Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in Biographies & Memoirs

Covens. Girl bands. Ballet troupes. Convents. In all times and places, girls and women have come together in communities of vocation, of necessity, of support. And wherever women gather, magic happens. Female farmers change the way we grow our food. Online beauty communities democratise the intricacies of skincare. Teen girls invent phrases that enter the urban lexicon and choose our next pop superstars. Patriarchal societies have long been content to uphold men's and boys' clubs while viewing groups that exclude men as sites of rivalry and suspicion.

After the tragic loss of his younger brother, Lineen experienced walking's regenerative power firsthand. Grief-stricken and adrift, he set off on a 2,700-kilometre solo trek across the Himalayas. He walked for months until his legs ached and his feet blistered, and by the end of the expedition something had changed in him. He was stronger - not just physically but psychologically and emotionally. What had happened? What had given him this feeling of peace, joy even?

Saroo Brierley's journey home to a small village in India with the help of Google Earth became an internationally best-selling book and inspired the major motion picture Lion. But the story of how his adoptive mother, Sue, came into his life half a world away in Tasmania is every bit as riveting. In this uplifting and deeply personal book Sue reveals for the first time her own traumatic childhood. The daughter of a violent alcoholic whose business gambles left her family destitute, she grew up in geographic and emotional isolation.

Son of the renowned Sydney obstetrician, Dr William McBride raised the alarm on the anti-nausea drug thalidomide in the 1960s and was later struck off the medical register for falsifying research results in a bid to challenge the safety of another drug. David chose to study Law, firstly at Sydney University and then at Oxford. There he met some British army officers and decided that soldiering was his calling, going on to train at Sandhurst.

Blazing her trail at the dawn of the 20th century, Vida Goldstein remains Australia's most celebrated suffragette and social reformer. Her life - as a campaigner for women's rights and suffrage in Australia, Britain and America, an advocate for peace, a fighter for social equality for all and a shrewd political commentator - marks her as one of Australia's foremost women of courage and principle. In 1903 she became the first woman in Australia to stand for the Senate and the the first woman in the Western world to stand for a national Parliament.

Like a lot of footy blokes, having a chat has always come easy to Dylan Buckley. But how to move beyond banter to the deeper conversations he didn't know he needed is something he's only learned more recently - a hard-won skill developed through his podcast and the career reboot it gave him after injury and anxiety cut his AFL career short. Honest Chat is filled with all the best insights and wisdom from the Dyl and Friends podcast, plus humorous and poignant stories from Dyl's own life.

In Graft, Maggie MacKellar describes a year on a Merino wool farm on the east coast of Tasmania, and all of life - and death - that surrounds her through the cycle of lambing seasons. She gives us the land she knows and loves, the lambs she cares for, the ewes she tries to save, the birds around her, and the dogs and horses she adores.

International businessman Peter Holmes à Court left the executive world and found himself living deep in rural France with only his seven-year-old twin girls for company. Peter was struggling as a single father in a foreign country, unsettled by the sudden move away from a traditional job, and completely baffled by the society around him. His only plan: to ride L 'Etape du Tour, the challenging amateur leg of the Tour de France. In an effort to find some new friends in the community - and a bike for the race - he discovered the region's small bicycle factory.

Careers in the cocaine-trafficking business are usually short. It's not only a dangerous profession, fraught with the possibility of capture and long jail sentences, but it can be deadly if the cartels get to you first. Not for Luis Antonio Navia. For 25 years the Cuban American smuggled hundreds of tons of white powder for the biggest cartels in Colombia and Mexico, including Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel.

When Sue Smethurst first sat down with her grandmother-in-law and asked how she survived the Holocaust, she was shooed away. By that time Mindla was in a Melbourne Jewish nursing home with other survivors, her body ageing but mind still razor sharp. 'Vhy do you vant to know?' she'd ask. 'My story is nothing special.' As death began approaching, Sue became a little more pushy. She knew Mindla's life had to be recorded, and they were running out of time.

