List
Australian Stories
13 books Discoverable by Booko Admin
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All Our Shimmering Skies
Trent Dalton · 2021
The bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton returns with All Our Shimmering Skies - a glorious novel destined to become another Australian classic. Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain down, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, turns once again to the sky for guidance. She carries a stone heart inside a duffel bag next to the map that leads to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer who put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress, and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. Run, Molly, run, says the daytime sky. Run to the vine forests. Run to northern Australia's wild and magical monsoon lands. Run to friendship. Run to love. Run. Because the graverobber's coming, Molly, and the night-time sky is coming with him. So run, Molly, run.All Our Shimmering Skies is a story about gifts that fall from the sky, curses we dig from the earth and the secrets we bury inside ourselves. It is an odyssey of true love and grave danger, of darkness and light, of bones and blue skies; a buoyant, beautiful and magical novel abrim with warmth, wit and wonder; and a love letter to Australia and the art of looking up.
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Kokomo
Victoria Hannan · 2020
'genuinely funny and heartbreaking' - VPLA judges When Mina receives an urgent call from her best friend back in Melbourne, her world is turned upside down. Her agoraphobic mother, Elaine, has left the house for the first time in twelve years. Mina drops everything to fly home, only to discover that Elaine will not talk about her sudden return to the world, nor why she's spent so much time hiding from it. Their reunion leaves Mina raking through pieces of their painful past in a bid to uncover the truth. Both tender and fierce, heartbreaking and funny, Kokomo is a story about how secrets and love have the power to bring us together and tear us apart.
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The Mother Fault
Kate Mildenhall · 2020
You will not recognise me, she thinks, when I find you . . . Mim's husband is missing. No one knows where Ben is, but everyone wants to find him - especially The Department. And they should know, the all-seeing government body has fitted the entire population with a universal tracking chip to keep them ‘safe'. But suddenly Ben can't be tracked. And Mim is questioned, made to surrender her passport and threatened with the unthinkable - her two children being taken into care at the notorious BestLife. Cornered, Mim risks everything to go on the run to find her husband - and a part of herself, long gone, that is brave enough to tackle the journey ahead. From the stark backroads of the Australian outback to a terrifying sea voyage, Mim is forced to shuck off who she was - mother, daughter, wife, sister - and become the woman she needs to be to save her family and herself.
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Song of the Crocodile
Nardi Simpson · 2020
Darnmoor, The Gateway to Happiness. The sign taunts a fool into feeling some sense of achievement, some kind of end- that you have reached a destination in the very least. Yet as the sign states, Darnmoor is merely a gateway, a waypoint on the road to where you really want to be. Darnmoor is the home of the Billymil family, three generations who have lived in this 'gateway town'. Race relations between Indigenous and settler families are fraught, though the rigid status quo is upheld through threats and soft power rather than the overt violence of yesteryear. As progress marches forwards, Darnmoor and its surrounds undergo rapid social and environmental changes, but as some things change, some stay exactly the same. The Billymil family are watched (and sometimes visited) by ancestral spirits and spirits of the recently deceased, who look out for their descendants and attempt to help them on the right path. When the town's secrets start to be uncovered the town will be rocked by a violent act that forever shatters a century of silence. Full of music, Yuwaalaraay language and exquisite description, Song of the Crocodile is a lament to choice and change, and the unyielding land that sustains us all, if only we could listen to it.
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Dropbear
Evelyn Araluen · 2021
I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers. This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.
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Stolen Girl
Trina Saffioti · 2011
Illustrated by Norma MacDonald Stolen Girl is a fictionalised account of the now universally known story of the Stolen Generation and tells of an Aboriginal girl taken from her family and sent to a children's home. Each night she sings, and dreams of her mother and the life they once shared - of sitting on the verandah of their corrugated-iron home, cooking damper and hunting goanna. But each morning she is woken by the bell to the harsh reality of the children's home, until finally one day she puts into action her carefully crafted plan - unlocking the door and taking her first step back toward home. Stolen Girl gives young readers an insight into the life of a child taken away from everything they know into an alien world without love. It captures the depth of emotion that was felt by thousands of Australians during this dark chapter in the nation's history.
