Debra Gavranich

Marija lives in a small village on the idyllic island of Korčula off the coast near Split in the country now known as Croatia. At 18 years of age she agrees to a proxy marriage to a 27-year-old sugarcane farmer in Far North Queensland who had left the village as a small child with his family in the 1920s. The couple do not know each other, having only exchanged photographs and a handful of letters, but this marriage is Marija’s escape from a traumatised post-war Europe. Her childhood is scarred by constant fear, with death and brutality stalking the island after it is occupied, first by the Italian army and later by the Nazis. Marija’s older sister joins the Partisan rebels as a codebreaker for General Tito, while Marija and her younger sister and father secretly help the Partisans hiding in the hills, with intelligence on the enemy.

A life in Australia with a husband she does not know is a risk worth taking. She travels by ship to Australia along with hundreds of other young men and women seeking escape from poverty and despair in the old world to the promise of adventure, love and a better life. Finding herself sharing a farmhouse with a hostile father-in-law far removed from neighbours, in the midst of cane fields in tropical Queensland, was only bearable as she fell in love with her devoted husband, created her own family and with it, a future for the next generations in the new country.

This is the migrant story of Australia, of courageous individuals taking the biggest risk of their lives often with little or no English. Their determination and hard work enable them to live with their sacrifices and overcome the profound loneliness of homesickness. The result is the rich diversity of our modern multicultural nation.

Dominic Frawley

On 1st March 1999, Dom Frawley was a rural general practitioner, providing medical care to a few hundred families through a small cottage practice. He and his wife Maggie were due to deliver their fourth child any day. Dom worked daily with people at their most vulnerable: sick, powerless, and often fearful or distressed. His job was to help carry them through.

By nightfall on 2nd March, Dom and Maggie were the ones needing help. Their newborn child was critically ill, flown by helicopter to an intensive care unit in Sydney. The baby’s life rested in the hands of Dom’s former colleagues.

Malachy had a major heart defect, making him a ‘blue baby’. His family were forced to experience the medical system from the patient side, walking with Malachy in a prolonged struggle with severe disability. Fear for the future stalked enjoyment of the present. Drawing on Maggie’s love, his passion for philosophy and innate optimism, Dom navigated a slow path to equilibrium. A deep father-son bond developed, enriching the lives of both.

Malachy’s heart disease inspired Maggie and Dom into activist roles with HeartKids. Dom adds “Malachy had taken up activism for the HeartKids movement and became an inspiration amongst his peers, and to many who crossed his path. The burden of heart disease brought a certain type of meaning and definition to our lives. All the while we had to balance the cause against the needs of three other children, and the demands of work and daily life.”

Then Malachy died. Life changed again. The carefully built framework of family life, Dom’s beliefs and ability to cope came up against life’s irresistible, final challenge.

Malachy: A father’s story of love, laughter and loss explores the bond of love between a parent and their child. It is a reminder of how treasured and important all children are. It is also a story about living with the agony of loss. The story touches what it means to love and be loved, to stare down hostile fate with a sense of humour, and to embrace life with courage and resilience.

Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert

Essential reading for everyone, especially in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter

This second edition of The Cherry Picker’s Daughter is an exquisite portrait of growing up Aboriginal on the fringes of outback towns in NSW in the mid-twentieth century. It’s a poignant insight into the Aboriginal experience in Australian history, as we are shown the extraordinary strength, resilience and ingenuity of Aboriginal families to overcome extreme poverty, persecution, racism and cultural genocide.

The strength of family ties in Aboriginal communities is clearly evident when three-month-old Kerry and her brother lost both parents. Her father, Kevin Gilbert––later to become a famous activist and artist––was jailed for many years and her father’s sister, whom she always called ‘Mummy’, raised Kerry and her brother, along with her own children and others within the extended family. The book is a tribute to this truly remarkable woman, who not only loved them selflessly and worked tirelessly to support them, but also managed to keep them from being taken/‘stolen’ by the ‘Welfare’.

