AustLit

'Dame Nellie Melba is, arguably, the most famous of all Australian women and her portrait graces Australia's highest denomination banknote. Blessed with an exceptionally fine voice, Melba forged a spectacular career for herself in the rarified world of grand opera and was acknowledged as a 'Queen of Song'. Triumph after triumph crowned her 44-year-long career and her admirers included numerous famous composers and the monarchs of many countries. Melba also provided a role model for other Australians who followed in her footsteps onto the stages of the world's great opera houses. Melba's private life was almost as colourful as the plots of the operas in which she sang. A turbulent marriage that ended in acrimonious divorce, custody battles, a doomed love affair with a member of the French royal family, health problems and a press campaign of criticism about her character taxed Melba's stamina and her courage.' (Publication summary)

'Stories in history habitually relate the deeds of men but less frequently speak of the equally important contribution of women. When Irish immigrants began arriving in the new colonies of Australia and New Zealand they energetically contributed to the development of a new culture. This was especially true in the area of social progress.

'Irish Women in the Antipodes: Foregrounded is a collection of Irish women's contributions to life in the Antipodes, stories that have been neglected or insufficiently acknowledged. The contributors have used all available tools to find these women in the archives, public records, newspapers, and family histories, taking them from the proverbial footnotes of history to the foreground.

'The first seven chapters focus on Irish women in South Australia, an under-researched group among the Irish diaspora regardless of gender, and while there are new accounts of women that readers may know of such as Mary Lee and Bee Walshe, this volume introduces us to many more of these pioneering women whose hidden lives have now been brought to the fore.' (Publication summary)

'From its earliest years, South Australia was the most German of the Australian colonies.

'As they contributed to the founding and consolidation of a British colony, Germans observed the processes of dispossession and subjugation that changed the lives of First Nations peoples around them forever. More than that, they participated in those profound and tragic changes. Importantly, German settlers and visitors left behind records of the events they witnessed.

'This volume collects those precious records and makes them available - most for the first time in English - to a modern Australian readership. It charts the course of German-Australian encounters from first contacts, through the ruptures and violence of a relentlessly expanding European presence and into the twentieth century. As it documents the astounding cultural wealth and complexity of Indigenous peoples under siege, it also lays bare the grim logic of the forces driving their world towards destruction.' (Publication summary)

'From 'Big Shot' to 'Swindler'. From 'palatial two-storey Kensington Park home' to 'the cold cells of Adelaide Gaol'. Racier newspapers gloated when Harry Hodgetts was convicted of fraud and false pretences in September 1945.

'Hodgetts was Adelaide's leading stockbroker, with 4000 clients, including a governor and governor-general. He gave outstanding service to lacrosse and cricket, educational institutions and the Royal Institute for the Blind but he is best remembered as the man who struck a deal to have the young Don Bradman move to Adelaide, play cricket for South Australia and work part-time in his office.

'How did things go so wrong for Hodgetts? With his wealth of historical knowledge, John Davis has written the complex and riveting story of this hard-working, gifted social climber, his fall into bankruptcy and a prison cell, and the scandal that haunted Bradman's reputation.'

'Wilf Healy lives in the wheatbelt town of Selwyn, works in Monk's Irish pub, delivers letters, drives the school bus, holds the place together. But he's had enough, wants to retire - to forget his nephew Connor, at war with the world, his brother Brian, visiting from America, his niece Orla, sick with blood cancer. Although he plans, and tries, he can't leave. Something is holding him back.

'As the young people flee, the old people die, the drugs arrive in Selwyn, Wilf has to decide what's important. Shining Like the Sun is about the value of promises, of words and actions that might save a failing community. In the process, Wilf learns there's no such thing as retirement.' (Publication summary)

'Like rocks, we are shaped by forces over time. Despite being eroded, fractured, immersed, put under pressure - The Rocks Remain. Always was, always will be.

'Through poetry and prose, twenty-five Aboriginal writers share narratives that embody: strength of family and community; love found and lost; enduring relationships with the Land and nonhuman others; honouring Elders and Ancestors; expressions of place and belonging; asserting sovereignty; talking back to the colony; and envisioning Blak futures. Voices of new and emerging writers are intertwined with writers of renown, with a strong representation of writers with connections to South Australia. This collection is both timeless and timely.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'But there I stand, with one hand resting on his shoulder, and I wonder what I was feeling in that moment. Why did I place my hand there? Was it for comfort, for reassurance, or to show that he was mine?

'Emma Werner, now an old woman, is domineering, cold and difficult to love. But she has not always been so. What happened to Magdalena Johanna Emma Scholz, the bright young woman she once was? And why does she still take flowers to the grave of her first love?

'Emma turns to the journals she has kept for sixty years to rediscover her old self, and to reclaim her future. They reveal the story of a survivor: a woman who suffered but never wavered, whose strength of will and self-belief helped her endure and make a life for herself and her family in a small town in the Riverina.' (Publication summary)

(Publication summary)

'On Luck Street builds on The Elsewhere Variations, Nearly Lunch, and Waldo's Game - taking the reader around the corner, and around the world. From a small circus in Nepal, to a florist in New York, and the streets of Coogee and Fitzroy.

'Connivers, chancers, charmers - those trapped and those who would break free. To what extent do any of us trust our luck?'(Publication summary)

'Waldo's Game extends the reach of The Elsewhere Variations and Nearly Lunch - going around the corner, and around the world. From supermarket aisle to art gallery - from nocturnal shiftiness in industrial zones to dawn reckonings ... in bedrooms, on wild coastlines.

'The world as it looks to other people, not all of them looking at the same thing. What are they at? What is their game?' (Publication summary)

'Mood is a memoir that perfectly suits our times, and our collective journey to understand how we are shaped by our identities. It is a testament to hard-won growth through self-knowledge.

