Winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction,The Age Book of the Year Award for Non-fiction, The Dobbie Prize for Best First Book. A lyrical memoir from a first-time author that has won critical acclaim Australia-wide. In the tradition of Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy, Mahood offers an intense and sensitive exploration of identity, familial ties and black/white relations in Australia. Craft For A Dry Lake is a memoir that will touch the hearts and souls of every Australian. In Craft For A Dry Lake Kim Mahood takes us on a lyrical journey to her heartland - travelling with her beloved cattle dog back into the Outback of her youth, seeking to lay to rest her father's ghost but finding herself faced with many of her own.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 VICTORIAN PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARDS FOR NON-FICTION Imagine the document you have before you is not a book but a map. It is well-used, creased, and folded, so that when you open it, no matter how carefully, something tears and a line that is neither latitude nor longitude opens in the hidden geography of the place you are about to enter. Since the publication of her prize-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake, in 2000, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to the Tanami desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional owners; the mining companies have arrived; and Aboriginal art has flourished. Comedy and tragedy, familiarity and uncertainty are Mahood’s constant companions as she immerses herself in the life of a small community and in groundbreaking mapping projects. What emerges in Position Doubtful is a revelation of the significance of the land to its people — and of the burden of history. Mahood is an artist of astonishing versatility. She works with words, with paint, with installations, and with performance art. Her writing about her own work and collaborations, and about the work of the desert artists, is profoundly enlightening, making palpable the link between artist and country. This is a beautiful and intense exploration of friendships, landscape, and homecoming. Written with great energy and humour, Position Doubtful offers a unique portrait of the complexities of black and white relations in contemporary Australia. PRAISE FOR KIM MAHOOD ‘[Mahood] is a talented writer whose mastery of the language is absolute. The combination of an artist’s eye, a mapmaker’s precision, and a wordsmith’s playfulness makes for a work of captivating beauty … a significant and timely work.’ The Weekend Australian ‘An extraordinary excavation of the relationship, past and present, between settlers and indigenous Australians, deeply grounded in this alluring tract of desert, but with relevance for us all.’ The Monthly

People would have known about Australia before they saw it. Smoke billowing above the sea spoke of a land that lay beyond the horizon. A dense cloud of migrating birds may have pointed the way. But the first Australians were voyaging into the unknown. Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent. Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia. It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging. It is about a slow shift in national consciousness: the deep time dreaming that has changed the way many of us relate to this continent and its enduring, dynamic human history. John Mulvaney Book Award: Winner Ernest Scott Prize: Winner NSW Premier's Literary Awards: Winner - Book of the Year NSW Premier's Literary Awards: Winner - Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards: Highly Commended Queensland Literary Awards: Shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards: Shortlisted Educational Publishing Awards: Shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards: Longlisted CHASS Book Prize: Longlisted ‘What a revelatory work! If you wish to hear the voice of our continent's history before the written word, Deep Time Dreaming is a must read. The freshest, most important book about our past in years.’ —Tim Flannery ‘Once every generation a book comes along that marks the emergence of a powerful new literary voice and shifts our understanding of the nation’s past. Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming is one such book. Deeply researched, creatively conceived and beautifully written, it charts the expansion of archaeological knowledge in Australia for the first time. No other book has managed to convey the mystery and intricacy of Indigenous antiquity in quite the same way. Read it: it will change the way you see Australian history.’ —Mark McKenna, historian ‘Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia is a remarkable book, and one destined, I believe, to become a modern classic of Australian history writing. Written in vivid, evocative prose, this book will grip both the expert and the general reader alike.’ —Iain McCalman, author of The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