Told in the child’s voice and in the vernacular of her Mob, activist, artist, poet and author, Aunty Kerry, tells her story of love and loss, of dispossession and repeated dislocation growing up in corrugated tin huts, tents and run-down train carriages, of helping her family earn ‘an honest living’ through fruit picking, and the impact of life as an Aboriginal state ward living under the terror of Protection Laws. It is a timely and significant contribution to our indigenous literature.

Sue Course

In 1977, Sue Course discovered a box of airmail letters in the dark recesses of a cupboard, written in German.

Her German was rusty, but she could see that most were from her parents and grandparents and were written from the time of the Nazi invasion of Vienna in 1938. The letters revealed a gripping tale of their war and that of their extended family, the stories of those who escaped and eventually resettled across the globe, and their experiences in that process.

The story was fleshed out through the later discovery of diaries and far-flung family members’ war memoirs. Lost Letters from Vienna provides a unique social history and insights into the lives of Sue’s wealthy Viennese Jewish family who, despite centuries of persecution, managed to develop global businesses with privileged lifestyles, enriched by the magnificent cultural and intellectual life that Vienna had become famous for. For Sue’s family, their entitlement to be a part of Viennese society and a citizen of the Austrian nation itself was lost when the Nazis annexed her country.

Sue was just four when she arrived in Australia with her family, too young to appreciate the penurious circumstances of their life at a time where German-speaking foreigners were viewed as ‘enemy aliens’, and where there was little immediate opportunity for non-English-speaking professionals to find respect or employment in their professions. Antipodean life was a far cry from the genteel experience of being raised in Vienna, and this story documents superbly the displacement, dislocation and immense struggle for those who have had to flee their countries, with its destructive consequences: loss of identity, culture, career, family and social networks, or any acknowledgement of value to the host society.

Cheryl Koenig

Optimism, resilience, audacity, hope, surviving daily challenges for themselves and those they love; carers embody all of these qualities. Cheryl Koenig's fifth book, a memoir, deals with all those human qualities necessary to not only survive a life-threatening diagnoses and a subsequent insidiously painful disease, but to thrive in spite of them.

Cheryl's is a story about never giving up, nor giving in. Most importantly, however, it is a love story that knows no limits. It is the sequel to her fourth book, With Just One Suitcase, where she met her soulmate, Rob, at fifteen and is still happily married to him after a turbulent life where hers, and her eldest son's mortality was questioned.

With her fearless spirit, Cheryl reveals the mindset that helped her survive, along with some courageous admissions regarding her perceived character flaws. But despite her frankness in discussing life after blood cancer, she is not a victim. Cheryl is an exemplar of her belief that the world is full of unknown achievers who have found a way to stay hopeful despite being fractured on life's battlefields. They each demonstrate that the path of a champion lies within. They each are resilient.

'For everything each life crisis has taken from us, something of greater value has been given. Ultimately the choice belongs to us, not fate, to determine how we respond to trials; to determine our own quality of life,' Cheryl says.

In My Blood is her inspirational response.

Megan Blandford

With her career down the toilet, a husband who was never home, a baby screaming non-stop and her cries for help falling on deaf ears, Megan Blandford spent years saying, “I’m fine”. Like many who say that, she wasn’t fine. Megan sank into postnatal depression and anxiety. The story covers the challenges of parenthood, high functioning and invisible depression, the value of self-compassion in recovery, the stigma around asking for help, and the inner battle so many of us deal with daily.

Megan’s story is one of raw honesty, humour and hope. It’s a story that speaks to the three million Australians who are living with depression or anxiety, and the one in seven women who experience postnatal depression and anxiety.

“There are surprisingly few stories told about what postnatal depression is really like. This only feeds the stigma and shame that surrounds it – so it’s time to talk more openly about this experience that affects so many,” Megan says. “I really hope that, in sharing my story, I can help to break down the walls of that stigma a little more, so that others feel less lonely and more able to ask for help.”

