Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in Essays

'Teeming with mysteries, wonders and heartbreaking facts, this beautiful, lucid hymn to the sea is a reminder of what we still have, what we stand to lose, and why we must never stop fighting to save our home.' Tim Winton The ocean has shaped and sustained life on Earth from the beginning of...

We all know the names: Jacinda Ardern, Kamala Harris, Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau, John Howard, Sanna Marin, Nelson Mandela, and Julia Gillard. But what about the people standing just behind them? In The Right Hand, Missing Perspectives founder Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks sits down with the chiefs of...

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others.

Across these twenty fresh and boldly intimate stories, Erin Riley writes about the things that matter most: family, heartbreak, humanity, justice and swimming, and the messy, hard graft of becoming one's authentic self. In weaving together their everyday while questioning society and its structures, Erin gifts us stories that double as a manifesto on how to disrupt and reinvent narrative, identity, love and community.

In 1966, at the age of 10, Martin Flanagan was sent to a Catholic boarding school in north-west Tasmania. Of the 12 priests on the staff, three have since gone to prison for sexual crimes committed against boys in their care. In 2018 and 2019, a series of disclosures about the school appeared on the ABC Tasmania website. Then came the Pell case. What followed was a frenzy of opinions, none of which represented Flanagan's view. The Empty Honour Board is part memoir, a reflection on truth and memory, and what is lost in rushing to judgement.

The past shapes the present-they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes? Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn't live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present...

2020 began with fire storms raging through the country, followed by floods and then a global pandemic that has changed how Australians think, feel and live. We all experienced this year differently, but one thing rings true for all us: this is a year we won't forget. This anthology brings together original work from a diverse collection of Australian voices, from writers to scientists, journalists to historians, all expressing what 2020 meant to them.

What does it feel like to be passionate about your daily work? How do people find their way into fascinating, unusually fulfilling careers, even against the odds? Space lawyers and bibliotherapists; euthanasia activists and women's rugby champions; shark experts and solar power visionaries; a...

Skin Deep explores beauty, ageing, imperfection, health and illness, all of which are closely related to skin, and interrogates whiteness, both historically, structurally and through current notions of white fragility and victimhood. Phillipa McGuinness has interviewed plastic surgeons, dermatologists, burn survivors, beauticians, melanoma sufferers, people who suffer from body dysmorphias, victims and perpetrators of racism and all kinds of people who are and are not comfortable in their own skin to write a book where science meets art and culture, history and politics.