Albert Facey's story is the story of Australia. Born in 1894, and first sent to work at the age of eight, Facey lived the rough frontier life of a laborer and farmer and jackaroo, becoming lost and then rescued by Indigenous trackers, then gaining a hard-won literacy, surviving Gallipoli, raising a family through the Depression, losing a son in the Second World War, and meeting his beloved Evelyn with whom he shared nearly sixty years of marriage. Despite enduring unimaginable hardships, F...

A remarkable life, adapted for young readers. Bert Facey's autobiography is a true Australian classic, now accessible to younger audiences.Follow Bert's extraordinary journey through a challenging childhood, hard labor in the outback, and the horrors of World War I. Despite facing poverty, family separation, and the brutalities of war, Bert's unwavering optimism and determination shine through.This simply written story explores themes of resilience, family,...

Born in 1894, Facey lived the rough frontier life of a sheep farmer, survived the gore of Gallipoli, raised a family through the Depression and spent sixty years with his beloved wife, Evelyn. Despite enduring hardships we can barely imagine today, Facey always saw his life as a 'fortunate' one. A true classic of Australian literature, his simply written autobiography is an inspiration. It is the story of a life lived to the full - the extraordinary journey of an ordinary man.

Sunburnt Country is an outstanding selection of autobiographical stories and short fiction about Australia and Australians. From childhood, through adolescence, work and marriage, to old age, these stories provide a lively, at times moving, sometimes funny, glimpse into many aspects of life in Australia.

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At 40, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Leached of all confidence, she spends her days in isolated tedium and her nights in a blur of vodka self-recrimination. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she sees, a shadow drifting up the beach below – a loner called Luther Fox, with danger in his wake.

'It is somewhere close to midnight on the clock when the men who fought the Second World War will still be with us. I have met just a few of them, sometimes goading them to reveal their experiences, at other times being simply a conduit to the river of their memories, sensing, on occasion, a kind of urgency to get it out there, just so these adventures and tragedies not be lost to future enquiring minds.' Michael Veitch has always been a keen historian and aeroplane fanatic. From a young a...

Established after World War I by the Royal Australian Navy, the Coast Watchers were a loose organisation of several hundred European settlers, missionaries, patrol officers and planters living in British and Australian Pacific Island territories whose job it was to observe and report on the enemy. They were mostly all unpaid volunteers whose job it was simply to observe and report on foreign shipping and aeroplane movements.It was never envisaged that the Coast Watchers would do an...

The seventh book in the addictive Woody Creek series from bestselling Australian author Joy Dettman.After many tumultuous years spent grappling with the past, Jenny Hooper might have expected her latter years to be the best of her life, and they are - until tragedy strikes. Left floundering in a house full of memories, not all of them good, Jenny knows a reckoning is in order.But it won't be easy. History is beginning to repeat itself for Jenny's adopted da...

First published in 1941, Eleanor Dark's classic novel of the early settlement of Australia is a story of hardship, cruelty and danger. Above all it is the story of conflict: between the Aborigines and the white settlers. In this dramatic novel, a large cast of characters, historical and fictional, black and white, convict and settler, brings alive those bitter years with moments of tenderness and conciliation amid the brutality and hostility. All the while, behind the veneer of British civ...

Everyone knows the story, or thinks they do. The leg-spinner who rewrote the record books. One of Wisden's five cricketers of the twentieth century. A sporting idol across the globe. A magnet for the tabloids. But the millions of words written and spoken about Shane Warne since his explosive arrival on the Test cricket scene in 1992 have only scratched the surface. The real story has remained untold.In No Spin, Shane sets the record straight. From his extraordinar...

The joyous, charming and utterly irresistible new novel from the author of mega-bestseller The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement VillageAt nearly ninety, retired nature writer Hattie Bloom prefers the company of birds to people, but when a fall lands her in a nursing home she struggles to cope with the loss of independence and privacy. From the confines of her 'room with a view' of the carpark, she dre...

July 1852. It had been six weeks since the 932 passengers and sixty-man crew aboard the clipper Marco Polo had left England bound for Melbourne. They had just crossed the northern latitude of the Roaring Forties, some 350 nautical miles south of the Cape of Good Hope. Suddenly a fearsome Southern Ocean storm charged in from beyond the western horizon and locked Marco Polo in its jaws. In a matter of hours, the moderate seas turned to mountainous breaking combers, accompanied by a howling a...