Cirrus@Austlit

'Donald Thomson at 10 years old was a lone figure in Melbourne’s Bayside with its billabongs and creeks meandering to the sea. In his ‘Naturalist’s Diary’, he recorded his collection of wildflowers to wattles, seabirds to tiny blue wrens, mammals to reptiles to fish and to insects of every shape and hue. By 16 he was part-time editor of a national nature magazine.

'At 28, as Australia’s first home-grown anthropologist, he met the only people who truly shared his worldview: the First Nations of northern and central Australia. He wrote, ‘We learned much about their language, social life, and customs, and of their elaborate rituals and tabus…and we grew to love these people.’

'It was this love for a world threatened with extinction that drove Donald Thomson for the rest of his life, fighting for justice through a threated invasion and the reality of a hostile and unrepentant occupation.' (Publication summary)

'In 1858, 14-year-old Narcisse Pelletier sailed from Marseilles in the French trader Saint-Paul. With a cargo of Bordeaux wine, they stopped in Bombay, then Hong Kong, and from there they set sail with more than 300 Chinese prospectors bound for the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. Around the eastern tip of New Guinea, however, the ship became engulfed in fog, struck reefs and ran aground.

'Scrambling aboard a longboat, the survivors undertook a perilous voyage, crossing almost 1000 kilometres of the Coral Sea before reaching the shores of the Daintree region in far north Queensland, where, abandoned by his shipmates and left for dead, Narcisse was rescued by the local Aboriginal people. For seventeen years he lived with them, growing to manhood and participating fully in their world - until in 1875 he was discovered by the crew of a pearling lugger and wrenched from his Aboriginal family. Taken back to his 'real' life in France, he became a lighthouse keeper, married and had another family, all the while dreaming of what he had left behind...

'Drawing from firsthand interviews with Narcisse after his return to France and other contemporary accounts of exploration and survival, and documenting the spread of European settlement in Queensland and the brutal frontier wars that followed, Robert Macklin weaves an unforgettable tale of a young man caught between two cultures in a time of transformation and upheaval.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'While English-born soldiers, sailors and surveyors have claimed pride of place among the explorers of the young New South Wales colony, the real pathfinder was a genuine native-born Australian. Hamilton Hume, a man with a profound understanding of the Aboriginal people and an almost mystical relationship with the Australian bush, led settlers from the cramped surrounds of Sydney Town to the vast fertile country that would provide the wealth to found and sustain a new nation.

'Robert Macklin, author of the critically acclaimed Dark Paradise, tells the heroic tale of this young Australian man who outdid his English 'betters' by crossing the Blue Mountains, finding a land route from Sydney to Port Phillip and opening up western New South Wales. His contribution to the development of the colony was immense but downplayed in deference to explorers of British origin. Hamilton Hume uncovers this brave man's achievements and paints an intriguing and at times shocking portrait of colonial life, by the author of the bestselling SAS Sniper.' (Publication summary)

'The true story of Australia's SAS and the soldier who was there from the start.

'Clint Palmer has spent much of his adult life in the SAS and has fought in this elite military unit as it developed from its fledgling beginnings into the highly trained, specialised fighting force it is today. He is an insider with the long view and this is his unique story of life in the SAS.

'As a bush kid in the Northern Territory of Australia, growing up in a one dog mining town, Palmer s best friends were mostly Aboriginal kids, and the outside world barely existed. But he always had one driving ambition - the army. Enduring the toughest of tough training, Palmer soon demonstrated his fighting capabilities and became part of the Australian SAS. So began almost thirty years of service.

'We go with him to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he is at the heart of some of the worst fighting in Operation Anaconda in the Shahi-Kot Valley in 2002. He lets us in on what it s like to have made well over a thousand parachute jumps, many of them in terrible conditions and into treacherous terrain which may have ended not just his career but his life. And he shares with us how this adrenalin fuelled world has become a lifelong commitment.

'Palmer is the man who knows the Regiment almost better than anyone, so SAS INSIDER really is the inside story of the SAS - and a gripping account of one Australian soldier s life at the sharp end.' (Publication summary)

'Explosive SAS action in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan.

'The command came: 'Stop those vehicles!'

'It was like a red rag to a bull. Instantly streams of 7.62 mm tracer and 50 mm calibre machine gun rounds arced across the night sky and smashed into the bus and truck.

'Elite SAS Patrol Commander Stuart 'Nev' Bonner takes us inside the extraordinary and dangerous world of secret combat operations in this explosive, behind-the-scenes look at life inside the SAS. A world where capture means torture or death, and every move is trained for with precision detail to bring elite soldiers to the very peak of fighting ability.

'In a career spanning twenty years, fourteen of them in the SAS, Bonner shares with us the inside story of being out in front and often behind enemy lines.

'From patrolling the mountains of East Timor to covert operations in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands, from sweeping into the Iraqi desert ahead of invading US forces to cripple Saddam Hussein's communications to patrolling in war-torn Baghdad and being in the middle of the disastrous Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan this is a no-holds-barred account of what it's like to live, eat and breathe SAS.' (Publication summary)

A planned film based on Australia's only Chinese bushranger, Sam Pu.

Pu was originally captured and hanged in Bathurst after killing a trooper in a firefight in 1865, but Macklin indicates in 'Chinese Bushranger in Focus' (see Works About) that his script will follow a different storyline:

'In the movie he doesn't get hanged, that's an awful end to a movie. In the movie he teams up with our own bushrangers - Johnny Gilbert, Frank Gardiner, Ben Hall - and with a Chinese girl who came to the goldfields with a group including Sam.' She joins the four of them for an adventure romance that also explores the relationship between the two cultures.

'In My Favourite Teacher high-profile Australians including children's author Mem Fox, comedian Anh Do, retired Chief Justice Michael Kirby, broadcaster Alan Jones and The Chaser's Julian Morrow, along with contributors from all walks of life, share very personal stories of their favourite teachers. Their entertaining, inspiring, and often moving accounts reveal how these teachers inspired their students to follow their dreams.'  (Publication summary)

'The story of an Aussie hero who became the most famous and influential journalist reporting for The Times on China before, during and after the Boxer Rebellion.

'The Man Who Died Twice is the compelling story of Morrison of Peking', who bestrode continents, helped bring down a dynasty and chronicled his times so brilliantly that he not only wrote history but changed it as well.

'George Ernest Morrison's strong sense of courage and devotion to reporting the truth led him, at only 20, to expose the Australian Kanaka slave trade. He then walked, alone and unaided, from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Melbourne only 21 years after explorers Burke and Wills had perished in the same endeavour. And in attempting the first crossing of New Guinea, he was almost killed in an ambush which left two spear tips embedded in his body.

'However, it was Morrison's work as a correspondent for the London Times in the decadent and dangerous Chinese capital at the turn of the century that brought him international fame, not least when he helped to organise the defence of the legations during the 55-day siege of the Boxer Uprising. Then, as adviser to the fledgling Chinese government, he was a pivotal figure in the fall of the last Emperor and the birth of the Chinese Republic.

'Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin have written a powerful and gripping biography of an Australian journalist and adventurer who paused only to tell his stories and to plan his next foray among the great events and leading figures of his day.' (Publication summary)