A look at isopod systematics and evolution, topics confronted include the influence of genetic and extrachromasomal factors on their population rate and a comparison of different species in different habitats.

Echinoderms, including feather stars, seastars, brittle stars, sea urchins and sea cucumbers, are some of the most beautiful and interesting animals in the sea. They play an important ecological role and several species of sea urchins and sea cucumbers form the basis of important fisheries. Over 1000 species live in Australian waters, from the shoreline to the depths of the abyssal plain and the tropics to Antarctic waters. Australian Echinoderms is an authoritative account of Australia’s 110 families of echinoderms. It brings together in a single volume comprehensive information on the identification, biology, evolution, ecology and management of these animals for the first time. Richly illustrated with beautiful photographs and written in an accessible style, Australian Echinoderms suits the needs of marine enthusiasts, academics and fisheries managers both in Australia and other geographical areas where echinoderms are studied.

Tim Burstall, the celebrated director of Stork, Alvin Purple and numerous other definitive 'ocker' comedies, is credited with shaking the moribund Australian film industry out of its torpor. But long before that, in the early 1950s, he began keeping a diary to record the world of the group of 'arties' and 'intellectuals' he was living among in Eltham, then a rural area outside Melbourne, where cheap land was available for mudbrick houses and studios, and where suburban rigidities could be mercilessly flouted. Burstall was in his mid-twenties, with two young sons and an open marriage with his wife, Betty. Eager to become a writer, to go against the grain, he kept a record almost daily-of the parties and the talk in pubs and studios, about art and politics and sex, of Communist Party branch meetings and film societies, of political rallies and the first Herald Outdoor Art Show. Somehow, while holding down a public relations job in the Antarctic Division and juggling his love affairs and obsession with the beautiful, brainy Fay, he wrote 500 words almost every day. Betty, according to the diaries, kept the show on the road, feeding friends after the pub, milking goats and working in her pottery making bowls and mugs, which Tim sometimes decorated at weekends. These Memoirs of a Young Bastard, as Burstall dubbed himself and them, are among the most evocative Australian diaries of modern times. Burstall can write. He has an eye for the telling detail, an unerring ear for cant and pomposity and, most endearingly, an ability to mock himself-always from the perspective of a bloke of his generation.

WINNER OF THE 2021 PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 'A strange and mesmerising piece of work' Sunday Times 'An absolute masterpiece' Laura Cumming 'An uncommon delight' Observer Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she turns her curator's eye to the fabric of life itself, tugging at the threads of memory: a cardigan worn by a child, a tin button box, the draping of a curtain, a pair of cycling shorts, a roll of lace, a pin hidden in a seam. Through these intimate and compelling close-ups, we see how the stories and the secrets of clothes measure out the passage of time, our gains and losses, and the way we use them to unravel and write our histories. 'Effervescent, poetic, puzzle-like ... Wilcox picks at the heartstrings' Financial Times