Here are 100 books that You Daughters of Freedom fans have personally recommended if you like
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I'm a political historian who writes for my fellow citizens and I have chosen books by writers who do the same. Books which are written with passion and purpose: to shift political understanding, to speak truth to power, to help people understand their country and the world, and to inspire a commitment to improving them.
A classic written on the eve of the Great Depression on the political culture of the British settlers in the great south land, with its commitment to egalitarianism, to bureaucratic process, and to protection all round, with restricted immigration and protective tariffs building ring-fences around ordinary workers’ standard of living. Hancock does not wholly approve of the result, which he sees as encouraging mediocre conformity. Written with verve and a sardonic eye.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I'm a political historian who writes for my fellow citizens and I have chosen books by writers who do the same. Books which are written with passion and purpose: to shift political understanding, to speak truth to power, to help people understand their country and the world, and to inspire a commitment to improving them.
A confronting history of the British invasion of Australia, documenting the massacres but also the resistance of indigenous people across the continent as they defended their tribal lands well into the twentieth century. No longer could anyone imagine that Australia had been settled peacefully. The book had a profound impact on Australians’ understanding of their history, but also on the continuing political struggle for indigenous rights.
The publication of ""The Other Side of the Frontier"" in 1981 profoundly changed the way in which we understand the history of relations between indigenous Australians and European settlers. It has since become a classic of Australian history. Drawing from documentary and oral evidence, the book describes in meticulous and compelling detail the ways in which Aborigines responded to the arrival of Europeans. Henry Reynolds' argument that the Aborigines resisted fiercely was highly original when it was first published and is no less challenging today.
I am Sumit Lodhia, a Professor of Accounting at the University of South Australia who has a primary research interest in sustainability accounting and reporting. Sustainable development is something that I am very passionate about, and I consider myself lucky enough to research in this area and to teach a course on this subject matter to third year undergraduate accounting students. I am a former resident of the beautiful Fiji Islands, and my lived experiences here and in my current country of residence, Australia, have shaped my worldview that focuses on equity, transparency, democracy, morality, and compassion.
I found this book a significant contribution to the climate change debate at a time when the scientific consensus on climate change was not easily accepted by all. Written by an Australian, I found that this book provided a scientific explanation of climate change in very simple terms.
This was actually one of the first books that I read on climate change, and it opened my eyes to the seriousness of climate change and the scientific basis that provided evidence of climate change as a fundamental issue impacting future human survival on this planet.
Terrifying and inspiring, The Weather Makers is a page-turning epic that brings the most elusive and powerful of natural phenomena within our grasp.
Internationally acclaimed writer, scientist and explorer, Tim Flannery takes us on a journey through history and around the globe as he describes the wondrous diversity of the world's ecosystems and explains how 'the great aerial ocean' unites us. Along the way, we meet polar bears and golden toads, and travel from ocean depths to mountaintops, via desert, swamp and rainforest. Flannery reveals how the earth's climate has changed, across millennia and decades, and how the slightest imbalance…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
I'm a political historian who writes for my fellow citizens and I have chosen books by writers who do the same. Books which are written with passion and purpose: to shift political understanding, to speak truth to power, to help people understand their country and the world, and to inspire a commitment to improving them.
Australia, like Canada, the United States, and New Zealand, was settled as a White Man’s land, where the inequities and corruption of the Old World would be replaced by the egalitarianism and democratic commitments of New World progressivism. But there was no place for Indigenous peoples who were deemed backward and primitive. Lake explores the links between American and Australasian reformers at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century and the way they combined racial self-confidence with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Lake shows that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism.
The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Progressive New World demonstrates that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism.
White settlers in the United States, who saw themselves as path-breakers and pioneers, were inspired by the state experiments…
As a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, I’ve always been interested in social justice and human rights, and my own writing explores such issues, including who holds the power and who exerts the control. By writing about real-world issues in a speculative future, it allows us to peel back the layers of conditioning and look at ourselves and our actions through the eyes of an outsider – which forces us to examine our best and worst human traits. I love the way speculative fiction can do this, and I love that it challenges us to do better.
When Tegan dies, she wakes up a hundred years later, locked in a government facility with no idea what happened. As she tries to make sense of this future world, it starts to feel as if something is very wrong. Should she keep her head down and just live out her life, or should she fight to make the future better for all? An excellent story from a world-class writer. “Accessible, thoughtful and compelling — science fiction done right.” – Kirkus Reviews
My name is Tegan Oglietti, and on the last day of my first lifetime, I was so, so happy.
Sixteen-year-old Tegan is just like every other girl living in 2027--she's happiest when playing the guitar, she's falling in love for the first time, and she's joining her friends to protest the wrongs of the world: environmental collapse, social discrimination, and political injustice.
But on what should have been the best day of Tegan's life, she dies--and wakes up a hundred years in the future, locked in a government facility with no idea what happened.
I’m a Pom, as Aussies would say, born and bred in England to an Australian mother and British father. I emigrated to Australia as a ten-pound Pom way back when and though I eventually came home again I’ve always retained an affection and a curiosity about the country, which in time led me to write three books about my own family history there. The early days of colonial Australia, when around 1400 people, half of whom were convicts, ventured across the world to found a penal colony in a country they knew almost nothing about, is one of the most fascinating and frankly unlikely stories you could ever hope to come across.
'Original, provocative, and witty, Australiais the most comprehensive single-volume history of Australia yet published.' This is the blurb on the back cover of the paperback but it echoes my own views of this marvellous book completely. It covers everything: from the plight of the convicts to the Europeans’ experiments with farming and land grabs; relationships with the Aboriginal people, and especially the virtues or otherwise of respective Governors and their often spiky relationships with the government back home. All of it written with authority and a wonderfully wry wit.
