Seventeen years after A Certain Style was first published, Jacqueline Kent’s biography of Australia’s first full-time book editor Beatrice Davis is being reissued for a new generation of publishing aficionados. Kent spoke with former UQP nonfiction publisher Alexandra Payne about what’s changed in the editing profession since ...
1One of the very first questions you are asked when a psychiatrist is fumbling towards a ‘bipolar’ diagnosis relates to family history. This is a nod towards the genetic, hereditary nature of the disease, but also a narrative framing device. Who? When? What? How? Why? The line is traceable. And ...
The Future of Everything is written for people who want a better world, and who want practical ideas for how that might be achieved. It is unashamedly ambitious, and I have no doubt some of the ideas I put forward will be ridiculed and dismissed, but that’s a risk ...
I did not expect to be here like this. My Williams family is short-lived and I have exceeded their span by an embarrassing chunk. So here I am, in what I thought would be my twilight years, as fit and busy as ever; the brain beneath the grey thatch and ...
NewSouth published Clinton Walker’s Deadly Woman Blues: Black Women and Australian Music in February 2018 and it was recalled on 5 March 2018 after a small number of books were sold. We were made aware that not all the women who appeared in the book were consulted about current ...
Feeding wild birds is probably something so familiar, so everyday, so commonplace – so tame perhaps – that we can forget that this is a fundamentally artificial activity. In virtually every case, the types of food we use to attract birds to our house yards – typically mixtures of various seeds but sometimes ...
I grew up with rivers, though I did not live next to one. My mother’s aged relatives told me in stark and frightening terms about the power of the Brisbane River, which had in 1893 invaded the city’s central business district and swept away the bridge linking the ...
Before dawn on 25 April 2012 I walked along the remains of the Thai–Burma Railway. Its iron tracks had been ripped up long ago. The original wooden sleepers, their surface at once cracked and polished by monsoonal rains, were partly obscured by small grey stones. The railway cutting is ...
Entries are open for the Bragg Prize and theBest Australian Science Writing 2018