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Sister Heart
Sally Morgan · 2016
A young Aboriginal girl is taken from the north of Australia and sent to an institution in the distant south. There, she slowly makes a new life for herself and, in the face of tragedy, finds strength in new friendships. Poignantly told from the child's perspective, Sister Heart affirms the power of family and kinship. This compelling novel about the stolen generations helps teachers sensitively introduce into the classroom one of world's most confronting histories.
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Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray
Anita Heiss · 2020
Gundagai, 1852 The powerful Murrumbidgee River surges through town leaving death and destruction in its wake. It is a stark reminder that while the river can give life, it can just as easily take it away. Wagadhaany is one of the lucky ones. She survives. But is her life now better than the fate she escaped? Forced to move away from her miyagan, she walks through each day with no trace of dance in her step, her broken heart forever calling her back home to Gundagai. When she meets Wiradyuri stockman Yindyamarra, Wagadhaanynsquo;s heart slowly begins to heal. But still, she dreams of a better life, away from the degradation of being owned. She longs to set out along the river of her ancestors, in search of lost family and country. Can she find the courage to defy the White manosquo;s law? And if she does, will it bring hope ... or heartache? Set on timeless Wiradyuri country, where the life-giving waters of the rivers can make or break dreams, and based on devastating true events, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams) is an epic story of love, loss and belonging.
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Too Much Lip
Melissa Lucashenko · 2021
A gritty and darkly hilarious novel quaking with life-winner of Australia's Miles Franklin Award-that follows a queer, First Nations Australian woman as she returns home to face her family and protect the land of their ancestors. Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent her adulthood avoiding two things: her hometown and prison. A tough, generous, reckless woman accused of having too much lip, Kerry uses anger to fight the avalanche of bullshit the world spews. But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley for one last visit. Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, across the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of latching on to people-not to mention her chaotic family and the threat of a proposal to develop a prison on Granny Ava's Island, the family's spiritual home. On top of that, love may have found Kerry again when a good-looking white fella appears out of nowhere with eyes only for her. As the fight mounts to stop the development, old wounds open. Surrounded by the ghosts of their Elders and the memories of their ancestors, the Salters are driven by the deep need to make peace with their past while scrabbling to make sense of their present. Kerry just hopes they can come together in time to preserve Granny Ava's legacy and save their ancestral land.
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The Yield
Tara June Winch · 2021
WINNER OF THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD 2020 An exquisitely written, heartbreaking and hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering and empowerment Knowing that he will soon die, Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors, and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind. After his passing, Poppy’s granddaughter, August, returns home from Europe, where she has lived the past ten years, to attend his burial. Her overwhelming grief is compounded by the pain, anger, and sadness of memory―of growing up in poverty before her mother’s incarceration, of the racism she and her people endured, of the mysterious disappearance of her sister when they were children; an event that has haunted her and changed her life. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends and honor Poppy and her family, she vows to save their land―a quest guided by the voice of her grandfather that leads into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river. Told in three masterfully woven narratives, The Yield is a celebration of language and an exploration of what makes a place "home." A story of a people and a culture dispossessed, it is also a joyful reminder of what once was and what endures―a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling, and identity, that offers hope for the future.
