Item category 1: Biographies & Memoirs

'I was Prime Minister for three years and three days.Three years and three days of resilience.Three years and three days of changing the nation.Three years and three days for you to judge.' On Wednesday 23rd June 2010, with the government in turmoil, Julia Gillard asked then Prime Minister Kevin ...

Love him or loathe him, Ned Kelly has been at the heart of Australian culture and identity since he and his gang were tracked down in bushland by the Victorian police and came out fighting, dressed in bulletproof iron armour made from farmers' ploughs. Historians still disagree over virtually eve...

Undoubtedly the most comprehensive and intimate biography of Nelson ever written, The Sword of Albion encompasses the high dramas of the Battles of the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. Sugden brilliantly interweaves graphic accounts of Nelson's famous victories at the battles of the Nile, Copenhag...

The greatest run-scorer in the history of cricket, Sachin Tendulkar retired in 2013 after an astonishing 24 years at the top. The most celebrated Indian cricketer of all time, he received the Bharat Ratna Award - India's highest civilian honour - on the day of his retirement. Now Sachin Tendulkar...

Even though we'd grown up in vastly different cultures and countries, we'd both known poverty, domestic violence and the expectation that neither one of us would ever amount to anything. That was probably what united us more than anything: our shared defiance of that prediction. She tap-danced on...

These stories share pain, humour, grief, hope and pride. Pride in family, community and survival. Pride in being Aboriginal. From life in the desert to growing up on a mission, enduring devastating policies in the 1930s to bravely seizing new opportunities in the 1960s, these are fifteen true sto...

This poignant and powerful narrative tells the dramatic story of Kunta Kinte, snatched from freedom in Africa and brought by ship to America and slavery, and his descendants. Drawing on the oral traditions handed down in his family for generations, the author traces his origins back to the sevent...

Honest, frank and brilliantly funny, this is the story of how a tall, shy youth from Weston-Super-Mare went on to become a comedy giant. En route, John Cleese describes his nerve-wracking first public appearance, at St Peter's Preparatory School at the age of 8 and 5/6ths; his endlessly peripatet...

In 1914 Vera Brittain was eighteen and, as war was declared, she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the life of her whole generation - had changed in a way that was unimaginable in the tranquil pre-war era. Testament of Youth, one of the most famous autobiographies ...

At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's rapid death from cancer, her family disbanded and her marriage crumbled. With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America - f...

This insightful and engaging history examines the key qualities that empowered 50 of history's most charismatic and inspiring leaders in the fields of politics, religion, culture and the arts. Read on and investigate the gripping events through which these men and women won renown or infamy. From...

Following the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, Rupert Murdoch's greatest regret was that he had let his father down. Popular history views Sir Keith Murdoch (1885 - 1952) as a fearless war correspondent, author of a brave, censor-evading letter that led to the evacuation of the Anzac forc...

Peter Garrett's life has been fully and passionately lived. A man of boundless energy, compassion, intelligence and creativity, he has already achieved enough to fill several lives. From his idyllic childhood growing up in the northern suburbs of Sydney, to an early interest in equality and justi...

"Pop-culture phenomenon, social rights advocate, and the most prominent LGBTQ+ voice on Youtube, Tyler Oakley brings you his first collection of ... essays. From someone who makes a career out of oversharing on the Internet, Tyler has a shocking number of personal mishaps and shenanigans to revea...

Richard Dawkins cheerfully, mischievously, looks back on a lifetime of tireless intellectual adventure and engagement. Exploring the halls of intellectual inquiry and stardom he encountered after the publication of his seminal work, The Selfish Gene; affectionately lampooning the world of academi...

An authorized portrait of one of Silicon Valley's most dynamic entrepreneurs evaluates his role in the successes of such innovations as Tesla and Space X while evaluating America's technological competitiveness.

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY. AUSTRALIAN. Georgiana Molloy (23 May 1805 - 8 April 1843) was an early settler in Western Australia, who is remembered as one of the first botanical collectors in the colony. Georgiana Molloy was born Georgiana Kennedy in Cumberland on 23 May 1805. In her youth she was ...

HUMOUR. AUSTRALIAN. What's life really like as a worker on a FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) mining site in Australia? In debt, in love and out of options, Xavier Toby's back as a FIFO with more hilarious tales from the coal face. Donk the Safety Guy, Jonno, Pando, Jokka and Dale are all back in top form, ...

By the age of thirteen, Osamah had survived the Iran/Iraq war, peddled fireworks and chewing gum on the Iranian black market, proposed 'temporary marriage' not once but three times, and received countless floggings from the Piety Police for trying to hold hands with girls in dark cinemas. And the...

In the aftermath of the Battle of Britain, airmen filled a small Sussex town where pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe established revolutionary surgical and therapeutic treatments. For the child Liz Byrski, growing up in a small Sussex town, the burnt faces of these airmen filled her ni...

'I grew up on the world's largest island.' This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton's beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how this unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. For over thirty years, Winton has written novels in which the natural wo...

John Farnham is nothing less than an Aussie icon. In a career spanning almost five decades, the likeable, charismatic star has entertained countless Australians of every generation, selling millions of records along the way. But his extraordinary story is as much about tackling adversity as it is...

Nance was a week short of her sixth birthday when she and Frank were roused out of bed in the dark and lifted into the buggy, squashed in with bedding, the cooking pots rattling around in the back, and her mother shouting back towards the house: Goodbye, Rothsay, I hope I never see you again! Whe...

Archaeologist, spy, Arabist, linguist, author, poet, photographer, mountaineer and nation builder, Gertrude Bell was born in 1868 into a world of privilege and plenty, but she turned her back on all that for her passion for the Arab peoples, becoming the architect of the independent kingdom of Ir...

BIOGRAPHY: GENERAL. AUSTRALIAN. Heartbreaking, joyous, traumatic, intimate and revelatory, Reckoning is the book where Magda Szubanski, one of Australia's most beloved performers, tells her story. In this extraordinary memoir, Magda describes her journey of self-discovery from a suburban childhoo...

A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin's corruption.

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY: HISTORICAL, POLITICAL & MILITARY. Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk's estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens p...

The New York Times bestselling author of Soldier Dogs returns with the incredible story of K-9 Marine hero Lucca, and the handlers who fought alongside her through two bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Top Dog, Maria Goodavage takes readers into the life of Lucca K458, a decorated and high...

"I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me." In the first instalment of Clive Jamess memoirs we follow the young Clive on his journey from boyhood to the cusp of manhood, when his days of wearing short ...

"A portrait in her own words of the female Lawrence of Arabia. One of the great woman adventurers of the twentieth century and the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I, Gertrude Bell turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world. Mo...