure her and Vera's survival. With unsparing honesty and the blackest humour, she recalls a world where the desire to survive was everything. After the war, Vera studied journalism at Warsaw University, throwing herself into the bohemian scene. In 1958, she migrated to Australia with her husband and young son, to escape rising anti - Semitism. Here she would carve out an adventurous career as an ABC TV researcher and producer on pioneering programs such as This Day Tonight. It was a wild time for politics and the media, and Vera was at the centre of it all, mixing with the Hawkes in the 1980s, and forming a close friendship with artist Mirka Mora. In Vera, acclaimed biographer Robert Hillman has captured the fierce and passionate life of an amazing Australian.
A funny and beautifully written travel memoir about the charmed life of an innocent. Robert Hillman, 16, lives a Walter Mittyesque existence in rural Victoria, Australia. Disliked by his stepmother and misunderstood by his father, Bobby is bored and lonely. He fantasizes about finding an island paradise in the Indian Ocean inhabited by half-naked women. Inspired by his impossible dream, Bobby sets sail for Ceylon dressed in his best suit, carrying a cardboard suitcase full of books and a typewriter. He has no money, no return ticket and, seemingly, no concerns for his future. Dropping anchor not in Ceylon but Athens, he barters his way through Istanbul, Tehran and Kuwait, lurching from slums to brothels to an implausible job at a hotel in Pakistan and even a fleeting jail term.
Here is an unusual and beautifully written Australian memoir destined to become a classic that captures the vulnerability and ardour of youth, and the fragility and strength of parental love. It is 1965. Robert Hillman, a mere 16 years old, is planning an extraordinary adventure. Deserted by his mother, disliked by his stepmother, and puzzled by his father, Bobby needs comforting. His life in rural Victoria has offered no solace; his job at Melbourne’s Myer Emporium, selling ladies’ slippers, offers no prospects. So he does what any confused and lonely teenager would do: he escapes. Boarding a ship bound for Ceylon, he begins his search for paradise, inspired by his father’s stories of...
· · THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER · · _______________________________ I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man. Now I am the woman who is going to catch him... You've just read the opening pages of The Nothing Man, the true crime memoir Eve Black has written about her obsessive search for the man who killed her family nearly two decades ago. Supermarket security guard Jim Doyle is reading it too, and with each turn of the page his rage grows. Because Jim was - is - the Nothing Man. The more Jim reads, the more he realises how dangerously close Eve is getting to the truth. He knows she won't give up until she finds him. He has no choice but to stop her first...
“Poignant, provocative, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, Pung’s rollicking tale of two worlds is not to be missed.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) After Alice Pung’s family fled to Australia from the killing fields of Cambodia, her father chose Alice as her name because he thought their new country was a Wonderland. In this lyrical, bittersweet debut memoir—already an award-winning bestseller when it was published in Australia—Alice grows up straddling two worlds, East and West, her insular family and the Australia outside. With wisdom beyond her years and a keen eye for comedy in everyday life, she writes of the trials of assimilation and cultural misunderstanding, and of the tender but fraught relationships between three generations of women trying to live the Australian dream without losing themselves. Unpolished Gem is a moving, vivid journey about identity and the ultimate search for acceptance and healing, delivered by a writer possessed of rare empathy, penetrating insight, and undeniable narrative gifts.
This moving and poignant work gives the reader a rare insight into the contented ‘milk and honey’ life of a simple Afghan family before the civil war ripped their country apart. The lives and centuries-old livelihood of farmers, craftsmen and small business owners were destroyed in just weeks and months. As a member of the Hazara tribe, hated and targeted by the Taliban, Najaf was forced to flee the brutal attacks on his people when the Northern Alliance fell to the advancing Taliban insurgents. His flight to Pakistan, from there to Indonesia, then by boat to Australia, ends with incarceration in Woomera, where the story begins. From the compelling opening sentence to the beautiful final chapter, Najaf’s integrity, his extraordinary optimism and his generosity of spirit will win the hearts and minds of all readers.