What was behind the wall and the wire? The local people knew . . . fine courtyards . . . an old swimming pool . . . dilapidated tennis courts and a remnant garden, now wild and sprawling. The Abbotsford Convent was this haunted place, left to languish for years after the last of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd had gone. In its prime it had been a school, a refuge, a retreat, a workhouse and a prison-the single largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere. In...

What does successful public policy look like, and how has it been achieved in Australia? What strategies are needed to overcome petty partisanship and narrow self-interest? And who gets to decide what a 'better Australia' even looks like? In A Better Australia John Brumby, Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells examine policy design, implementation and reform, and show what can be achieved when engagement is sincere and intent clear. Leading policymakers and political insiders - Julia Gi...

In the 1980s and 90s, amid an explosion in international money flows, a handful of people saw a new financial future and staked claims in it, triggering a battle to control the world's money markets. With phenomenal profits at stake, the conflict would go all the way to the United States Supreme Court, in a case that involved not just the largest Wall Street banks against each other, but also the tech behemoths of Silicon Valley. The extraordinary story of Alice Corporation, a company crea...

Richard Lane was one of three brothers who founded Penguin Books in 1935.But like all great stories, his life didn’t start there.After sailing to Adelaide in 1922, Richard began work as a boy migrant – a farm apprentice living in rural South Australia as part of the ‘Barwell Boys’ scheme.In Australia, he deepened his appreciation for literature, and understood how important it was to make good writing widely accessible.Richard’s diaries – th...

Australia's oldest university press is also one of our best known and most trusted publishers. Founded in 1921 as a bookshop for students at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne University Press was soon publishing important works that contained the best of national scholarship. Landmark MUP books and series include The Australian Dictionary of Biography, Manning Clark's History of Australia, The Encyclopaedia of New Guinea and the journal Meanjin. The...

The remote Kimberley region of Western Australia has a rich history and unique geography. In the 1960s De Beers, the world's largest diamond company, sent gem-hunters to the area but they came away empty-handed. It was a vast region to survey, and they'd overlooked something vital. A few years later, a team of Australian geologists with a tiny budget searched for even tinier mineral clues. Those clues led them to the earth's largest diamond deposit and the world's richest source of rare pi...

With staffs that are collectively larger than the Russian army, the Big Four accounting firms are a keystone in global finance --but do they really provide stability and safety? Leading scholar Ian Gow and award-winning writer (and former KPMG director) Stuart Kells warn that a house of cards may be about to fall.Across the globe, the so-called Big Four accounting and audit firms - Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG - are massively influential. Together, they...

Warm, feisty, and intelligent, the Delany sisters speak their mind in a book that is at once a vital historical record and a moving portrait of two remarkable women who continued to love, laugh, and embrace life after over a hundred years of living side by side.Their sharp memories tell us about the post-Reconstruction South and Booker T. Washington, Harlem’s Golden Age and Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson.Bessie Delany breaks barriers to ...

Why is Australia doubling down on fossil fuels?The world may have committed at Paris to hold back dangerous climate change, but Australia's fossil-fuel giant Woodside is doubling down: it has bold new plans to keep producing gas out to 2070. Support from the major parties is locked in, so something has to give.This is a story of power and influence, pollution and protest. How does one company capture a country? How convincing is Woodside's argument that gas is a necessary...

An irreverent take on the political life and times of Australia's twenty eighth prime minister, detailing a litany of questionable calls, miraculous blunders, and inexplicable mistakes.In August 2013, Australia welcomed Tony Abbott as its new prime minister. This promised to be a marriage between responsible government and a nation tired of the endless drama of the Gillard-Rudd years. But then... Well...Fairfax columnist Andrew P Street details the litany o...

'Endlessly witty, but the wit is underpinned by a tremendous, unembarrassed anger and moral lucidity. A superb guide which will turn any reader into an expert within the space of 200 pages' Jonathan CoeThere's probably a word in German for that feeling you get when you can understand something while it's being explained to you, but lose hold of the explanation as soon as it stops. A lot of writing about the credit crunch has that effect: you can grasp it while it's...

The award-winning biography of one of Australia's best-loved writers ... The author of MY BRILLAINT CAREER had a fascinating career of her own ... Winner of the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature for Non-Fiction 2010'a long-awaited and splendidly breezy blockbuster biography of the indefatigable, self-inventing and campaigning author of My Brilliant Career' Richard Holmes, AUStRALIAN BOOK REVIEW 'to meet Miles Franklin was as invigorating as to ride on a spring morning across th...