An updated and extended edition of the bestselling biography of one of the most talented, poised and respected Australian politicians‘What Simons has excavated from the background of this extraordinary Australian should be cause for great pride and celebration.’ —Mandy Sayer, The Weekend AustralianSenator Penny Wong is an extraordinary Australian politician. Resolute, self-possessed and a penetrating thinker on subjects from climate change to forei...

A fascinating portrait of one of Australia’s most influential womenElected to federal parliament aged just twenty-eight, Tanya Plibersek has lived almost half her life in the public eye, and is the longest-serving woman in Australia’s House of Representatives. But how much do we know about what drives her, what she values, and what we can expect from her next?Plibersek was born in Sydney to Slovenian parents, both of whom fled post-war Europe as young adult...

Life lessons from the ground up.Sometimes you reap what you sow. Sometimes you reap what other people sowed. Sometimes you haven't got a clue what you are sowing, and sometimes you just get lucky, or unlucky. All these things are true of life, as of gardening.In this thoughtful and beautifully observed book, journalist and gardening enthusiast Margaret Simons takes readers on a journey through the seasons, through her life, and through the tiny pat...

Kerry Stokes: Self-Made Man is the real, fascinating story behind the rabbits-to-riches ascendancy of one of Australia's most powerful men.Plucked from an orphanage as an infant, Kerry Stokes grew up in the slums and streets of post-Depression Melbourne with his itinerant, adoptive parents. As a boy he trapped, skinned and sold rabbits to make ends meet, and seemed destined to a life of hardship and poverty.Today Stokes is one of Australia's most s...

Award-winning journalist Margaret Simons journeys through the troubled Murray-Darling Basin exploring the politics of water, drought and food.The Murray-Darling Basin is the food bowl of Australia, and it's in trouble. What does this mean for the future - for water and crops, and for the people and towns that depend on it?In Cry Me a River, acclaimed journalist Margaret Simons takes a trip through the Basin, all the way from Queensland to South A...

In the third Quarterly Essay of 2004, Margaret Simons takes a long hard look at Mark Latham, the self-proclaimed "club buster" and the man who would be prime minister. Few doubt Latham's intelligence and ambition, but what will this amount to in government? Simons argues that if Labor is elected, it will not be "business as usual". Rather we can expect a reformist government in the spirit - if not the letter - of Latham's political tutor, Gough Whitlam. It is also likely to be a government...

In The Content Makers Margaret Simons explains the changes taking place in the Australian media. She analyses audiences, our major media organisations, the role of government – and the implications of all of these for our society and our democracy.Her examination leads her to the conclusion that the challenges facing the content providers in the modern world are part of a broader striving, a very old struggle – we might call it the search for meaning. The big media businesses may ...

In this part memoir and part authorised biography, Malcolm Fraser talks about his time in public life.'The great task of statesmanship is to apply past lessons to new situations, to draw correct analogies to understand and act upon present forces, to recognise the need for change.'—Malcolm FraserMalcolm Fraser is one of the most interesting and possibly most misunderstood of Australia's Prime Ministers. In this part memoir and part authorised biography, Fraser at the age of...

In the third Quarterly Essay of 2004, Margaret Simons takes a long hard look at Mark Latham, the self-proclaimed "club buster" and the man who would be prime minister. Few doubt Latham's intelligence and ambition, but what will this amount to in government? Simons argues that if Labor is elected, it will not be "business as usual". Rather we can expect a reformist government in the spirit - if not the letter - of Latham's political tutor, Gough Whitlam. It is also likely to be a government...

Gender scholarship during the last four decades has shown that the exclusion of women's voices and perspectives has diminished academic disciplines in important ways. Traditional scholarship in philosophy is no different. The 'recovery project' in philosophy is engaged in re-discovering the names, lives, texts, and perspectives of women philosophers from the 6th Century BCE to the present. Karen Warren brings together 16 colleagues for a unique, groundbreaking study of Western philosophy w...

How Australia's public broadcaster reinvented itself for the digital ageToday, the ABC offers things that were unimaginable twenty years ago: twenty-four-hour news coverage, an entire app of kids' content, countless podcasts and on-demand TV shows. Before smartphones, broadband and Bluey, all this would have sounded impossible.Going Digital tells the tumultuous story of how the ABC transformed itself for the digital age, revealing the key players and controversia...

In a compelling chronicle of her search to understand Beauvoir's philosophy in The Second Sex, Margaret A. Simons offers a unique perspective on Beauvoir's wide-ranging contribution to twentieth-century thought. She details the discovery of the origins of Beauvoir's existential philosophy in her handwritten diary from 1927; uncovers evidence of the sexist exclusion of Beauvoir from the philosophical canon; reveals evidence that the African-American writer Richard Wright provided B...