Cirrus@Austlit

'The long-awaited memoir of one of AFL’s hardest players and most respected behind-the-scenes coaches.

'‘You’ve got to have that madness in your mind to win, win, win. You’ve got to have that somewhere, but it can’t consume you.’

'This story begins in infamy. Everyone’s first glimpse of the man is of ferocious blows struck in grand finals, his name splashed in headlines across the back pages of the tabloids. It’s the 1970s, it’s Richmond: kill or be killed.

'There was a time when almost every football watcher who heard Neil Balme’s name would react with disapproval. My God, what a bruiser . . . A dangerous fellow . . . And those who knew him would quickly deny these accusations. He’s not a brute, you know, he’s a thinker . . . A mild-mannered bloke, easygoing. The great paradox of Balme is the violence and the pacifism, the mayhem and the calm, the rough justice and the gentleness. He’s a cold-blooded thug; he’s a soft-hearted healer; he’s a villain and a hero.

'Balme is unique in having spent longer than anyone else in clubland. Richmond, Norwood, Melbourne, Collingwood, Geelong and Richmond again – over fifty years. He’s seen and created limitless change in those decades. So how did Neil Balme go from being the infamous on-field enforcer of the 1970s to the avuncular guru the football world knows and loves today?

'After eleven premierships, an aura surrounds the man. Get Balme to your club and premierships will follow. What has he to tell us of football, of the high times and the low, of the champs and the egos? Of Royce and GR, of Diamond Joe, of Eddie and Mick, of Bomber, of Dimma? And of life and the human heart?

'Balme’s tale is, unsurprisingly, a mix of hard truth and unerring compassion.' (Publication summary)

'At a surf campus, a weekend of cultural exchange begins, during which a group of less-advantaged boys from Dallas Islamic Academy are taught to surf by boys from Yarraside Boys’ Grammar, an elite private school. A sexual encounter takes place on the beach between Seb, a rich kid from the Grammar, and Fariad, a Muslim Afghan refugee from the Academy. Little does anyone know that this encounter has been unwittingly recorded by a drone, sent up by one of the Grammar schoolkids to watch the antics of the surfers.

'A hilarious memoir and a crash-investigator’s report into how not to be a boy. Anson Cameron was born in the Victorian town of Shepparton in 1961, the son of a country lawyer and an English rose. Through the shoeless neighbourhoods and surrounding forests, sipping a Blue Heaven milkshake, shooting at anything that moves, and singing an Irish Rovers song, this boy wends his way smiling and lying and creating chaos in his wake. He joins a peeing club and becomes a tycoon of urine; assassinates the Cisco Kid; keeps a deaf man as an entertainment; starts a war between hags; electrocutes a friend’s mother; and has a Bodgie clubbed by the police before he is seven. His war on schoolteachers means he is forced to cycle home from school dyed a different colour every day. At high school, with a maturing political outlook, he joins a gang of Anglos to fight a war on Wogs. There is hardly a trap of vanity into which he doesn’t fall. With a wry narrator and a cast of rural originals, Boyhoodlum is a clear window into a time and place. It is the story of a family and a town through the eyes of a boy who laughed at them and loved them equally.' (Publication summary)

'A blackly funny novel about an unlikely hero, and his misadventures on the flood he has created.

'In the drought-stricken Riverland town of Bartel in South Australia, after the suicide of his wife, Merv Rossiter steals a boat. He trucks north with his eight-year-old-daughter Em into Queensland. There he blows up the dam at Waroo Station, releasing a flood through outback New South Wales into South Australia.

'As the authorities search for them, Merv and Em ride the flood south in their stolen boat, rescuing a Queensland Minister from the water, and then a young blackfella who fancies he sang the river to life all by himself.

'Meanwhile, in Canberra, the political flotsam carried by Merv's renegade ocean brings the Federal Government to its knees.

'The Last Pulse is the story of the last flood that will ever flow down the inland artery that was the Darling River. The stream is broken now and the agriculture and lives of South Australians have been appropriated with the water by a people a thousand kilometres to the north.

'Throughout their misadventures on his flood, Merv promises his daughter they will be heroes in South Australia, and that they are sailing towards victory parades and happiness. The other crewmembers, however, know he is heading towards a violent reckoning with Australia itself.

'Blackly humorous, poignant, timely, The Last Pulse is Anson Cameron's finest work to date.' (Publication summary)