Showing results by narrator "Paul English" in All Categories

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia’s greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz. After tragedy struck, Mawson found himself all alone, 160 miles from safety, with next to no food.

Ned Kelly the man - warts and all - the most vivid portrait yet of Australia's immortal outlaw! Author, Ian Jones, acknowledged Kelly authority, shares with us the results of a lifetime's research. For the first time, Ned Kelly truly emerges as a man - a man who hated conflict yet never escaped it. A private man incapable of being ordinary and unnoticed. A man who was seen, even in his own lifetime, as what he represented rather than what he was.

For many, the colonial story of Australia starts with Captain Cook's discovery of the east coast in 1770, but it was some 164 years before his historic voyage that European mariners began their romance with the immensity of the Australian continent. Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who discovered and mapped the majority of the vast, unknown waters and land masses in the Indian and Southern Oceans.

Never before has a member of the Packer family co-operated with a writer to tell their story. In his biography The Price of Fortune, one of the nation's richest and most psychoanalyzed men opens up in an attempt to make sense of his roller-coaster life and to tell the human story of being James Douglas Packer. Of how his wealth, charm and intellect took him to such exciting places. Yet how sometimes trusting the wrong people and his own rash actions cost him - and how he is now working on getting it all back.

The biggest threat facing modern business is the sheer complexity of an uncertain future. That, and the fact that everyone is busy. Too busy for progress. Workplace cultures have become cursed with efficiency. And so when it comes to developing strategy, we default to our defaults. We favor quick fixes, easy templates, and familiar approaches, developing 'robust plans' that do little to mitigate strategic risk or generate new value. The result? The future comes, and businesses die.

One day, not so very many years ago, a small peasant boy was chosen to study ballet at the Beijing Dance Academy. His mother urged him to take this chance of a lifetime. But Li was only eleven years old and he was scared and lonely, pushed away from all that he had ever known and loved. He hated the strict training routines and the strange place he had been brought to. All he wanted to do was go home - to his mother, father, and six brothers, to his own small village. But soon Li realised that his mother was right. He had the chance to do something special with his life - and he never turned back.

On the afternoon of 8 April 1802, in the remote southern ocean, two explorers had a remarkable chance encounter. Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicolas Baudin had been sent by their governments on the same quest: to explore the uncharted coast of the great south land and find out whether the west and east coasts, four thousand kilometres apart, were part of the same island. And so began the race to compile the definitive map of Australia.

Thirteen-year-old Barnaby Fletch is a bag-and-bones orphan in London in the late 1700s.Barnaby lives on his wits and ill-gotten gains, on streets seething with the press of the throng and shadowed by sinister figures. Life is a precarious business.When he hears of a paradise on the other side of the world – a place called Botany Bay – he decides to commit a crime and get himself transported to a new life, a better life.

In November 2010 came the announcement that the nation had been waiting for: Prince William is to marry Kate Middleton. The couple had become engaged in October while they holidayed in Kenya, and the news further proved that their love story has captivated everyone. At last, this is the true insider account of the relationship that has so far defined the 21st century. He is the confident young Prince who is the future of the Royal Family. She is the royal bride who is thoroughly modern and has confounded all the stereotypes of how the future Queen Consort should be.

It's 1942, and war is raging in Europe and in the Pacific. The Japanese army is on Australia's doorstep, and the small coastal Queensland town of Maryborough is on full war footing. What they are not prepared for is the arrival in the town of a troupe of incompetent actors whose unjustifiably self-confident leader, William Power, is determined to bring his daring production of Titus Andronicus to the barbarians of rural Australia. Unfortunately for the Power Players, the only gift William Power has is a capacity for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is your one chance. You have your secret dreams. Follow them! Make them come true ...In a poor village in northern China, a small boy is about to be taken away from everything he's ever known. He is so afraid, but his mother urges him to follow his dreams. For soon he will become a dancer, one of the finest dancers in the world...So begins The Peasant Prince, the true story of Li Cunxin's extraordinary life.

A fast-paced, witty and gripping historical crime series from Tom Keneally and his eldest daughter, Meg. In the Port Macquarie penal settlement for second offenders, at the edge of the known world, gentleman convict Hugh Monsarrat hungers for freedom. Originally transported for forging documents passing himself off as a lawyer, he is now the trusted clerk of the settlement's commandant.

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

A tale of longing, loss and growing love under the bright Australian sun. It's 1921, and the Great War has left in its wake untold tragedy, not only in lives lost but in the guilt of survivors, the deep-set scars of old wounds and the sting of redoubled bigotries. In the tiny hamlet of Sunshine, on the far-flung desert's edge, three very different ex-servicemen - Jack Bell, an Aboriginal horseman; Snow McGlynn, a laconic, curmudgeonly farmer and Art Lovelee, an eccentric engineer - find themselves sharing a finger of farmland along the Darling River, and not much else.

Failed Shakespearean actor and would-be private detective William Power returns to Melbourne in this wry sequel that re-creates the tension and fear of wartime Australia. Bloodied and broken but somehow unbowed, he arrives in a town struggling under war-rationing and full of cocky American soldiers and lands squarely in the bosom of his childhood home in Carlton, now dominated by his sister-in-law, the odious Darlene.

In this audiobook you'll find what it takes to have an underlying sense of calm and equilibrium you can rely on the whole of your life. This is much more than feeling. It's a way of squeezing the most out of the up times, coping with the down times, and bouncing right back when things go completely off the rails. And best of all it requires no special skills and no effort. Calm: No Matter What shows you how to do this with one simple technique.

On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride; an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock? The men, the women, the children? Once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?Margo Lanagan weaves an extraordinary tale of desire and revenge, of loyalty, heartache and human weakness, and of the unforeseen consequences of all-consuming love.

Kalu climbed high into a tree seeking the perfect leaf to roll into a pipe.... Softening one end in his mouth, he pressed down with his teeth to flatten the tube and blew. The sound, sweet and clear, rode the wind, snaking through the tree and down into the village. Set in the small Indian town of Hastinapore, we meet Kalu: just a young boy, without any family, living on the streets. As he plays his music, he doesn't realise there is a man resting against the trunk listening. And so Kalu and the healer meet, and Kalu’s life is changed forever.

Imagine a faraway country that was once a friend of the West becoming the enemy, its people isolated and savagely repressed by a tyrant known as Great Uncle. As one of the country's most celebrated writers and a war hero, the storyteller has a better life than most – until he is made an offer he can't refuse. He must write a great novel, telling of the suffering of his people under the enemy's cruel economic sanctions and portraying Great Uncle as their saviour.

Son of a Norwegian master-mariner and grandson of Kaloni, the last of the great Polynesian navigators, Gunnar Thorkild is a man consumed by a dream. Convinced that the Polynesians’ legendary Island of the Dead is real, he risks his career, his life – and those of his fellow adventurers – to find it. Shipwrecked on the very island they seek, the castaways are forced to leave behind everything they know and rely upon. To survive in this lush tropical paradise, they must make new laws of power and property, of sex and marriage.