On Identity by Stan Grant

$14.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Stan Grant asks why when it comes to identity he is asked to choose between black and white. Is identity a myth? A constructed story we tell ourselves? Tribalism, nationalism and sectarianism are dividing the world into us and them. Communities are a tinderbox of anger and resentment. He passionately ho pes we are not hard wired for hate. Grant argues that it is time to leave identity behind and to embrace cosmopolitanism. On Identityis a meditation on hope and community. ...Show more

Chaser Quarterly #15: Election 2019 by The Chaser

$19.95 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Know your electorate. All the other guides will tell you the swings and demographics of the seats. Only The Chaser tells you which electorate have the most tax evaders, white collar fraudsters and insider traders (Wentworth). Electorate profiles you can actually use- The Poo Jogger's Guide to Brisbane. All the best places to defecate in all your favourite Brisbane hotspots. Did you know that every single person in Australia will be an ex-Prime Minister by 2050? Are You A One Nation MP? With all the comings and goings in One Nation, it's hard to keep track of whether you?re a One Nation MP or not. Take our special quiz, and find out! ...Show more

Webtopia: The Worldwide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work by Peter Lewis

$32.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s was a world of limited choice, one where we all watched the same television programs and the household phone was at the heart of allnetworks people belonged to: family, school, church and the neighbourhood. The arrival of the internet promised a utopian, creative and democr atic future that would break down traditional institutions and replace them with exciting collaborative networks. So how did we end up here? In Webtopia, Peter Lewis draws from his own pre- and post-tech experience and conversations with entrepreneurs, politicians, pastors, parents, teachers and journalists to show us that technology is not the problem. We are. If we fix our relationship with technology, it will be easier to fix our relationships with each other in a fragmenting world. Riveting, engaging and wise, Webtopia traces our digital journey to this point and, fearlessly, marks out the best route from here. 'This book is an encounter with a born raconteur. This makes for a highly readable book, but it also reflects something more profound: that people power the web and modern tech is the embodiment of human genius, human folly and every human choice that lies in between.' -- Edward Santow, Australian Human Rights Commissioner   ...Show more

All the Ghosts in the Machine: How the Digital Age Is Transforming Death in the 21st Century by Elaine Kasket

$32.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

'As charming and touching as it is astute and insightful' Adam Alter, New York Times bestselling author of Irresistable and Drunk Tank Pink Seen any ghosts on your smartphone lately? As we're compelled to capture, store and share more and more of our personal information, there's something we often fo rget. All that data doesn't just disappear when our physical bodies shuffle off this mortal coil. If the concept of remaining socially active after you're no longer breathing sounds crazy, you might want to get used to the idea. Digital afterlives are a natural consequence of the information age, a reality that barely anyone has prepared for - and that 'anyone' probably includes you. In All the Ghosts in the Machine, psychologist Elaine Kasket sounds a clarion call to everyone who's never thought about death in the digital age. When someone's hyperconnected, hyperpersonal digital footprint is transformed into their lasting legacy, she asks, who is helped, who is hurt, and who's in charge? And why is now such a critical moment to take our heads out of the sand? Weaving together personal, moving true stories and scientific research, All the Ghosts in the Machine takes you on a fascinating tour through the valley of the shadow of digital death. In the process, it will transform how you think about your life and your legacy, in a time when our technologies are tantalising us with fantasies of immortality. ...Show more

Australia Day by Stan Grant

$34.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Australia is poised at a critical moment of its history - but the time to act is now. Since publishing Talking to My Country in early 2016, Stan Grant has been crossing the country, talking to huge crowds everywhere about how racism is at the heart of our history and the Australian dream. But Stan knows this is not where the story ends. Everywhere he goes, he is asked the same questions: What can we do? How can we change the story? In Australia Day, Stan weaves a story of history, memoir, politics, struggle, survival and hope. Expressing a cautious optimism, he wants to show us that there is something we can all do, that there is a path forward, a way towards true reconciliation. For Stan, the creation of the Australian nation and the repression of the Indigenous people is integrally woven together. He has long been fascinated by the history of Jimmy Governor - also a Wiradjuri man - a man who was pushed to intolerable limits. Found guilty of murder, he was sentenced to hang, but the execution date was delayed by almost two months due to planned festivities to celebrate Australian Federation. Jimmy Governor was finally hanged at Darlinghurst gaol on 18 January 1901, just days after the official birth of the Australian nation. But Stan believes that with the recent establishment of the Referendum Council on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the coming referendum, there is a huge opportunity facing Australia - an opportunity to fix past wrongs and set an optimistic path for the future and true reconciliation. It's the right thing to do. But we have to do it NOW. ...Show more

Blackout How can energy-rich Australia be running out of electricity? by Matthew Warren

$29.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

For 20 years Australia has been in political denial about the seismic changes occurring in the way we power our country. Successive governments continue to tell people that power prices will fall while the lights stay on. Debate is reduced to two equally preposterous narratives: coal-fired, climate change indifference versus an impossibly utopian renewable energy future. This nonsense swirls around an incredulous public while power prices rise, the grid is stretched, energy becomes political poison and the earth warms. How did it come to this and how can we find our way out of this mess? Matthew Warren has worked for all sides of the energy industry, is regularly attacked for being too pro-coal and too pro-renewables, and writes without fear or favour. He has been lobbying for a national climate and electricity policy for over a decade. With an entertaining and fascinating narrative, Blackout cuts through the waffle to chart the disintegration of Australia's energy security, call out what is holding us back, and plot the way for a brighter future.  ...Show more

Quarterly Essay 73: Australia Fair: Listening to the Nation by Rebecca Huntley

$22.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Series: Quarterly Essay Ser.

