Shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal 2019 ‘A gentle whisper from the past Visits me in my dreams Or is it the future that I see ... ’ From well-known poets John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk-Green comes a tête-à-tête that is powerful, thought provoking, and challenges what we think we know about our country, colonisation, and how we understand our land. Striking conversations surrounding childhood, life, love, mining, death, respect, and diversity; imbued by silken Yamatji sensibility and sublimely responded to by the son of a foreman from South Champion Mine. This extraordinary publication weaves two differing points of view together as Papertalk-Green and Kinsella’s words traverse this land and reflect back to us all, our many identities and quiet voices.

An entertaining, deeply informative explanation of how high-level financial crimes work, written by an industry insider who’s an expert in the field. The way most white-collar crime works is by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. Financial crime seems horribly complicated, but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what’s theirs. In Lying for Money, veteran regulatory economist and market analyst Dan Davies tells the story of fraud through a genealogy of financial malfeasance, including: the Great Salad Oil swindle, the Pigeon King International fraud, the fictional British colony of Poyais in South America, the Boston Ladies’ Deposit Company, the Portuguese Banknote Affair, Theranos, and the Bre-X scam. Davies brings new insights into these schemes and shows how all frauds, current and historical, belong to one of four categories (“long firm,” counterfeiting, control fraud, and market crimes) and operate on the same basic principles. The only elements that change are the victims, the scammers, and the terminology. Davies has years of experience picking the bones out of some of the most famous frauds of the modern age. Now he reveals the big picture that emerges from their labyrinths of deceit and explains how fraud has shaped the entire development of the modern world economy.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Women's Studies, Native Australian Studies. Forty years ago, letters, words and feelings flowed between a teenage daughter and her mother. Letters written by that teenage daughter--me--handed around family back home, disappeared. Yet letters from that mother to her teenage daughter--me--remained protected in my red life-journey suitcase. I carried them across time and landscapes as a mother would carry her baby in a thaga. In 1978-79, I was living in an Aboriginal girls' hostel in the Bentley suburb of Perth, attending senior high school. Mum and I sent handwritten letters to each other. I was a small-town teenager stepping outside of all things I had ever known. Mum remained in the only world she had ever known. NGANAJUNGU YAGU was inspired by Mother's letters, her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture. A substantial part of that culture is language, and I missed out on so much language interaction having moved away. I talk with my ancestors' language--Badimaya and Wajarri--to honour ancestors, language centres, language workers and those Yamaji who have been and remain generous in passing on cultural knowledge.

In 1889, the first Official Secrets Act was passed, creating offences of 'disclosure of information' and 'breach of official trust'. It limited and monitored what the public could, and should, be told. Since then a culture of secrecy has flourished. As successive governments have been selective about what they choose to share with the public, we have been left with a distorted and incomplete understanding not only of the workings of the state but of our nation's culture and its past. In this important book, Ian Cobain offers a fresh appraisal of some of the key moments in British history since the end of WWII, including: the measures taken to conceal the existence of Bletchley Park and its successor, GCHQ, for three decades; the unreported wars fought during the 1960s and 1970s; the hidden links with terrorist cells during the Troubles; the sometimes opaque workings of the criminal justice system; the state's peacetime surveillance techniques; and the convenient loopholes in the Freedom of Information Act. Drawing on previously unseen material and rigorous research, The History Thieves reveals how a complex bureaucratic machine has grown up around the British state, allowing governments to evade accountability and their secrets to be buried.

A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.

This powerful reinterpretation of United States history is remarkable not only for its scholarship and historical breadth, but also in its assertion that the success of the country depends in a large part on the unique American character, which has shaped so many historic events. In the first of a projected three-volume series, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walter A. McDougall argues that the creation of the United States is the central event in the last four hundred years of world history. Freedom Just Around the Corner masterfully chronicles the earliest years of this nation, revealing that the genius behind the success of the United States is not based on the works and ideas of one person, but rather on the complex, irrepressible American spirit. A professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, Walter A. McDougall is the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth and Let the Sea Make a Noise..., Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877, and Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage children. “The chapter on the framing of the Constitution should be required reading ... Walter McDougall is a historian with a masterful grasp of his subject.” — Claude Crowley, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

In elegant, sensual prose, Michael Crummey crafts a haunting tale set in Newfoundland at the turn of the 19th century. A richly imagined story about love, loss and the heartbreaking compromises—both personal and political—that undermine lives, River Thieves is a masterful debut novel. Published in Canada and the United States, it joins a wave of classic literature from eastern Canada, including the works of Alistair MacLeod, Wayne Johnston and David Adams Richards, while resonating at times with the spirit of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. An enthralling story of passion and suspense, River Thieves captures both the vast sweep of history and the intimate lives of a deeply emotional and complex cast of characters caught in its wake.