Rod Moss

The memoirs and paintings that Rod Moss has produced during the last 35 years are unique in their dramatisation of the lives of his trusting Aboriginal family and have been critically acclaimed nationally and internationally. In his third memoir we follow the nurturing of the curiosity and openness that has fastened him to the luminous power of Central Australia and its First Peoples. From the foothills of Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges and his city-based art education, we are taken to arid-zone Victoria where he first embraces the climate most conducive to his well-being. He returns to the city and is invited to participate in Melbourne’s dynamic experimental small school movement. Then there’s a year in the USA studying the ‘spiritual’ teachings of Gurdjieff in a Shenandoah farm setting. Travel necessarily widens perceptions and continues to pique his curiosity. A trip to a Pilbra Indigenous community opens the door on the Aboriginal world that he will spend the rest of his life coming to terms with.

Crossing the Great Divide is deeply insightful without pretension; compelling reading for those who relish exquisite writing combined with the artist-philosopher’s apprehension of our world. The reader is swept along through an historical arc of great moments. At times it reads like some exotic travelogue where familiar places are freshly painted in details only remembered as you read––like a 3-dimensional re-experiencing of that place. Throughout, it creates a strong sense of the unique, essential Australianness with which we apprehend our world

Olfat Mahmoud

Olfat Mahmoud is a Palestinian refugee. Born in a refugee camp in Lebanon, she is a descendant of the Christian and Muslim people who were forced from their homeland at gunpoint by the Israeli military in the 1948’s Nakba, ‘Catastrophe’, and who fled Palestine in the period leading up to – and after – the subsequent founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

In 1949, David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the State of Israel and the first prime minister, stated that ‘we must do everything to ensure [the Palestinians] never do return… the old will die and the young will forget’.

Olfat’s life mission is to fulfil the dream of her parents and grandparents to return to their hometown, Tarshiha in Palestine. Her determination to help her people in their fight to return to their homeland, has led to a nursing career that has placed her at the front line of atrocious massacres and wars in the Middle East.

Tears for Tarshiha follows Olfat’s career – as a registered nurse, the director of an international NGO, an internationally recognised peace activist, and most recently, the recipient of a doctorate – amid the death and destruction of Lebanon’s many conflicts; and chronicles the Palestinian people’s remarkable capacity for love and bravery in the most extreme conditions. Olfat’s extraordinary story is emblematic of the Palestinian plight, illustrating their continued survival and determination that has become an inconvenience to the international community.

Despite Olfat’s parents and grandparents never seeing Tarshiha again, this book is part of Olfat’s ongoing campaign to keep her people’s predicament in the public consciousness. This is their story, and the story of all Palestinians and their descendants who were forced from their homeland.

Vikki Petraitis

Once a copper, always a copper. At least that's how it seems for Brian 'The Skull' Murphy, long-retired but sought out by a trail of journalists and cops who regularly beat a path to his door. Once known as Australia's toughest cop, The Skull was both charged with manslaughter (and acquitted), then awarded a Valour Award for bravery in the line of duty. It is these two sides to the complex man that intrigue audiences to this day.

A non-drinking, Catholic family man, The Skull didn't fit the 1950s police mould and often found himself on the outer among his colleagues. Dodging crooks and corruption on both sides of the thin blue line, The Skull carefully cultivated a reputation for being a 'mad bastard'. Over 40 men felt the sting of his bullets, and many more felt the sting of his fists.

But behind Australia's toughest cop lay a personal secret of sexual abuse which Murphy shares publicly for the first time, in the hope that it will help others. This abuse formed the kind of police officer he later became — tough on the bad guys, but fiercely protective towards victims.

Once a Copper explores the many facets of The Skull’s story. Starting on the mean streets of South Melbourne, to his early years as a policeman, then his fight against police corruption. No one was off-limits to Skull Murphy who used his street smarts to outwit the wiliest of crooks. He formed enemies of an epic nature – among them was Great Bookie Robber, Ray ‘Chuck’ Bennett. Indeed, when Bennett was gunned down in broad daylight, Murphy was an early suspect (he swears he was nowhere near the Magistrates’ Court that day). Notorious hitman, Christopher Dale Flannery, once had The Skull in his sights, as did the infamous Painters and Dockers. He wore his unpredictability like a shield of steel, and courted unlikely informers like killer, Dennis Allen.

