What does a black hole eat for supper? Why does toast always land butter-side down? And can a wombat really do square poo?Silly Rhymes for Smart Kids is a treasury of 101 read-aloud poems for curious children and the grown-ups who read to them. Here you'll meet Mister Goff, who sneezes his roof off; a dragon stuck in the dustbin; Algernon Atom, who has lost an electron and is feeling very positive about it; Barry the Black Hole, who gobbles comets like spaghetti; and Great-Uncle Si...

It is the summer holidays in Safety Bay, and Barry Carter has a credibility problem. Lying on his verandah at eleven forty-two on a hot January night, he watches a green light blink twice, pause, and blink twice again from Penguin Island — which has been closed since the last ferry came home at four. Nobody believes him. Barry mistook a wheelie bin named Bruce for a shark. He has no credibility.But Rose believes him. And Rose recruits Annie, who already has a notebook. The notebook...

The annual Classics Dinner is in full swing. Professor Hadley MacNamara — formidable, silver-haired, sixty-five, the kind of man rooms arrange themselves around — is holding court on the veranda of the Scholar's Table above the Swan. His toast is is genuinely brilliant. It moves from Homer to the geography of joy, and the room gives him exactly the silence he deserves.Then, after the silence, something is different.He begins a sentence he does not finish. He reaches for a c...

Alice is sure there must be magic somewhere in the Ash Grove. As evening settles over the forest, she sets out to find it.At first, the familiar woodland offers only ordinary wonders: a rabbit vanishing into the ferns, a Tawny Frogmouth blinking among the branches, moonlight touching the trees. Beautiful, perhaps-but not the magic Alice imagined.Then the last golden light fades. Beside a mossy log, Alice sees a tiny glow shining in the dark. It looks like a fallen star rest...

In Grandma's herb garden, Alice notices a flash of green and gold beneath a stem. It is a chrysalis, and inside it a butterfly is slowly becoming. Alice is enchanted. She sits beside it, waits, checks again and asks whether it might hurry, just a little.But becoming cannot be rushed.As wind gathers and rain approaches, Alice longs to keep the chrysalis safe. With Grandma patiently close by, she watches for each tiny change: a dark line, a tremble, the first careful movement...

A lyrical nature picture book with a soft moral center. A wisdom book for bright young minds. The forest magic is atmospheric and character-led, so the hook is emotional rather than plot-heavy: a child learns to listen with her heart and acts kindly when she hears distress. It is a- Read-aloud bedtime picture book.- Nature-and-kindness story for home and classroom.- Gentle emotional literacy title.- Forest or woodland themed gift bookIn the quiet of ...

Something is moaning on the headland at Point Peron — and whatever it is, it empties a school camp in under an hour.Barry Carter is fourteen, constitutionally unable to lie to his mother, and — as the framed commendation on the HQ wall attests — President of the Safety Bay Six. When Year Nine camp ends two days early after an unearthly sound drives twenty-six boys and two teachers from their bunks, Barry knows, with the reluctant certainty of a boy who has been right about this sor...

When the prestigious Italian Bellini Foundation arrives at the Swan River Festival of Voices with a previously unknown Vivaldi manuscript, Dr Alex Moreton notices three things before the opening reception is half over.The provenance chain leads from a Swiss estate sale, through a Zurich auction house, through eighteen months of preliminary authentication in Rome, and arrives in Perth wearing the imprimatur of the Bellini FoundationBy the following morning, the manuscript wa...

A man was trapped in impossible conditions. Another man went into the darkness to save him, again and again. A community kept vigil. Hope survived when logic said it shouldn't. And ordinary people rose to meet extraordinary circumstances with courage that still resonates more than a century later.

Sixty-one years, three brass plaques, and a locked biscuit tin nobody has ever seen opened — that's the Bay Fryer's whole reputation, gone from a cool room that was locked the entire time. No broken window. No forced door. Just a tin-shaped nothing on a shelf, and a landlord's lease letter sitting on the spike like a clock starting.The Safety Bay Six follow the only clues going: a salt-dried footprint two sizes too small for any grown suspect, a sleeve of stolen drone footage, and ...

The Scholar's Table was closed. This was not a thing Alex had ever seen before. This was different. The police tape was a fact. The officer posted outside the staff entrance was a fact. The absence of sound from a building that was almost never silent in daylight hours — no espresso machine, no delivery rattle, no voices from the kitchen — was a fact she found she hadn't prepared for. Marco was being held as a murder suspect - the body was on his premises. The knife was his. Yesterday the ...

On a January morning in Perth, a woman is recovered from the Swan River. She was the university's chief archivist — precise, stubborn, entirely without sentiment about what an archive was for. She knew where every document was.There is a note at her house. A single page. Handwritten.It says: I cannot undo what was done.It doesn't say what was done or what gets buried, and what survives the burying, and what it costs the people who decide that something buri...