AustLit

'The Work is the debut novel of Bri Lee, an accomplished nonfiction writer and public intellectual. It’s set between Sydney and Manhattan, in a milieu where art matters but money rules. It offers up steamy sex and cold characters along with some great lines (“Life had clearly been generous to Sophie, but not kind”) and some absolute clunkers (“When some cunt’s passing offered to fast-track you a few rungs up the ladder of life, you didn’t look a dead gift horse in the mouth”). Relationships in The Work are highly transactional across a range of currencies – sex, prestige, actual money – and yet true love conquers all.' (Introduction)

'Traced opens in 2020. The narrator, Jane, is a middle-aged contact tracer at a New South Wales Health call centre in Sydney’s western outskirts. The novel transports us back to the time when Covid-19 was new and all talk was of clusters and close contacts. It’s interesting how historical a story that takes place just three years ago can feel.' 

'This is a tale of two tribes – one ancient, one modern, both wounded and alienated – and how they came together. It’s a story of complicated and generous friendships between the Yolŋu community on the homeland of Donydji in Arnhem Land and a group of PTSD-stricken Vietnam vets, especially between the senior man, Tom Gunaminy Bidingal, and the anthropologist Neville White.' (Introduction)

'“The story of the first 70 years of lawn tennis (1875-1945),” the eminent immunologist and Nobel laureate Peter Doherty tells us in Empire, War, Tennis and Me, “is embedded in much bigger narratives about imperialist ambitions that led to smaller conflicts and then to both WWI and WWII.” The story of his uncles Charlie and Jack Byford, “keen tennis players” who volunteered to fight “for Australia and Empire” in World War II, prompted the writing of this hybrid of history and memoir. Charlie was taken prisoner by the Japanese in Changi, shipped to the Burma Railway and died when his POW transport ship from Burma to Japan was sunk by the Allies. Jack, too, had his share of the horrors of war, including on the Kokoda Track, but survived.'(Introduction)

'When he wanted to send a secret message, the ancient Greek tyrant Histiaeus shaved the head of a slave, tattooed the message on his scalp and, once the hair had grown back, sent him on his way. In this story, Ellis Gunn finds a key metaphor for how patriarchal society imprints and then hides its stories of violence and abuse on the bodies of women: “All the messages tattooed on our scalps. All the hair we’ve grown over them.”' (Introduction)

'There are few Australians who would have a better claim to the title of “battler” than the post-gold rush Chinese immigrants and first-generation Australian-born Chinese whose stories are told in South Flows the Pearl. In fact, they tell their own stories, as oral histories are at the heart of this book.' (Introduction)

'In A Witness of Fact, Drew Rooke dissects the career of Colin Manock, an English immigrant who retired in 1995 as South Australia’s chief forensic pathologist after a career spanning almost three decades. Rooke carefully weighs its parts, puts samples under a microscope, and examines the evidence from every angle. The result looks a lot like a crime scene.' (Introduction)

'Beijing, 1984, and young proofreader Ding is in all kinds of trouble ... A sharp, funny novel about one of the most turbulent, and most hopeful, periods of China's recent history.' (Publication summary)

'In 2005, the CSIRO predicted that climate change would lead to catastrophic fires in south-eastern Australia by 2020. But rather than treating the climate crisis as “a question of science and how we prepare”, as journalist Bronwyn Adcock writes in Currowan: The story of a fire and a community during Australia’s worst summer, the Coalition politicised and trivialised it. In April 2019, following the brutal heatwave of the year before, retired emergency services leaders warned the government that it needed to prepare urgently for climate crisis-related extreme weather events. Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to meet with them. By November, fires were burning across the land. Morrison assured a nation on edge that everything was under control. Tweeting a photo of himself with Australian cricketer Steve Smith, he told fire-affected communities that the cricketers would give them “something to cheer for”.' (Introduction)

'“How to be alone yet to be in company? That,” the unnamed narrator of Travelling Companions tells us, “is the conundrum.” As a train strike throws him into travel limbo with other tourists on the Spanish–French border, he observes: “We are a group but not quite, there is a plausible deniability.” Banding together helps, he notes elsewhere, to “beat down the ontological insecurity”.' (Introduction)

'There had been an undercurrent of speculation aboard the Étoile about smooth-faced Jean Barret, the stoic and hard-working assistant and personal valet to the ship’s naturalist-doctor, Philibert Commerson. In April 1768, after the ship moored off Tahiti, a local man, immediately perceiving what the French crew had only guessed, cried out, “Ayenne!” – “Woman!” Jeanne Barret’s secret was out.' (Introduction)

'Bluebird, the setting of Malcolm Knox’s latest novel, is an insular little community on the coastal periphery of “Ocean City”, a wink-wink stand-in for Sydney. The problem with Bluebird, and it’s mostly a problem for the middle-aged white male kidults at the centre of the novel, is that it’s changing. Outsiders are moving in, the Chinese are buying up, and people who’ve lived there only five years maddeningly claim to be locals as they drop in on waves.' (Introduction)

'As Australia entered World War II, its all-male armed services had a problem only a woman could solve. That woman was Violet McKenzie, Australia’s first female electrical engineer, a wireless radio pioneer, one of the ABC’s first broadcasters, and the founder of the volunteer Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps, or “Sigs”. Established in 1940, Sigs trained hundreds of women to the highest standards in Morse code and semaphore using a unique system McKenzie devised herself, drawing on mnemonics and musical cues. She also instructed her students in circuit theory and the physics of electromagnetic radiation and taught them how to fix radios and install antennas. The “girls” of Sigs practised military drills at weekend camps and in Sydney’s Centennial Park, the top students wearing the uniform that McKenzie, whom they adored, had designed herself. Australia’s military was in urgent need of personnel with mastery of signalling technologies; it turned to Sigs for help.'  (Introduction)