Much has been written about The Skull’s escapades, but few have explored the method behind the madness.

Awards: Ned Kelly & Davitt Award (longlisted)

Cheryl Koenig

This is a true story about two boys, Istvan and Frici, who live two kilometres but worlds apart in Romania. One is Catholic, one is Jewish; one grows up on a farm, the other in the affluent part of town. Life is routine and secure, the future seems predictable and each boy knows his place.

Yet when the Second World War breaks out, the familiar world with its clear divisions disintegrates. Families are torn apart as men are forcibly recruited to fight in the war. As the country comes under Nazi, then later communist control, people are held hostage to an ever-changing political landscape, punctuated by military interventions and fluctuating allegiances. As the chance of a peaceful future becomes more remote, with a totalitarian regime in control, Frici and his brother, already facing persecution as Jews, escape across the border with the help of people smugglers, the authorities in pursuit.

Istvan, just 16 years old, is transported to work in a Russian gulag before his chance at freedom comes, too. In their parallel journeys, both young men leave their families and beloved homeland to an uncertain future for a shot at freedom in Australia, sacrificing all that is familiar. Facing the challenge of building a new life, they even change their names in an effort to belong.

This epic book, spanning two continents, recounts the story of three generations of two families whose lives unexpectedly intersect in their adopted country. Beautifully capturing the loss faced when war dislocates families, it also tells of the struggles and challenges of starting anew and adapting to a different way of life. With Just One Suitcase serves as a tribute to the courage and resilience of two men who bear the scars of war, and face adversity without surrendering their optimism for the future.

Edited by Jan Tresize

A collection of poignant stories and poems of seven East Timorese families living in Melbourne whose experiences belong to that long history of human tragedy created where violent conflict of power, land and resources takes place, inevitably visiting on ordinary people, disruption and loss. Since 1975 to 1999, men, women and children, and even grandparents, have been forced to flee their beloved homeland, their culture, their language, their families––and the graves of those murdered in repeated massacres over those years.

The East Timorese have a special place in our history: so close geographically; giving succour and safe haven to our soldiers during the Japanese occupation of their island; our government in 1975 giving tacit support for an Indonesian invasion with its consequent brutal oppression; and later, in the bloody aftermath of the 1999 independence vote, Australia supporting independence and leading a UN international peace-keeping force to the island.

And from 1975 to 1999, refugees arrived in Australia, mostly settling in Melbourne, quietly making new lives, without fuss or fanfare. Some returned after independence, many contributing their Australian-acquired skills and experience to the fledgling country.

Until now, their stories, written by people in their community, have not been recorded and published. With a heritage tied so closely to Australia in so many ways, this collection represents an essential part of the great story of migration, whether voluntary or forced, to this country particularly in the last 50 years. The reader will be moved by these remarkable, courageous, and resilient people, who endured so much, just on our doorstep.

The East Timorese families in these stories settled in the City of Casey in Melbourne’s south-east. The stories are woven into the history of East Timor, a country that was colonised by Portugal for four hundred years, invaded by the Japanese during World War Two, later abandoned by its colonisers and suffered civil war before being invaded by neighbouring Indonesia.

In the various periods of this history there are acts of defiance against oppression which resulted in family members being exiled, imprisoned or executed. In two families this fate was passed down through several generations.

Some families were split apart as a result of war and conflict, suffering separation for many years. One family of seven children lost their father and were then separated from their mother for more than three years. A 13-year-old girl was away from home when her family were forced to flee. Left behind, she suffered incredible trauma for many years before being reunited with the other family members.

Several mothers and some grandmothers were left alone in conflict zones to care for their children and grandchildren, and some were forced to take refuge before being able to escape. And yet, in times when family members were suffering great deprivation at the hands of occupying forces, there were small acts of kindness by individual soldiers.