A spellbinding meditation on art and life that travels from Eastern Europe to Northern Australia, from World War II to the present. Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, 2014 Elegiac and seductive, Belomor is the frontier where truth and invention meet, where fragments from distant lives intermingle, and cohere. A man seeks out the father figure who shaped his picture of the past. A painter seeks redemption after the disasters of his years in northern Australia. A student of history travels into the depths of religion, the better to escape the demons in his mind. A filmmaker seeks out freedom and open space, and looks into the murk and sediment of herself. Four chapters: four journeys through life, separate, yet interwoven as the narrative unfolds. In this entrancing new book from one of our most original writers, we meet European dissidents from the age of postwar communism, artists in remote Australia, snake hunters, opal miners and desert magic healers. Belomor is a meditation on time, and loss: on how the most bitter recollections bring happiness, and the meaning of a secret rests in the thoughts surrounding it. Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Heaven and Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior. He lives in Darwin, and is the Australian's roving northern correspondent. 'Melancholy, singular, exhilarating, Belomor reads like a haunted history of the world.' Delia Falconer 'Belomor is exhilarating, challenging and draining...The existence of a final page, a final sentence, presupposes some sort of climax, but Belomor would be better suited to looping back and beginning all over again.' Adelaide Advertiser 'Rothwell's writing resists easy description. He roams the borderlands between memoir and fiction and insinuates himself into gaps between time and place...His prose is lush and often beautiful.' Weekend Australian 'At a time when writers and publishers shy away from the obscure and the oblique, Rothwell's ambition and the intricacy of his book must be acknowledged.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Thoughout these pages, Rothwell proves adept at navigating the cross-currents of European cultural history. Nevertheless, the main emphasis of Belomor falls elsewhere, on the physical, cultural and spiritual complexion of a seemingly very different world: the vast, enigmatic spaces of the north of Australia that Rothwell has traversed for many years. This frequently oblique but almost always compelling book seeks to reconcile those apparently opposed worlds, tracing subtle but significant affinities between Europe's historically determined self-consciousness and what might be called the Dreamtime.' Saturday Age, Canberra Times, Sydney Morning Herald 'A peculiar and bewitching work of Australian literature...a hymn of praise to the north and its inhabitants.' Herald Sun 'Rothwell's calm wondering...left me with a feeling of enchantment.' Robert Dessaix 'Spanning continents and decades, this is a work that defies literary conventions; seamlessly moving between fact and fiction, memoir and essay, history and digressive conversation...it also poses critical questions about the present and future of our culture that will stay with readers long after they finish this book.' Bill Godber, Managing Director Turnaround UK

An Alice Girl is Tanya Heaslip's extraordinary story of growing up in the late 1960s and early 70s on a vast and isolated outback cattle property just north of Alice Springs. Tanya's parents, Janice and Grant 'the Boss', were pioneers. They developed the cattle station where water was scarce, where all power was dependent on generators and where a trip to town for supplies usually meant a full day's journey. Grant was determined to teach his children how to survive in this severe and isolated environment and his lessons were often harsh. Tanya and her siblings led a childhood unimaginable to many Australians. Whether working the mobs of cattle with the stockmen, playing cattle-duffing on horseback or singing and doing lessons at their School of the Air desks, the children were always aware of the demands of the land. But while her sister and brothers loved riding and working stock, Tanya's heart longed to be back at the homestead with her books and stories. In a childhood that many would consider very tough, Tanya tells of this precious time with raw honesty, humour, love and kindness. This is the story of an Alice girl. 'Tanya Heaslip lived the outback childhood of Australian mythology. Stories like this remind us that love of place is universal.' Kim Mahood, NSW Premier's Literary Award for Craft for a Dry Lake 'Tanya's story glows with love for family and the rugged, wild outback land that never leaves her heart.' Toni Tapp Coutts, bestselling author of A Sunburnt Childhood 'Territory station kids like Tanya had the ultimate upbringing . . . A great read!' Ted Egan AO, bestselling author of Outback Songman

WINNER OF THE 2023 AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FOR NONFICTION To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt — and to risk failure. For Kim Mahood, it is both a form of writing and an approach to life. In these finely observed and probing essays, award-winning artist and writer Kim Mahood invites us to accompany her on the road and into the remote places of Australia where she is engaged in long-established collaborations of mapping, storytelling, and placemaking. Celebrated as one of the few Australian writers who both lives within and can articulate the complexities and tensions that arise in the spaces between Aboriginal and settler Australia, Mahood writes passionately and eloquently about the things that capture her senses and demand her attention — art, country, people, and writing. Her compelling evocation of desert landscapes and tender, wry observations of cross-cultural relationships describe people, places, and ways of living that are familiar to her but still strange to most non-Indigenous Australians. At once a testament to personal freedom and a powerful argument for Indigenous self-determination, Wandering with Intent demonstrates, with candour, humour, and hope, how necessary and precious it is for each of us to choose how to live.

Desert Lake is a book combining artistic, scientific and Indigenous views of a striking region of north-western Australia. Paruku is the place that white people call Lake Gregory. It is Walmajarri land, and its people live on their Country in the communities of Mulan and Billiluna. This is a story of water. When Sturt Creek flows from the north, it creates a massive inland Lake among the sandy deserts. Not only is Paruku of national significance for waterbirds, but it has also helped uncover the past climatic and human history of Australia. Paruku's cultural and environmental values inspire Indigenous and other artists, they define the place as an enduring home, and have led to its declaration as an Indigenous Protected Area. The Walmajarri people of Paruku understand themselves in relation to Country, a coherent whole linking the environment, the people and the Law that governs their lives. These understandings are encompassed by the Waljirri or Dreaming and expressed through the songs, imagery and narratives of enduring traditions. Desert Lake is embedded in this broader vision of Country and provides a rich visual and cross-cultural portrait of an extraordinary part of Australia.