Cirrus@Austlit

'Datson Angel is a turbo-charged adventure into the dark heart of 1980s Australia: a place completely alien, yet frighteningly similar, to today.

'EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK HAPPENED . . .

'At seventeen, aching to begin her adult life, Anna Broinowski is precocious, naive and in her first year of Arts/Law at Sydney University. Anna's already convinced she knows how the world works, but O-week changes that. She watches Australia's drunk future captains of industry terrorise freshers and the Wesley grapevine starts buzzing with reports that a Sancta Sophia first-year has been gangbanged by the St Paul's seniors, who pinioned her to the rose garden lawn with croquet hoops.

'Nothing is what she thought it'd be . . . until the Sydney Uni Dramatic Society (SUDS) leads Anna to her people. New dreams are made. Acting, playing violin, auditioning for NIDA, losing her virginity. And then Peisley, a gentle giant with calves as muscly as the Hulk's, talks of a hitchhiking trip up north. And, after agreeing on three rules - Never split up. Remain platonic. Accept every lift that gets them closer to Darwin - Anna decides to go.

'Hitchhiking the highways leads her to a dystopian dustbowl of raging paranoia and ghastly beauty, a flyblown asylum where outsiders must adapt or perish, and women teeter on an existential knife-edge, between hatred and annihilation. Anna's is a tale of danger, unravelling sanity and blossoming love. It details the extreme things that happen when urban feminism is plucked from the Ivory Tower and forced to confront the toxic misogyny in the guts of the Australian soul. In her travels, Anna will learn that the line between victim and survivor can be as cruel as luck and as random as a shiny blue Datson on a red dirt road.

'Based on her battered travel diary, Datsun Angel is a riveting and darkly funny true story of a sex, drugs and violence-fuelled adventure through the brutal 1980s Australian outback. It is a feminist Mad Max, told through a #MeToo filter.' (Publication summary)

'In 1996, Pauline Hanson gave a speech that changed Australia. Attacking Asian and Indigenous people and foreign aid, Hanson unleashed a Pandora’s box of violence and division on the progressive country Prime Minister Keating had positioned as ‘part of Asia’. After her famous defeat in 1998, her political downfall seemed assured – but she stayed firmly in the spotlight, whether she was being locked up for electoral fraud or jiving on Dancing with the Stars. Now, after almost two decades in the political wilderness, Hanson is back and more powerful than ever. Before One Nation’s astonishingly successful return to Australian politics in 2016, multi-award-winning filmmaker Anna Broinowski had complete access to Hanson and her ‘Fed Up’ election campaign. Broinowski followed Hanson as she flew from Rockhampton to Sydney to Great Keppel Island and beyond in her Jabiru two-seater. The crazies, the madness, the division and the hatred Hanson attracts and inflames were all on show – sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, and often surreal. At the time, no one was taking Pauline Hanson and One Nation’s political chances seriously, but Broinowski quickly realised that there was a movement forming behind her. Pauline Hanson’s explosive political journey mirrors Australia’s own: from left-leaning multiculturalism, to the divided landscape we live in now. And, alongside the shocks of Brexit and Trump’s presidency, Hanson's resurrection reflects a broader global trend towards outrageous far-right outsiders.' (Publication Summary)

'We were all propagandists; the only differences were our goals.'

Looking for respite from her crumbling marriage and determined to stop a coal seam gas mine near her Sydney home, filmmaker Anna Broinowski finds wisdom and inspiration in the strangest of places: North Korea. Guided by the late Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's manifesto The Cinema and Directing, Broinowski, in a world first, travels to Pyongyang to collaborate with North Korea's top directors, composers and movie stars to make a powerful anti-fracking propaganda film.

The Director is the Commander centres around the bizarre twenty-one day shoot Broinowski did in North Korea to make her documentary, Aim High in Creation! She meets and befriends artists and apparatchiki, defectors and loyalists, and gains a new insight into the world's most secretive regime. Her adventures are set against a parallel exploration of propaganda in general: both in its ham-fisted North Korean form and its sophisticated but no less pervasive incarnation in the corporate West.

Funny, multi-layered and utterly compelling, The Director is the Commander is a gripping account of an extraordinary journey inside a nation we can usually only see from the outside looking in.