Tjanara Goreng Goreng with Julie Szego

Life was tough and poor as an Aboriginal kid in No Go, in remote Queensland. Dr Tjanara Goreng Goreng navigates the treacherous waters of her childhood, immersed in the legacy of 200 years of brutal treatment of her mother’s people that has left its suppurating scars deep in their psyche. Tjanara’s parents believed that education was the only way to break through systemic poverty, and found ways to send all seven children to school that were at once desperate and fraught. A disempowered people are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse – in her case, by the Catholic clergy.

A strong-willed, successful student and athlete, after graduating from university, the times were ripe. She found her place in the new era of federal policymaking: land rights and self-determination, initiatives on health, education, and social justice that were spearheaded by Charlie Perkins and his bright young people. Tjanara was at the nerve centre of Australia’s political life, shaping policy during the most exciting and innovative period in Australian politics.

But she struggles to escape the dark side that leads straight back to her heritage – her experiences as an Indigenous Australian: the abuse, the daily acts of cruel racism, the despairing plight of her people, the addictions to numb the pain. Rising to a management position in Social Policy within the Prime Minister’s Department, the ideological landscape has taken a tectonic turn under the Howard government. When fraudulent claims are cooked up to give the government an excuse to send the military into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, she courageously blows the whistle, and is sacked, charged and convicted for breaches of the Crimes Act relating to disclosure of confidential information; and is bankrupted for her actions.

Always the professional, engaged in numerous ways to help her people, her own damage leads her on a search for healing: from psychotherapy to Aboriginal knowledge to Indian meditation and spirituality.

Szego is captivated and captivates us with this extraordinary Australian whose irrepressible, playful wicked humour leaps off the pages, even as we glimpse the personal and communal pain and despair at times in a life that sweeps across the breadth of the land and its history.

Para Paheer with Alison Corke

In May 2009 Sri Lanka’s long and dreadful civil war was finally brought to an horrific end. Ruthlessly driven to a small strip of land on the tip of the island’s north-east coast, tens of thousands of innocent civilians died, smashed by artillery, killed by snipers, denied medical treatment and starved to death beneath the baking sun.

This ferocious battle consolidated and highlighted the terrors of the preceding twenty-six years of war, characterised by torture, vicious murders and desperate acts from both sides. In such a cruel war, was there any room for humanity?

This is the story of an impoverished young Tamil growing up during one of the modern world’s longest conflicts. A child when the war began, Para grew up to become a student leader who was targeted, captured and tortured by the Sri Lankan government. Fleeing to seek asylum in Australia, after a gruelling month at sea his boat capsized in the middle of the Indian Ocean. All seemed lost until he was miraculously rescued by the gas tanker LNG Pioneer and taken to Christmas Island Detention Centre.

While in detention, Para became penfriends with Alison Corke, a member of the Apollo Bay branch of Rural Australians for Refugees, in Victoria. On his release in 2011 he moved in with the Corke family.

“From our first letters, exchanged while Para was in detention and trying to improve his English, I knew he was an exceptional young man, with an astonishing tale to tell.

I am proud to be helping him share his story and to find and thank those people who helped him survive, often against massive odds…Time and again, Para and I agreed that it is the little things that matter most – those small, often unremembered acts of kindness that can change someone’s world. We all have the power to do something; only we can choose whether to use that power for the good.”

—Alison Corke

This is their story, the story of refugees, friendships and the power of good people.

Les Twentyman & Robert Hillman

Award-winning writer, Robert Hillman, has collaborated with one of Australia’s best-known youth outreach workers and social campaigners, to bring his story to the public in that wonderful storytelling style that Robert and Les share.

Raised in Braybrook in Melbourne’s Western suburbs, Les has devoted his life to young people doing it tough both in Melbourne’s west and more recently in western Sydney, setting up crucial programs, services and resources to assist youth at risk. His is a success story on many fronts: attracting a dedicated and passionate team who work directly with the young people to bring about individual change; and building a huge public profile to support his work. His personal contact list would be the envy of prime ministers: from politicians to prominent business people to police command to sports champions and CEOs of major sporting codes, to the governor general.

