Item category 1: Society & Culture

Dip into the pages of this little treasury and you'll find plenty to inspire you: from the festivals that sprinkle the days of October and November, to a daily delight for Advent and the Twelve Days of Christmas. Full of traditions, poems, stories and ideas for things to make and do, it's a celeb...

Are you ready to experience true, unconditional love? Do you wish you could create stronger relationships, heal yourself and experience genuine affection? Vex King is back with Closer, a practical guide to creating lasting connections. Vex has developed these practices and skills to help him heal...

Penny van Oosterzee and her husband are regenerating rainforest from paddocks, reconnecting fragments into a living corridor that will run to the Daintree and beyond. She weaves this personal experience into a sweeping account of Australia's rainforests, from their swampy birth millions of years ...

In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of big finance and tech requires 'cloudmoney' -- digital money underpinned by the banking sector -- to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-establis...

You are a fourteen-year-old girl at a party. You are drunk. All your friends are drunk. A boy is pressuring you to have sex. You don't really want to, but you don't know how to say no. You really want him to like you. So you say yes, at least you think you say yes. You can't remember. What you do...

All families have their secrets and a convict ancestor or an illegitimate birth were shames that families once buried deep. Among the best-hidden stories in Australia's history are those of convict orphans. Agnes arrived on a convict transport aged four, and was abandoned when her mother needed t...

When asked why true crime is so in vogue, journalist and author Amber Hunt always has the same answer: it's no hotter than it's always been. Crimes and trials have captured American consciousness since the Salem Witch Trials in the seventeenth century. And these cases over the centuries have fund...

"An explosive exposé and testament to the power of investigative journalism In mid-2017, whispers from Australia's most secretive and elite military unit reached Walkley Award-winning journalist Nick McKenzie. McKenzie and veteran reporter Chris Masters began an investigation that would not only...

Cruel Care tells a story of government, politics and the emotions that drive decisions. It asks why Australia has treated child refugees with violence and why governments say that the cruel acts they perpetrate are a form of care. Based on extensive research - including 35 oral history interviews...

Crystal healing is for everyone. Learning to work with these gifts from nature should be simple, easy, and effective. This beautifully illustrated book is a modern guide that aims to demystify the spiritual jargon surrounding crystal healing and teach practical rituals to help you attune to cryst...

Explore a directory of crystals and minerals, and their individual properties and learn new ways to connect with their glimmering energies to improve your life. Learn how to cleanse your mind, body and spirit, heal your home and harness the power of the rocks. This practical guide will equip you ...

Many of the animals we encounter in everyday life, from the creatures in our fields to those in our fantasies, have remained the same since medieval times - but the words we use, and the ways we describe them, have often changed beyond recognition... Old English was spoken over a thousand years a...

Welcome back to Clarkson's Farm. Since taking the wheel three years ago Jeremy's had his work cut out. And it's now clear from hard-won experience that, when it comes to farming, there's only one golden rule: Whatever you hope will happen, won't. Enthusiastic schemes to diversify have met with st...

When you've lived your dreams, it's time for new ones. The 4-bed, 2-bath home you loved... the pool you couldn't get the kids out of... they've had their day. Downsizing isn't about living in a tiny home - unless you want to - it's not about square metres; it's about rightsizing your home for the...

Part biography, part forensic jigsaw puzzle, part cold-case detective investigation, The Eagle in the Mirror is the astonishing untold story of an Australian-born intelligence officer accused by some espionage experts of being the traitor of the century, Charles Howard 'Dick' Ellis.

At a time when multiple crises are compounding to create epic inequality, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme, from the metaverse to cryptocurrency, space travel and transhumanism, is an existential threat...

What leads to political turbulence and social breakdown? How do elites maintain their dominance position? And why do ruling classes sometimes suddenly lose their grip on power. For decades, complexity scientist Peter Turchin has been studying world history like no-one else. Assembling vast databa...

The Event Planning Toolkit is a how-to guide offering the information you need to execute any event with precision and enjoy the big day with less stress and fewer unpleasant surprises. You will learn how to manage your scope, time and resources, as well as identify goals, create budgets, find th...

What if we could learn to live with such awareness long before the end? To appreciate every moment, and every encounter with another human or with the natural world around us? Might we, too, learn that everything is extraordinary? That we are interconnected and interdependent? Each encounter we h...

A social history that reveals the roots of AI in the spatial computation of industrial factories and the surveillance of collective behaviour.

Australian slang unites the true blue and the dinky-di and separates the cheeky little possums from the happy little Vegemites. In this attractive new pictorial guide, readers will learn to distinguish their drongos from their dropkicks and discover where our unique vernacular comes from. Discove...

Meet the Murdochs and the disastrously dysfunctional family of Fox News. Until recently, they formed the most powerful media and political force in America. Now their empire is cracking up and crashing down. In his irresistible trilogy on the chaotic Trump presidency - Fire and Fury, Siege, and L...

Hacking, espionage, war and cybercrime as you've never read about them before Fancy Bear was hungry. Looking for embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton, the elite hacking unit within Russian military intelligence broke into the Democratic National Committee network, grabbed what it could,...

Fandom Acts of Kindness not only tells the stories of the good fans have done in the world but serves as a dungeon master's guide to how to be a hero yourself.

We are no longer living in ordinary times, where political violence is unimaginable, and conspiracy theorists are marginal figures whose ideas can be laughed at. How did things get to this point? Fear: New Zealand's hostile underworld of extremists helps make sense of the tributaries feeding the ...

Following a three-year drought and during the hottest and driest year on record, a flume of scorching air set the Australian continent aflame. The Black Summer fires were unprecedented. Over six months in 2019-20 they burned more than 24 million hectares of Australia's southern and eastern forest...

A journalistic exploration of the present and future of beauty through the lens of South Korea's booming "K-beauty" industry and the culture it promotes.

Over six years of imprisonment on Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book, "No Friend...

Spy satellites orbiting the moon. Space metals worth more than most countries' GDP. People on Mars within the next ten years. This isn't science fiction. It's astropolitics. Humans are heading up and out, and we're taking our power struggles with us. Soon, what happens in space will shape human h...

A shocking expose of the dark, secret history of Catholic orphanages--the violence, abuse, and even murder that took place within their walls-- and a call to hold the powerful to account. More than 5 million Americans passed through orphanages in the 20th century alone. At its peak in the 1930s, ...