AustLit

'Hired young by Keith Murdoch, Michael Cannon made his name as a journalistic roustabout and gifted historian'

'During his first electoral campaign, Daniel Andrews hung a sign in his office containing a timeless political wisdom from Lyndon Baines Johnson: ‘If you do everything, you will win.’ He has continued taking it literally. Australian politics has, it is agreed, few harder workers than Victoria’s premier: he is in the same class as LBJ, who famously said that he seldom thought about politics more than eighteen hours a day.'  (Introduction)

'Dan Christian is one of the world's most sought after cricketers, not only a star for the Sydney Sixers but having been part of teams in premier leagues from India and Pakistan to South Africa and the Caribbean. In The All-Rounder, he takes us on a globe-trotting tour from Karachi to Cardiff, from the billion-dollar Indian Premier League, where he played for Virat Kohli's Royal Challengers Bangalore, to the inaugural season of England's new franchise competition The Hundred, where he led Manchester Originals.

'It was a never-ending summer like no other, shadowed by COVID-19, encased in bio-secure bubbles, in which Dan also reflected on his indigenous heritage and grappled with imminent fatherhood, all the while concentrating on a fast-evolving, high-stakes game in which you're a champion one day, a chump the next.' (Publication summary)

'The true story of an Edwardian cricket murder – the accused was the son of an Ashes hero, the murder weapon a bat, the backdrop a remote sheep station in Queensland that was serving as the dustbin of empire.' (Publication summary) 

'Kim Rubenstein’s biography of Joan Montgomery, the venerable former principal of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), has been thirty years in the making and is the definition of a labour of love. It involves Rubenstein, a distinguished and worldly legal scholar and human rights campaigner, revisiting scenes from her own life. She was a pupil at Montgomery’s PLC. As a first-year law student, she addressed the remarkable public meeting in April 1984 that opposed Montgomery’s defenestration by Presbyterian reactionaries, who were avenging the formation of the Uniting Church seven years earlier by asserting control over the school. Rubenstein’s subsequent career has been that of a distinguished old girl following the tenets of a liberal education.'  (Introduction)

'H. V. ‘Doc’ Evatt has long been obscured by Menzies’s broad shadow, as the Labor Opposition Leader through the prosperous and complacent 1950s. In this book, one of our finest writers and sharpest minds shows Evatt in his true light: the most brilliant Australian of his day. Inspiring, cosmopolitan and humane, Evatt was the forerunner of Keating and Kirby, believing that Australia could be more than quiet and comfortable – it could be an example to the world of a compassionate, just, progressive society.

'An acclaimed advocate, champion of modern art and state member for Balmain in the NSW Parliament, in 1930 Evatt became Australia’s youngest ever High Court judge, a regular dissenter from this arch conservative body as he tried to make the law responsive to the rapidly-changing modern world. Haigh traces one case in particular – that of the Chester family, who sued Waverley Council for the trauma of their young son's drowning in an unfenced ditch. Evatt’s legal brilliance, intellectual independence and personal empathy combined in a judgement regarded as the finest of its era, arguing that people’s inner lives were as valuable as their physical selves, and ought to be recognised as such by the law. The idea was far ahead of its time, but is now a fundamental legal principle.

'Evatt had been attuned to grief by losing two brothers in the First World War, which contributed both to his zest for life and his belief that the world should offer sanctuary to the afflicted. This conviction had long-lasting expression: as Australia’s only ever President of the UN General Assembly, Evatt was instrumental in the establishment of Israel. There are not many of whom it might be said that leading their party in federal politics was a step down, but Evatt was such a figure.

'The Brilliant Boy is a feat of remarkable historical perception, deep research and masterful storytelling. It confirms Gideon Haigh as not only our finest cricket writer, but one of our best writers of non-fiction. In painting this bigger picture of our past, The Brilliant Boy allows us to think differently about our present and future.' (Publication summary) 

''I'm just a prisoner of my past. I don't want to be a prisoner any more.'

'Natasa Christidou's earliest memory is of her father masturbating over her childhood bed. She was two. It was the start of a lifetime's physical abuse and psychological torture, which included long phases of sex slavery and sex work, institutional neglect and brutal imprisonment.