He is renowned for his knowledge and passionate advocacy for those forgotten and hidden from view who are victims of youth homelessness, drug abuse, and all the consequent problems that ensue; focusing on both the micro and macro levels of reforms as the only way to make permanent change.

He is the first stop for Victorian and national media outlets for the word on ‘how it really is’. He has featured in hundreds of TV, radio and print press interviews and has been a regular newspaper columnist and article contributor. He also features in a number of documentaries, most notably The Ohio Gun Buyback Scheme, LA Gangs, Can We Help, 20 Minutes with Twentyman and Heroin Without the Hype.

Les has consistently shone a light on emerging youth issues like gang violence, weapons carriage, cyber bullying and the growing trend of truancy in our education system. The hard-hitting DVD The Realities of Cyber Bullying and Knives Trash Lives are testament to Les’ ‘pull no punches’ approach to the damage caused to youth through peer pressure and social media. He is often called on to visit volatile regional areas of Australia in a bid to bring about harmony and cooperation where gangs and youth violence is a problem. He has also accompanied the Governor General, state government officials and prominent leaders from the private and public sectors to the ‘dark streets’ of Australia they never thought existed.

In addition to his tireless work with disadvantaged youth and media commentary, Les is a well-credentialed public speaker. His speaking engagements include schools, community groups, service clubs, corporate, Government Departments and business conferences. He has also been engaged by AFL and NRL teams to address young players on the pitfalls of ‘celebrity’. A testament to Les’s reach was being asked to introduce his Holiness, The Dalai Lama, at his Melbourne conference in June 2013.

In this memoir, Robert goes behind the public knowledge to find out what makes Les tick, where he came from, who and what made him Australia’s number one advocate for our most vulnerable young people. And what of his private life, if he has one at all? Take a journey with one of Australia’s living treasures to the ugliest side of life and to the best.

Take a look at Bill Shorten’s speech for the launch of The Mouth That Roared here

Cover 📷 Louise Chen Photography | Website

Katherine Boland

Spanning five decades and as many continents, Hippy Days, Arabian Nights is a funny, moving and compelling story of a woman whose extraordinary life will never be summarised by the words ‘could have’, ‘might have’, or ‘should have’. Whether it’s following her dreams pursuing what she believes in, or chasing matters of the heart, from the outset Australian artist Katherine Boland has grabbed life by the throat and jumped in feet first.

Part One: Hippy Days

One woman’s experience of life in a hippy community that sprang up in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales as part of the counterculture movement––an overlooked and relatively untapped period in Australian modern history. In 1976, Katherine and her boyfriend John, like many idealistic young students of the time, abandon their university studies and leave Melbourne to pursue a sustainable and independent life in the bush.

Katherine learns how to milk a goat, mill flour, grow vegetables, spin wool and make mud bricks. Hot water, electricity or a flushing indoor toilet are considered luxuries they can do without. Their earnest quest for a Utopian life in harmony with nature is both hilarious and serious: John finds himself reviving their dying goat with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the back of a ute while on the way to the vet; and, under the stars, alone in the bush, a pregnant and groaning Katherine goes into labour to the accompaniment of New Year’s Eve fireworks and the sympathetic mooing of a neighbour’s cow. Other moments are less absurd, such as when her daughter’s two teenage school friends are abducted and brutally murdered, or Katherine recounts her memories of her father’s suicide when she was sixteen.

However, as Katherine reveals, even the strongest woman is vulnerable and the noblest of dreams can perish, observing as she does that in many families ‘peace, harmony and mung beans’ can founder on the back of drug addiction with its many consequences including family violence and child neglect.

It’s an extraordinary adventure: gruelling and wonderful in equal measure as she faces physical and economic hardship; and the perils of the intense Australian seasons, while negotiating the limits of a self-sustaining existence. A pioneer of a kind, her journey is fulfilling and sometimes dangerous. Katherine survives floods, fires and drought, but in the face of adversity, she remains optimistic and resolute.