A narrative history of Australia provides comprehensive coverage of such events as the rapid development of the continent's five democratic colonies, the government's controversial official relationship with the Aboriginals, and the nation's leading standards of living. Reprint.
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I’ve been writing about climate change for the past 14 years. I have been the Environment and Energy Editor for the news website, The Conversation, and worked for the government in renewable energy and reducing emissions from transport. Now I work for a conservation organisation, protecting land for nature. My first novel, A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, was set in a climate-changed Melbourne and an idyllic past San Francisco. My most recent novel, From the Wreck, is historical fiction set in the 1870s but is also about modern humans’ history of ecocide. I have also written essays and a non-fiction guide The Handbook: Surviving & Living with Climate Change.
Dyschronia is strange, complicated, overwhelming, frightening, and occasionally enervating – just like climate change. Jen Mills tells the story of a young woman in a small, dying town who can’t stop seeing horrible futures; or, perhaps, the story of a young woman who compulsively lies. You won’t forget the compelling and sickening scene of a town waking up to find the ocean has disappeared. This one is worth wrapping your brain around.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2019
"There is a poetry in Mills's writing that shimmers like desert air - and in her storytelling, in the way she captures the moods of time, there is something mystical. Daring, original and ambitious." The Australian
An electrifying novel about an oracle. A small town. And the end of the world as we know it...
One morning, the residents of a small coastal town somewhere in Australia wake to discover the sea has disappeared. One among them has been plagued by troubling visions of this cataclysm for years. Is she a prophet?…
I am an African Australian author of several novels and fiction collections, and a finalist in the 2022 World Fantasy Award. I was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. I have a master's degree with distinction in distributed computer systems, a master's degree in creative writing, and a PhD in creative writing. The short story is my sweetest spot. I have a deep passion for the literary speculative, and I write across genres and forms, with award-winning genre-bending works. I am especially curious about stories of culture, diversity, climate change, writing the other, and betwixt.
Margo Lanagan’s mini-collection Stray Bats is an exceptional showcase of refined writing—less is always more. Powerful bite-size vignettes in this dark illustrated miscellany of micro fiction and prose poetry encompass rhyme, beauty, and something most sinister. Offering up constellations, maidens in flight, familiars, hag hunters, vixen wives, and spirit girls, this kind of dark, fantastical writing and the ghosts of its graphics haunt you for a super long time…
Dachshund droids, mad crones, shapeshifting children, a plethora of witches, dragonstalkers, familiars, slithering eels and, of course, bats, flit and fly through these pages, aided and abetted by Kathleen Jennings’s deft and inspired pencil drawings. Stray Bats is a glorious miscellany of vignettes based on poems by Australian women. While some of the pieces hie close to the originals in form and theme, some stray far, far from them even as Lanagan delights in playing with language, rhyme, and rhythm.
This could be the perfect gift for that slightly otherworldly person in your life—or for yourself, when you need a…
I’m an author, poet, and editor who works in natural history and social history publishing by day, explaining the unique flora and fauna, culture, and spirit of this ancient continent. By night, I moonlight as a fiction author, writing whatever takes my fancy. Seeing Australia and understanding Australia aren’t always the same thing in a country with unforgiving stony desert at its heart, more venomous creepy-crawlies than you can ‘poke a stick at’ (but please don’t!), the oldest living culture in the world, and a complex history. So, here are my recommendations for novels that travel deep into the Australian spirit.
Winton is one of Australia’s most celebrated authors for his effortless prose. In Breath, he vividly captures the moment restless ennui of life in a small town meets the Australian desire to push boundaries, building background tension that eventually crashes Aussie surf culture down like a dumper and leaves everything broken. While the award-winning Cloudstreet is often considered Winton’s ‘Great Australian Novel’, the historic setting and vernacular felt somewhat contrived to me. I consider Breath Winton’s true masterpiece, which stays with you long after you finish the final page.
'Exhilarating' Sunday Times 'Rapturous' Sunday Telegraph 'A remarkable tale of grace and danger' Financial Times
When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than anyone what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him. Bruce remembers what it was like to be a risk-taking kid, to feel that thrill and that fear . . .
Breath by Tim Winton is the story of Bruce and his best friend Loonie, and the surfing obsession that changed both of their lives. It is about the exhilaration of…
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
I started reading crime fiction as a teenager, so maybe it was inevitable that one day I would start writing it. I began with short stories, but then found an idea for a novel that wouldn’t let me go. One small paragraph about a tape recording left by a dead man. The books I love reading now are often set in small towns and communities, like the one I grew up in, where normal people tend to hide the worst secrets! Hidden motivations and seeing how the past plays out in the present are two elements I love in crime fiction—they help to work out who the killer is.
Humour done well in crime fiction is rare, I think, and this novel has plenty. I think you would call it a caper, with things constantly going wrong for Jac, the main character, in bizarre and amusing ways, but Draga, her Croatian housekeeper is hilarious. Draga’s solutions to fixing things are not what any sensible person might agree to, but Jac is desperate. She even resorts to using Draga’s favourite broom herself at one point. This one will keep you on the edge of your seat, yes, but you might also fall off it laughing. I’m hoping there will be a sequel.
The week begins like any other in Jacqueline Burne's messy life. And it just gets worse. Jac's business is in trouble, her husband is up to no good, and her eccentric housekeeper, Draga, is nagging her with unsolicited advice. Then Jac's annoying teen stepson lands on her doorstep and wants to stay.
Jac devises a plan to regain control of her life, but Draga jumps in to help and it goes horribly wrong. They soon find themselves on the wrong side of the law, where handcuffs and prison jumpsuits become a real possibility. As Jac juggles her many problems, dark…