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It Wasn't Meant to Be Like This
Lisa Wilkinson · 2021
The long-awaited autobiography from one of Australia's most popular, much-loved and enduring media stars, Lisa Wilkinson. Lisa Wilkinson has lived her life in the public eye. One of Australia's most admired and respected journalists and media personalities, her warm, intelligent and elegant presence has graced our television screens for many years, where she has shared and shaped many important national conversations. Australians of all ages love and respect her warmth, empathy, humour, integrity and fighting spirit. But it all could have been so different... When she was at school, Lisa found herself wishing she could just disappear. Subjected to horrific bullying as a teenager, she survived by making herself as small as possible, but she swore when she left school that no one was ever again going to determine who she was - or limit what she was capable of. That determination and drive led to Lisa blazing an unprecedented and enormously successful trail through the Australian media and cultural landscape for more than four decades. She was only twenty-one when she became the editor of Dolly - the youngest ever appointed to a national women's magazine - and four years later, after almost tripling the circulation, Lisa was head-hunted by the late Kerry Packer, who offered her the editorship of the iconic Cleo magazine. which she transformed into the number-one bestselling women's lifestyle magazine per capita in the world. Moving to television, first on Channel Ten's Beauty and the Beast, then as host of the Seven Network's Weekend Sunrise, she went on to spend almost eleven years as co-host of the Nine Network's Today Show, becoming its longest-serving female co-host, and where her talents took the program to the number-one spot in breakfast television. Lisa then caused a media storm in Australia and the world when she moved to the Ten Network as co-host of its prime-time award-winning program The Project. Lisa's interviews with everyone from George Clooney to Lady Gaga to Sophia Loren to Kim Kardashian, to every one of the country's last eight prime ministers, always create headlines. But it is her most recent work and the leading role she took in uncovering the misogyny in Parliament House, with her powerful, exclusive interview with Brittany Higgins, of which Lisa says she is most proud. A fierce campaigner for women and gender equality, Lisa has fought her own personal battles on this front, and continues to lead the way.It Wasn't Meant to Be Like This, the story of how a young girl from Campbelltown came to be such a force in Australian cultural life, is honest, warm, funny, engaging - and powerfully inspirational.
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How We Love: Notes on a life
Clementine Ford · 2021
A deeply personal exploration of love in all its forms from a feminist icon and bestselling author of Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys. There is love in this place, just like there is love everywhere we care to look for it. There is beauty and there is hope and there is a boy and there is a mother and there is the past and there is the future but most importantly there is the now, and everything that exists between them that has got them from one moment to the next. The now is where we find the golden glow where, for the briefest of moments, the sky rips open and we see what it is we are made of. Tell me a story, he asked me. And so I began. Clementine Ford is a person who has loved deeply, strangely and with curiosity. She is fascinated by love and the multiple ways it makes its home in our hearts and believes that the way we continue to surrender ourselves to love is an act of great faith and bravery. This tender and lyrical memoir explores love in its many forms through Clementine's own experiences. With clear eyes and an open heart, she writes about losing her adored mother far too young, about the pain and confusion of first love - both platonic and romantic - and the joy and heartache of adult love. She writes movingly about the transcendent and transformative journey to motherhood and the similarly monumental path to self-love. 'We love as children, as friends, as parents and, yes, sometimes as sexual beings, and none of it is more important than the other because all of it shows us who we are.' How We Love is heartfelt, funny, confessional, revelatory, compassionate - and essential reading. It shows us to ourselves in moments of unwavering truth and undeniable joy.
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Love Stories
Trent Dalton · 2021
Trent Dalton, Australia's best-loved writer, goes out into the world and asks a simple, direct question: 'Can you please tell me a love story?' A blind man yearns to see the face of his wife of thirty years. A divorced mother has a secret love affair with a travelling priest. A widower miraculously finds a three-minute video recorded by his wife before she died. A tree lopper's heart falls in a forest. A working mum contemplates taking the photographs of her late husband down from the fridge. A girl writes her last letter to the man she loves, then sets it on fire. An ageing gigolo regrets the one that got away. A palliative care nurse helps a dying woman converse with the angel at the end of her bed. A renowned 100-year-old scientist ponders the one great earthly puzzle he was never able to solve: 'What is love?'Endless stories. Human stories. Love stories. Inspired by a personal moment of profound love and generosity, bestselling author - and one of Australia's finest journalists - Trent Dalton spent two months in 2021 pounding city pavements, speaking to Australians from all walks of life and asking them one simple and direct question: 'Can you please tell me a love story?' For two straight weeks he sat at a desk with a sky-blue 1960s Olivetti typewriter, on the bustling corner of Adelaide and Albert streets, Brisbane, with a sign saying, 'Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?'The result is Love Stories - a warm, wise, poignant, funny and moving book about love in all its guises, including stories, observations and reflections on lovers in parks; people in cemeteries, hospital wards, pubs and bingo halls; and newlyweds walking out of registry offices. There will be stories of people falling into love, falling out of love, and never letting go of the loved ones in their hearts. And woven through it all will be remembrances of Trent's own special moments, and of the people whose love stories have made him the man and writer he is today.A heartfelt, deep, funny, wise and tingly tribute to the greatest thing we will never understand and the only thing we will ever really need: love.