Mawunyo Gbogbo is a church-going African Australian girl growing up in the sleepy mining town of Muswellbrook, NSW. At home, her parents fight all the time, and sibling rivalry runs deep. At primary school, Black Is Beautiful until a racist bully dares to tell her otherwise. But at high school, she falls in love with two things that will alter the course of her adult life: the seductive thrill of hip hop music and charismatic bad boy Tyce Carrington. Tyce also feels like an alien in Australia, despite his Aboriginality—or because of it.

In 1994, 14-year-old Stefanie Hinrichs dreamed of owning a horse, leaving school and marrying Keanu Reeves. But God had other plans for the teenager. Her family belonged to a controversial Doomsday cult led by self-proclaimed Messiah William Kamm, also known as the 'Little Pebble', who was building a new promised land for his followers deep in the Australian bush. Stefanie was forced to become the false prophet's child bride - one of 84 mystical spouses chosen by the Lord to bear 27 children for his new heavenly dynasty.

In 2013 Jaivet Ealom fled Myanmar's brutal regime, where Rohingya like him were being persecuted and killed, and boarded a boat of asylum seekers bound for Australia. Instead of receiving refuge, he was transported to Australia's infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre. Blistering hot days spent in shipping containers on the island melted into weeks, then years until, finally, facing either jail in Papua New Guinea or being returned to almost certain death in Myanmar, he took matters into his own hands.

Balme is unique in having spent longer than anyone else in clubland. Richmond, Norwood, Melbourne, Collingwood, Geelong and Richmond again—over 50 years. He's seen and created limitless change in those decades. So how did Neil Balme go from being the infamous on-field enforcer of the 1970s to the avuncular guru the football world knows and loves today? After 11 premierships, an aura surrounds the man.

Paul Verhoeven's ex-cop dad, John, spent years embroiled in some of the seediest, scariest intrigue and escapades imaginable. What unfolded in Loose Units was a goldmine of true-crime stories, showcasing John's dramatic experience of policing in Sydney in the 1980s and brilliantly twisted sense of humour. But what happened next in John's career was twice as weird. Electric Blue spans the final years of John's stint in the New South Wales police force, when he took up an offer to move into the grimy, analytical world of forensics.

Across history, women were told to sit down, smile, and stay quiet.
Spoiler alert: they didn't. They spoke out, stood tall - and ruined the patriarchy's day. Because of them, women won.

In 2003 Kathleen Folbigg was convicted of killing her four babies. Her trial relied on her husband's accusations and diary entries expressing her guilt over her children's deaths. She was sentenced to forty years in prison. In Inside Out Kathleen takes us back to her traumatic childhood, her difficult marriage, her dream of nurturing a family, and the profound souring of that dream into a nightmare.

The twists and turns of the last 15 years of the Qantas story contain all the ingredients of a corporate thriller, with constant shocks to the system, and boardroom dramas and disasters narrowly avoided. During this tumultuous period, as CEO of Australia's iconic airline, Alan Joyce became one of the best-known corporate figures in Australia, and one of the most polarising. Global aviation expert Peter Harbison tells the full and unvarnished story of this fascinating period of the Qantas journey.

Frank Moorhouse was legendary in Australian literary and cultural life, the author of a huge and diverse body of work - essays, short stories, journalism, scripts, the iconic Edith Trilogy - an unapologetic activist, intellectual, libertarian and champion of freedom of speech and sexual self determination. Though he lived his life publicly, his private stories have not been shared, the many paths he forged left unexamined, until now. This landmark study is the fascinating story of how one of Australia's most original writers and pioneer of the discontinuous narrative came to be.

Dubai is feted internationally as a beacon of modernity: glittering skyscrapers, a cultural melting pot, even a new player in the space race. The city's ruled by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, an all-powerful multi-billionaire who counts the Queen and Donald Trump as friends. His kingdom's progressive propaganda defies a medieval underbelly. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the Sheikh's own palace, where numerous women have now risked their lives by sounding the alarm about what's really going on in the United Arab Emirates.