When, as a result of a fatal bushfire, her marriage collapses and she abruptly leaves the bush and the life she loves, Katherine is forced to begin again. Back in the city, endeavouring to express and expunge the grief and anger that threaten to overwhelm her, she makes art, returning to the passion that had once led her to art school in the ’70s. Katherine becomes a successful artist, exploring themes of fire and impermanence, using fire itself to make her artwork. She undertakes studio residencies in New York, Italy and France and travels the world.

Part Two: Arabian Nights

Prior to the Egyptian revolution in 2010, Katherine receives an invitation from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to participate in an International Artists’ Symposium. And so begins her next fateful and totally unplanned foray into the unknown: falling head over heels in love (or is it lust!) with an Egyptian journalist 27 years her junior – at first sight. Her ideas and preconceptions about Islam and the Middle East are challenged as her relationship evolves and deepens over the next 6 years. Katherine repeatedly returns to Cairo to see her lover until the political situation in Egypt becomes so volatile that they are forced to meet elsewhere - in London, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.

Faced with the tyranny of distance, her lover’s jealous inclinations, cultural and religious chasms and an uncooperative Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Katherine and her lover’s feelings are tested to the maximum. Will Gamal’s family’s extreme opposition to their son’s relationship, her dilemma over the age gap, her transient existence and the devastating impact of the Global Financial Crisis on her art career be her undoing?

Drawing on her experiences in Egypt, Katherine provides a ‘up close and personal’ account of contemporary life in Egypt and the country’s trajectory since the revolution. Her intimate depiction of an Egyptian family and the fresh, unschooled perspective on this culture is at once engrossing and informative.

Ann Fogarty & Anne Crawford

Forged with Flames is Ann Fogarty’s poignant and compelling story of her experiences of the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983 and its devastating aftermath as she struggled to survive the severe burns she sustained to 75% of her body, followed by a series of life-threatening events. These have had a profound effect on her psyche, her health and her spirit, yet the reader is repeatedly drawn to admire and be deeply inspired by her honesty and her incredible moral fortitude. Her triumph is coming out of it scathed but by no means defeated.

Brought up in a working-class family, Ann stepped out of her predefined life path in a small industrial town in Lancashire to work as a nanny in swinging 1960s London where she found herself living across the road from her teen idol, Cliff Richard. Her fate was sealed when she met and fell in love with a young Australian and emigrated with him to Australia soon after they were married. She embraced her new home, settling and working in a bushland community on the south-east outskirts of Melbourne with her husband and two young children.

On the 16th September in 1983, this seemingly idyllic life would be shattered in a matter of seconds when she was engulfed by a fireball in one of Australia’s worst bushfires on record as it swept across Victoria and South Australia, changing many lives forever. In the tiny Victorian town of Upper Beaconsfield where she lived, 21 people would lose their lives, 186 houses would be lost, and many people would be injured. She would ‘die’ many times before she could be safely returned to the world of the living.

Awards: Winner of the Australian Christian Literary Awards 2013

Jill Sanguinetti

In 1958, Jill left her home in the Victorian town of Kyabram to attend Methodist Ladies’ College (MLC) as a boarder. In this coming-of-age memoir she interleaves her MLC story with lively vignettes of her early school years, the family newsagency, church, and country community life. This is a deeply personal account of teenage struggles with parental and sibling relationships and with MLC’s discipline, study demands, tough living conditions and rigorous religious education. Jill’s daily life as a school boarder, her rebellions, emotional highs and lows, and encounters with Dr Wood, MLC’s charismatic principal and pastor, are described with honesty, hilarity and sharp critical insight.

Jill embarked on her memoir following the chance discovery of the letters that she and her sister had written from MLC fifty years ago:

I wanted to write a book about it: for MLC students, teachers and Old Collegians, to feed their sense of history and their remembrances; for other one-time school boarders; for young people struggling to grow through life’s complexities; and for myself, to venture into a dark and musty corner of my soul and give it an airing.

Through the letters we learn about Jill’s clashes with teachers and house mistresses, inspiration from learning and music, and her striving to come to terms with contradictoriness in a school that was “revolting and terrific at the same time”.