'Roz Bellamy is a first-generation Jewish Australian who identifies as non-binary. They met their wife, Rachel, as a university student, as the pair made their first tentative forays into queer culture - and fell in love - through a Buffy the Vampire Slayer online message board. As a young teacher, Roz's longstanding anxiety intensified, as past trauma of being bullied in their own schooldays and the creeping toll of antisemitism in the classroom undermined their burning desire to be the 'perfect' teacher.

'Therapy to treat their distress became a deeper inquiry. As Roz began to investigate and unfurl the various strands of their identity, and how they intersect to make them who they are, they were handed more pieces of the puzzle.

'Mood is a story about love, family and self-fulfilment, while living with mental illness. It's also a candid, absorbing inquiry into the self, and the rewards of embracing who you are, in all its complexity and contradictions. Even - especially - when it's hard.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Is it possible to break the cycle of failures in one's love life? Toby Hill, a bachelor for many years, finds himself startled out of his withdrawal from social life by a chance meeting. What happens when a chance encounter - a black swan - arrives in Toby's reclusive life?

'Why did Viv want him to come to her home for the review of the grant application instead of her office? Why was he silly enough to agree to this?

'Following in his father's footsteps, searching the world for his next adventure, learning about food, wine and love, Toby realises that what he thought was unconditional love was more to do with youthful lust. He has to admit that journeying with a female companion has its drawbacks.

'Da Capo is a coming of age story as Toby steps into the unknown, trying to understand life's complexities and betrayals in his search for fulfilment, love and commitment.' (Publication summary)

'A young man from the working-class suburb of Fitzroy was on the cusp of a brilliant career and was the talk of the Academy's salons. Far from his humble origins, he now stood shoulder to shoulder with the leading figures of London's art world.

'Max Martin was an enigmatic achiever who stood briefly on the mountaintop but died in obscurity. It was over thirty years after his death before a painting of his was acquired by a public collection. The National Gallery of Victoria, Newcastle City Gallery in New South Wales and the art collection of the State Library of Victoria now all hold his work.

'What made him turn his back on painting at the height of critical acclaim? How close was he to a career in mainstream ballet and what drove him to march for disarmament in his later years?' (Publication summary)

'In Witnesses, Valerie Volk takes us behind the scenes for a fresh look at some of the great moments in biblical history. These sixteen compelling stories are told by those on the sidelines: Saul's armourbearer, Noah's daughter-in-law, frightened of water and about to board the Ark, a man who cut a hole in the roof of a house to lower his paralysed brother to Jesus, David's daughter Tamar, sexually assaulted by her brother ... witnesses at the edges of significant and familiar stories.

'The characters in Witnesses tell their own tales, but they are also observers of important events. Their stories will change the way you understand the Bible, and have implications for modern lives.' (Publication summary)

'December, 1963: widowed café owner Stella Madigan, with her two young children Fran and Theo, and the free-spirited artist Mardi Rose, embark on a road trip to Byron Bay. But a night spent in the tiny outback town of Temperance will alter all their lives, and ignite a chain of events the children will struggle to both conceal and resolve, long into adulthood.

'Temperance explores the discrepancies between what children see and what adults allow them to believe. Its mystery unravels against a background of early 1960s Australia, where religious wars are fought in suburban living rooms, and feminism has made so little headway that a relationship between two women can be seen as perverse, even dangerous.

'This haunting novel vividly inhabits its suburban beachside setting, while sensitively exploring through its characters the corrosive effects of ambiguous loss, and of tightly held family secrets.' (Publication summary)

'Josiah Symon arrived in South Australia from Scotland in 1866 just before his 20th birthday. His baggage included two boxes of books, references praising his primary school teaching and a few English pounds. In 1934 he left an estate valued in modern terms at $22 million.

'Symon acquired his wealth as the acknowledged leader of the Adelaide Bar for 30 years, by investments in shares and property in London and Australia, and through his highly regarded vineyard and winery.

'Knighted for contributions to the federal cause, Symon served in the House of Assembly (1881-1887) and in the Australian Senate (1901-1913) and was, briefly, both a State and a Commonwealth Attorney-General.

'He headed a large family, owned an estate and working farm and was also a philanthropist, a bibliophile, Shakespearean scholar, president of cultural societies and a sought-after public speaker.

'His contemporaries knew him as a major figure, but he is now mainly remembered, if at all, as a reactionary and a master of vituperation. To restore balance requires recognition that this largely self-made Scot, composed of many allegiances and contradictions, took principled stands which placed him ahead, alongside and behind his times.' (Publication summary) 

'Hali Greengard thinks she's a freak. She's a twin from Hexa, a planet where twins are always Daka together. Except for her. She is Luma.

'When the navigation system on her family's interplanetary cruiser goes haywire, an ordinary family holiday turns into a nightmare. They are hurtled through space with no known destination, finally dropping into orbit six days later around a small, unlisted planet in the Milky Way called Earth.

'The family is welcomed by two of Earth's inhabitants, who call themselves Humans but bear a striking resemblance to Lumas. Hali finds herself strangely comfortable in this unfamiliar world, where her Daka brother stands out like a sore thumb, not her. Soon they discover that space travel is banned on Earth, and they are, in fact, fugitives from the law. Things go from bad to worse when they're spotted by the nosy kids from the farm next door, who report them to their mother, the local cop.

'With their new friends languishing in jail and an all points alert out on the 'dangerous aliens' (as the Earth authorities have dubbed them), Hali and her family must work quickly to save Liam and Jodi. Along the way they discover that Lumas and Humans might have more in common than they thought.

'This fast-paced intergalactic adventure is a story of family, friendship, and discovering who you really are.' (Publication summary)