AustLit

'Richard Flanagan's closing address to the 2011 Melbourne Writers' Festival struck a chord around Australia. This stirring speech has been broadcast nationally on radio and television and published in Quarterly Essay 44.

'At a moment when the ferment of Tahrir Square has spread around the world to unsettle the status quo, Flanagan's provocative ideas resonate with a new mood and a new questioning.

'Above all, Flanagan says, we need to take our compass more from ourselves and less from the powerful if we are to find hope.' (From the publisher's website.)

''I ask a young 200-kilo patient what he snacks on. 'Nothing,' he says. I look him in the eye. Nothing? He nods. I ask him about his chronic skin infections, his diabetes. He tears up: 'I eat hot chips and fried dim sims and drink three bottles of Coke every afternoon. The truth is I'm addicted to eating. I'm addicted.' He punches his thigh.'

'In Fat City, Karen Hitchcock unpicks the idea of obesity as a disease. In a riveting blend of story and analysis, she explores chemistry, psychology and the impulse to excess to explain the West's growing obesity epidemic.' (Publication summary)

''How many Australians born in the 137 years since Truganini's death learnt her legend and scarcely thought deeper about the enormity of the loss she represented, and the history that led to it? Her spirit casts a long shadow over Australian history, but we have nearly all of us found a way to avert our eyes from its meaning.'

'In The War of the Worlds, Noel Pearson considers the most confronting issue of Australian history: the question of genocide, in early Tasmania and elsewhere. With eloquence and passion, he explores the 'emotional convulsions of identification and memory' that he feels on encountering these events. Re-reading Dickens and Darwin, Pearson acknowledges the 'fatal logic' of the colonial project, and seeks to draw out its meaning for Australians today.' (Publication summary)

''As the convoy growled and squeaked to a halt in the dark, angry militiamen and soldiers began to shout and wave at the Australians, demanding they move aside. The Brave Ones' vanguard presented as a B-movie vision of some pirate biker gang from Hell, a rat bastard outfit in black tee-shirts, camouflage pants, long hair and bandanas, with axes in their eyes and guns at the ready.'

'The Brave Ones follows the Indonesian Army's Battalion 745 as it withdrew from East Timor after the 1999 independence vote, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. Birmingham's unflinching account reveals the scorched-earth tactics of the retreating troops, and shows just how close Australia came to armed conflict with Indonesia.' (Publication summary)

'On a Tuesday morning, I make my way to the Gap View Hotel for a drinking session starting at 10 a.m. I'm told this is one of Alice Springs' three notorious 'animal bars' … As I wander around, a Sudanese security guard approaches me, his face concerned. Am I lost? he wants to know.

In a way, I am. I don't want a beer. It's 10 a.m., for Chrissake.'

'In Booze Territory, Anna Krien takes a clear-eyed look at Indigenous binge-drinking – who does it, why, and what it means. She visits bars brimming with morning drinkers and investigates alcoholic after-effects ranging from extreme violence to extraordinarily high rates of cirrhosis of the liver. This is an essay which never fails to see the human dimension of an intractable problem and shine a light on its deep causes. ' (Publication summary)

''Silence was a deeply established tradition. Men used it as a form of self-protection; it saved those who had experienced the horrors of war from the emotional trauma of experiencing it all over again in the telling. And it saved women and children, back home, from the terrible knowledge of what they had seen and walked away from … One result of this was that the men who had actually lived through Gallipoli and the trenches did not write about it.'

'In the century since the Gallipoli landing, Anzac Day has taken on a different tenor for each succeeding generation. Perceptively and evocatively, David Malouf traces the meaning of this 'one day' when Australians stop to reflect on endurance, service and the folly of war. He shows how what was once history has now passed into legend, and how we have found in Anzac Day 'a truly national occasion.'' (Publication summary)

''A big liner, brightly lit, passes us one or two cable-lengths ahead. 'Ow! They are guzzling champagne but cannot see what's in front of them!' grumbles Etienne, who has the helm and puts Prosper back on course. Our wooden boat, which one long wave can carry, is a mere cork in the wake of that ship, which crushes three dozen such waves under her uncaring steel plates. How many hundreds of men does she carry? Up there, people laugh, play, dream, eat and sleep … while we, a few feet above the water, surrounded by dancing lights, keep watch till dawn.'

'One summer, Simon Leys joined the crew of a tuna-fishing boat in Brittany, one of the last boats working under sail. In this exceptionally beautiful and elegiac essay, he evokes the traditions, hardships and dangers of the oldest and finest form of seamanship.' (Publication summary)

''There are few original ideas in politics. In the creation of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was responsible for one.'

'This essay reveals the making of Julian Assange – both his ideas and his world-changing actions. Robert Manne explores Assange's unruly childhood and then his involvement with the revolutionary cypherpunk underground, all the way through to the creation of WikiLeaks. Pulling together the threads of his development, Manne shows how Assange became one of the most influential Australians of our time.' (Publication summary)

''On the last day of 1985, I went home to live in Bunyah, the farming valley I had left some twenty-nine years earlier. My wife and our younger children followed two days later … at last I was going home, to care for my father in his old age and to live in the place from which I'd always felt displaced. What I didn't know was that I was heading home in order to go mad.'

'Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray's frank and courageous account of his struggle with depression. Since this essay first appeared, hosts of readers have drawn insight from his account of the disease, its social effects and its origins in his family's history. Murray describes how patches of daylight now balance out those of darkness in his life.' (Publication summary)

''In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu Sadhu, leaving behind family and wealth to live as a beggar; the pilgrims of Compostela walking away their sins; the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora; the Hajj. What could this ritual journeying be but symbolic, idealised versions of the foraging life? By taking to the road we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.'

'After many thousands of years, the nomads are disappearing, swept away by modernity. Robyn Davidson has spent a good part of her life with nomadic cultures. In this fascinating and moving essay she evokes a vanishing way of life, and notes a paradox: that even as classical nomads are disappearing, hypermobility has become the hallmark of contemporary life. In a time of environmental peril, she argues, the nomadic way with nature still offers valuable lessons. No Fixed Address is part lament, part evocation and part exhilarating speculative journey.' (Publication summary)

''I will continue my work on my land, building a future. It is the only thing that is certain to me now and I want to advance while I can. I am trying to light the fire in our young men and women. We are setting fires to our own lives as we really should, and the flame will burn and intensify – an immense smoke, cloud-like and black, will arise, which will send off a signal and remind people that we, the Gumatj people, are the people of the fire. There are people of the fire around Alice Springs – and I reach out to them, too. We can then burn united, together.'

'Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow is 'no mere essay. It is an existential prayer,' writes Noel Pearson. Galarrwuy Yunupingu tells of his clan and his early life. He recounts his dealings with prime ministers, and how he learnt that nothing is ever what it seems. And behind him, he writes, 'the Yolngu world is always under threat, being swallowed up by whitefellas. This is a weight that is bearing down on me; at night it is like a splinter in my mind.' ' (Publication summary)