'Aged fifty, Natasa decided to tell her story. Gideon Haigh listened. The result is a compelling work of investigation and reportage of the silent crime of incest - usually so confronting, so taboo, that we prefer to look away, because of the social sanctity of 'the family'.

'Today, Natasa lives in a tiny unit in Morwell. She is agoraphobic, vision and hearing impaired, stricken with incontinence, insomnia, panic attacks and back pain as a result of her experiences. Only with the help of a dedicated group of care workers, counsellors and lawyers has she made it so far. She is also a warm, gentle and funny woman whose survival testifies to the resilience of the human spirit.

'This Is How I Will Strangle You takes the reader behind the headlines and hysteria around child sex abuse, and reinforces an uncomfortable truth: that women and children are sometimes safer on the street than in their own homes.'

Source: publisher's blurb

'I'm not proud of whats happened. Y'know, its not within the spirit of the game.

'Steve Smith was not to know it at Cape Town on 24 March 2018, but he was addressing his last press conference as captain of the Australian cricket team. By the next day morning he would be swept from office by a tsunami of public indignation involving even the prime minister. In a unique admission, Smith confessed to condoning a policy of sandpapering the cricket ball in a Test against South Africa.

'He, the instigator David Warner and their agent Cameron Bancroft returned home to disgrace and to lengthy bans. The crisis plunged Australian cricket into a bout of unprecedented soul searching, with Cricket Australia yielding to demands for reviews of the cricket team and of itself to restore confidence in their culture.

'In Crossing the Line, Gideon Haigh conducts his own cultural review less official and far cheaper but genuinely independent. Studying the cricket team across a decade of radical change, he finds an accident waiting to happen, and a system struggling to cope with self-created challenges, on the field and in the boardroom. And he wonders: is there even any longer a spirit of the game to be within?'

Source: publisher's blurb

'As enigmatic in life as in death, Mollie Dean was a woman determined to transcend. Creatively ambitious and sexually precocious, at twenty-five she was a poet, aspiring novelist and muse on the peripheries of Melbourne’s bohemian salons – until one night in 1930 she was brutally slain by an unknown killer in a laneway while walking home.

'Her family was implicated. Those in her circle, including her acclaimed artist lover Colin Colahan, were shamed. Her memory was anxiously suppressed. Yet the mystery of her death rendered more mysterious her life and Mollie’s story lingered, incorporated into memoir, literature, television, theatre and song, most notably in George Johnston’s classic My Brother Jack.

'In A Scandal in Bohemia, Gideon Haigh explodes the true crime genre with a murder story about life as well as death. Armed with only a single photograph and echoes of Mollie’s voice, he has reassembled the precarious life of a talented woman without a room of her own – a true outsider, excluded by the very world that celebrated her in its art. In this work of restorative justice, Mollie Dean emerges as a tenacious, charismatic, independent woman for whom society had no place, and whom everybody tried to forget – but nobody could.'  (Publication summary)

'Victor Trumper (1877-1915) was our first internationally recognised cricketing genius, acclaimed by the legendary W.G Grace and others, who died at 36 in 1915. He has entered Australian sporting folklore and is still one of the great names in sport, with a stand named after him at the SCG. Trumper is a figure that has long held intrigue for Australia's favourite cricket writer, Gideon Haigh. In Trumper, he takes the phenomenon and specific focus of Trumper and particularly a famous, groundbreaking photograph of him by Englishman George Beldham preparing to drive to ask a much larger set of questions. Haigh argues Trumper changed the way cricket was perceived and played in a way that reflects on Australia's relationship with England, the start of the 20th century (photography, marketing, professionalism) and eternal themes of sport and beauty. In the spirit of Simon Wincester, he explores the relationship between Trumper, the photograph, the game, the country and its people.'

In David Williamson's 1977 play The Club, the action takes place in a single room, through which traipse combinations of club president, committeeman, general manager, coach, captain and star recruit, conniving and conspiring. Big money and commercial pragmatism threaten to uproot personal loyalties and ancient ways. ‘I want to turn all those photographs around so they don’t have to look down on this shameful scene,’ says one character, who, it turns out, protests too much.' (Introduction)