In a new rendering of the Australian classic, The Getting of Wisdom, School Days of a Methodist Lady is a universal story about school, growing up and the tender milestones that see us entering adulthood. It will appeal to adult and young adult readers, highlighting how school education has changed over the last fifty years and those things that remain the same. Its anecdotal descriptions of public and private school education in the 1950s and ‛60s make it a valuable contribution to the cultural and social history of schooling in Australia.

Kooshyar Karimi

This is a gripping, previously untold story, which throws a chill light on the secrets and lies that flourish in the fertile soil of dehumanising beliefs and practices – in this case in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a memoir by Sydney-based doctor and writer/translator, Kooshyar Karimi, who in 2000 managed to flee, with his family, escaping certain torture and death which stalked him on a daily basis in his native Iran. Karimi’s sin was his Jewishness and the fact that he helped desperate girls and women, who had been raped, terminate the resulting pregnancies.

Kooshyar Karimi is a father, a doctor, a writer, and translator. In 1998, he is kidnapped from the streets, blindfolded, and tortured. When he is eventually released, it is only as a spy for the Islamic Secret Service. This is the story of his survival.

Craig Jurisevic with Robert Hillman

Listed in the 2011 Better Reading’s ’50 Books You Can’t Put Down’

The year is 1999, and a fresh hell is being created before our eyes. It is hardly to be credited that the enlightened nations of Europe are allowing this nightmare to occur only sixty minutes by jet from Paris and London. The forces of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic have swept into Kosovo on the Balkan Peninsula leaving a trail of death and heartbreak. Scenes of Milosevic’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ play out on television screens all over the world; haunted figures huddled behind barbed wire fences, bodies heaped in ditches.

Adelaide surgeon Craig Jurisevic recalls his grandfather’s ordeal in a Nazi concentration camp and resolves to honour his memory by offering his skills as a surgeon to the victims of the conflict. Leaving behind a wife and son, Jurisevic flies to the Balkans under the auspices of the International Medical Corps. Struggling to maintain his moral bearings, Jurisevic’s journey from Adelaide to the hell of Kosovo has become a descent into the heart of darkness. Blood on My Hands, co-written with award-winning author Robert Hillman, tells a story of terrible suffering, of extraordinary heroism, and of the savagery that lies coiled in the human heart.

Najaf Mazari & Robert Hillman

Best-selling memoir, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, traces the story of a young Afghan man’s extraordinary journey from a shepherd boy in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, to asylum seeker in Woomera Detention Centre and, finally, to owner of a successful Afghan traditional rug shop in Melbourne, Australia, and founder of the charitable fund, AusGhan Aid.

Although Mazari flees his country in 2001, this moving and poignant work, laced with a good dose of humour, continues to delight and move readers because of its recognisably universal insights into the refugee experience: the conditions that create the ‘refugee’ in the first place, the trauma and heartache as a result of leaving everything and everyone behind, the dangerous journey to the ‘promised land’, and the often hostile reception and loss of identity, purpose and even freedom, on arrival.

Mazari begins life in a mountain village where families lived a simple, contented ‘milk and honey’ life typical of so many, before the Civil War ripped that country apart. The lives and livelihood of farmers, craftsmen and small business owners and their families that had existed for centuries, were destroyed in just weeks and months.

As a member of the Hazara tribe, hated and targeted by the Taliban, Mazari was forced to flee the brutal attacks on his people when the Northern Alliance fell to the advancing Taliban insurgents; although not before he was brutally tortured by them. His dangerous, overland flight to Pakistan, from there to Indonesia, then by boat to Australia, ends with him in the notorious Woomera Detention Centre in the Central Australian desert country, where the story begins.

The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was the first book-length account from a representative of the many refugees who have arrived in Australia since the beginning of this century; and is exquisitely captured in his own voice. From the compelling opening sentence to the beautiful and touching final chapter, Najaf’s integrity, his extraordinary optimism and his generosity of spirit wins the hearts and minds of all readers. ‘Engaging’, ‘compelling’, ‘inspiring’ are the responses of readers of the book.