Public speaking can be terrifying. For David Nihill, the idea of standing in front of an audience was scarier than cliff jumping into a thorny pit of spiders and mothers-in-law. Without a parachute or advanced weaponry. Something had to change.In what doesn’t sound like the best plan ever, David decided to overcome his fears by pretending to be an accomplished comedian called "Irish Dave" for one full year, crashing as many comedy clubs, festivals, and shows as possible. One part o...

In September 1945, on a sweltering parade ground at Morotai, Australian troops watch as General Sir Thomas Blamey accepts the surrender of the Japanese Second Army. For Corporal Tom Davis, the ceremony brings neither triumph nor relief. The war has ended-but something within him remains unsettled.Ashes & Sakura is a sweeping work of historical fiction set in the uneasy aftermath of the Second World War. Moving from the battlefields of New Guinea and Borneo to the shattered cities o...

An Attractive Naivety is a historical novel of war, identity, and endurance, set against Australia's first half-century as a nation.At the dawn of the twentieth century, Australia is newly federated - ambitious, proud, and unsure of itself. The novel traces that coming of age through the lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. From plague-stricken Sydney to the battlefield of Palestine, from the Cowra Breakout to the building of the Sydney Harbo...

“What does Nihilism mean?” wrote Friedrich Nietszche. “—That the highest values are losing their value. There is no goal…. There is no Truth, no ‘thing in itself.’ There is no answer to the question: ‘why?’”In 1962, the young Eugene Rose—the future Hieromonk Seraphim—undertook to write a monumental chronicle of the abandonment of Truth in the modern age. Of the hundreds of pages of materials he compiled for this work, only the present essay, on Nihilism, has come down to us in comp...

This is a unique study, contuining the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and using the techniques of phenomenology against the prevailing nihilism of our culture. It expands our understanding of the human potential for spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our gestures and movements. The author argues that a psychological focus on our experience of well-being and pathology as embodied beings contributes significantly to a hi...