A beer barrel full of yarns, laughs and beer-related facts, this is the perfect book to flip through while you're enjoying a cold one! Why is one of our prime ministers in the GUINNESS BOOK OF RECORDS? How many beers did Rodney Marsh really drink? How did beer save the life of a bloke bitten by a bloody great big brown snake? the answers to these and many other burning beer-related questions can be found in the pages of the great Aussie volume, GREAt AUStRALIAN BEER YARNS. With this collection of funny, frank and fascinating beer stories, Peter Lalor has managed to create every beer lover's dream - the perfect book to flip through while you're enjoying a cold one!

Whatever the circumstances, Australians have always found something to laugh about, laugh at or laugh off. Graham Seal has been gathering traditional stories from country towns and the outback for decades, and here he compiles the very funniest stories he has encountered. 'Graham Seal writes ripper, fair dinkum, true-blue Aussie yarns.' - The Weekly Times Australians traditionally like their humour irreverent, crude and with very sharp teeth. Perhaps you've heard of the vicious drop bears that fall on unsuspecting tourists as they walk through the bush? Or the hoop snakes that put their tails in their mouths as they roll down the hill towards you? Or how about the Citizenship Test for Aspiring Australians which begins with this question about an essential life skill: 'How many slabs can you fit in the back of a Falcon ute while also allowing room for your cattle dog?' The bush is the source of traditional Aussie humour. Pioneering, settlement and battling fire, flood and drought have produced yarns of tough cocky farmers, shearers, bush workers, swaggies and dreadful cooks. Much of this humour relates to the resilience and fortitude necessary to endure the realities of rural life. Australians took this sensibility with them to war and to work in the cities, and the tradition continues today. Whatever the circumstances, Australians have always found something to laugh about, laugh at or laugh off. 'Graham Seal has the knack of the storyteller.' - Warren Fahey AM

Love, life, writing and friendship are the intimate subjects of letters between three intelligent, witty women who shared a passionate commitment to Australian literature. These carefully selected letters tell a story that reads like a novel. Their correspondence - from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s - reveals their public battles as well as their private ones. Their personal conflicts are a microcosm of Australian society's struggles over the period.

Beer Mania transports readers back to the glory days of Fourex, Reschs and Carlton. A time of Emus, Swans, Sparkling Ales and Boags. Of catchy slogans and Foster's front man Hoges.Drink up tasty tales telling a potted history of beer and brewing in this wide brown land. Ever feel like a Tooheys or two? Or had a hard-earned thirst? Then this one's made for you.

This book, which can be seen as both a research monograph and a text book, challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal "maxims of conversation" and "principles of politeness", which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people - refugees, immigrants, crosscultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which can be of no use in crosscultural communication and education, this book is both theoretical and practical: it shows that in different societies, norms of human interaction are different and reflect different cultural attitudes and values; and it offers a framework within which different cultural norms and different ways of speaking can be effectively explored, explained, and taught. The book discusses data from a wide range of languages, including English, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Walmatjari (an Australian Aboriginal language), and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different "cultural scripts" prevailing in different speech communities can be described and compared in a way that is clear, simple, rigorous, and free of ethnocentric bias by using a "natural semantic metalanguage", based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication and education, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.

'Heads and Tasker, legends themselves, set out to write a book that would continue the trail laid by early-days sporting scribes of long ago. I could not put it down.' John Coates AC, President of the Australian Olympic Committee 'I know readers will enjoy the many stories and anecdotes that Heads and Tasker have accumulated over more than a century combined in journalism.' Ian Chappell, former Australian cricket Captain. Australia enjoys a rich sporting heritage. Our small population has yielded a disproportionate number of champions. These sports stars have become known worldwide as fierce combatants and honourable competitors, achieving soaring victories, but also heart-pounding near-wins and humbling defeats. Veteran Australian sports journalists Ian Heads and Norman Tasker have seen it all. In these 65 original stories, we hear of the explosive introduction of World Series Cricket in 1977, which turned a genteel endeavour into a high-octane contest, and the clash of the titans as Packer and Murdoch squared off over the Super League war. We see Rugby Union become a battleground for race and the Olympics an arena for sublime acts of courage and achievement. We get an insider's perspective on every kind of sporting endeavour - from boxing to tennis, cricket to AFL, athletics to rugby league - and not just the action on the field, but the change room gossip and clubhouse politics as well. Written with wit, insight and a wealth of knowledge, Great Australian Sporting Stories is an enthralling expedition into the combative, collegiate, entertaining and always exciting world of Australian sport.