For some time, a majority of Australians have been saying they want change - on climate and energy, on housing and inequality, on corporate donations and their corrupting effect on democracy, to name just a few.Recent attention has focused on the angry, reactionary minority. But is there a progressive c entre? How does it see Australia?s future? And what is to be learned from the failures of previous governments? Was marriage reform just the beginning, or will the shock-jocks and their paymasters hold their ground?In this vivid, grounded essay, Rebecca Huntley looks at the state of the nation and asks- what does social-democratic Australia want, and why? ...Show more

Rusted Off: Why Country Australia Is Fed Up by Gabrielle Chan

$34.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Telling the story of Australia as it is today, Gabrielle Chan has gone hyper-local. In Rusted Off,she looks to her own rural community?s main street for answers to the big questions driving voters. Why are we so fed up with politics? Why are formerly rusted-on country voters deserting major parties in g reater numbers than their city cousins? Can ordinary people teach us more about the way forward for government?In 1996 - the same year as Pauline Hanson entered parliament - Gabrielle, the city-born daughter of a Chinese migrant, moved to a sheep and wheat farm in country New South Wales. She provides a window into her community where she raised her children and reflects on its lessons for the Australian political story. It is a fresh take on the old rural narrative, informed by class and culture, belonging and broadband, committees and cake stalls, rural recession and reconciliation.Along the way, Gabrielle recounts conversations with her fellow residents, people who have no lobby group in Canberra, so we can better understand lives rarely seen in political reporting. She describes communities that are forsaking the political process to move ahead of government. Though sometimes facing polar opposite political views to her own, Gabrielle learns the power of having a shared community at stake and in doing so, finds an alternative for modern political tribal warriors. ...Show more

Four Flashpoints - How Asia Goes to War by Brendan Taylor

$29.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Asia is at a dangerous moment. China is rising fast. Young, reckless North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is engaging in territorial spats with the US president over nuclear missiles. Japan's nationalist government is remilitarising, throwing off the constitutional constraints imposed at the end of World W ar II. Washington is charting a different course, too- Donald Trump is the first US president to have contact with Taiwanese leaders since the 1970s, and also the first to edge his finger so firmly towards the nuclear button over North Korea. The doomsday clock has reached two minutes to midnight, as the possibility of global catastrophe looms ever closer. In this revelatory analysis, strategic expert Brendan Taylor examines the four Asian flashpoints that are most likely to erupt in sudden and violent conflict- the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, the South China Sea and the East China Sea. He argues that crisis can only be averted by understanding the dynamics of these global hotspots and the complex interrelations between them. Drawing on history, contemporary sources and in-depth reports to weave an analysis both pertinent and chilling, Taylor asks what the world's major powers can do to avoid an eruption of war -- and what role Australia, as both a force in this region and a historical ally of the United States, can play to change the course of this otherwise disastrous history. ...Show more

On Experience - David Malouf

$14.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love by Naomi Wolf

$32.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

The bestselling author of Vagina illuminates a dramatic history - how a single English law in 1857 led to a maelstrom, with reverberations lasting down to our day. That law was the Obscene Publications Act and it was a crucial turning point. Why? Because dissent and morality; 'deviancy' and 'normalcy'; unprintable and printable were suddenly lawful concepts in the modern sense. This new law effectively invented modern obscenity. Before 1857 it wasn't 'homosexuality' - a term that didn't yet exist - that was a crime, but simply the act of sodomy. But in a single stroke, not only was love between men illegal, but anything referring to this love also became obscene, unprintable, unspeakable. And writers, editors and printers became the gatekeepers with a responsibility to uphold the morals of the society - followed by serious criminal penalties if they didn't. And as the act evolved, joined by other laws against sexual representation and speech, making their way to courts, the authors' or artists' intentions were deemed immaterial. What mattered was if the work in question had a 'tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall'. Wolf paints the dramatic ways this set of laws and consolidation of what we would call homophobia and censorship, played out among a bohemian group of sexual dissidents, including Walt Whitman in America and the homosexual English critic John Addington Symonds - in love with Whitman's homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass - decades before the infamous 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde. She retrieves forgotten history of men and even young teenage boys, executed at the Old Bailey for 'sodomy' or even 'the attempt'. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater and painter Simeon Solomon, were among the writers and artists, and countless booksellers and printers, whose lives were shadowed with jeopardy from this emerging network of laws against speech and love. She depicts both a fascinating story and, crucially, an important way of understanding how we arrived at our ideas of 'normalcy' and 'deviancy' - and the idea of the state's purported need and right to police speech - ideas which are with us to this day. Most powerfully, Wolf recounts how a dying Symonds helped write the book on 'sexual inversion' that created our modern understanding of homosexuality. She argues that his secret memoir, mined and explained here fully for the first time, together with a secretly published essay, evolved into what would become the first mainstream gay rights manifesto in the west - proving that the literature of love will ultimately triumph over censorship. ...Show more

Quitting Plastic: Easy and Practical Ways to Cut Down the Plastic in Your Life by Clara Williams Roldan; Louise Williams (As told to)

$19.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Reading Level: 4 non fiction

How to reduce plastic in your everyday life, starting with changes that are small and easy to make, and working up to bigger changes to your daily routine.