Month May 2016
Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road tells how an Australian nurse become an award-winning international travel writer and photographer. A Sense of Place Publishing is proud to have helped bring this wonderful book to a broader audience.
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The whole national capital of Australia could become a movie set if an enterprising director picks up this eminently filmable novel. In it, politicians and journos have their real names; clandestine meetings take place in cafes we all know; suburban streets and bush roads are recognisable. Then on a cold July night a sudden death outside the Yacht Club sends ripples way beyond Yarralumla. Jo, a progressive Australian National University academic, is researching “the unfair sex”, the bureaucracy’s resistance to women in senior positions and its hostility to men who seek to promote them. Jo farewells her Yugoslavian lover outside the Hyatt, then drives away and apparently shoots herself in the head. This is the hinge on which the novel swings – and swing it does in early 1990s Canberra. Young professional women are shaking the barricades and remaking the rules, the written ones at least. Their affairs, public and private, domestic and foreign, propel an investigation that is conducted with fixed phones, faxes and no email. Lake George still “glistens in the sun”. But people-smuggling, gun-running and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation malfeasance are rife in Canberra, so it is hardly out of date.
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Australia is in the grip of an election campaign, with an increasingly disengaged and disillusioned population calling down a curse on both their houses. Drawing on more than sixty on-the-record interviews with all the major players, Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation Paul Kelly writes with a keen eye and fearless determination. His central theme is that Australian politics has entered a crisis of the system that, unless corrected, will diminish the lives of all Australians, that in many senses politics and the machinery of government no longer serve the people. “The business of politics is too decoupled from the interests of Australia and its citizens,” Kelly writes. “This decoupling constitutes the Australian crisis.” Triumph and Demise is the inside account of the hopes, achievements and bitter failures of the Labor Government from 2007 to 2013. Nobody knows all the major players in Australian politics in the same way author Paul Kelly does.
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A Sense of Place Publishing brings you a quirky new Australian detective novel, Bloody Colonials by Stafford Sanders. The book pits a canny convict sleuth against the ruthless empire-builders of an early penal settlement – with exciting and amusing results. Set among the high cliffs and rugged bushland of the Australian coast, Bloody Colonials unleashes detective Seamus “Shameless” Halloran into a brave new world of mystery and intrigue, action, romance, dark humour, poignancy, irony – and barbed satire on power, pretension and the seeds of modern Australia.
Through an extremely curious series of circumstances, A Sense of Place Publishing encountered Michelle Desparquet, living on an island which he has specifically asked not be revealed. Now in his mid-80s, the author of Abduction to the 9th Planet remains remarkable, even if his first flush of fame has faded. He still displays an ebullent love of life, a fondness for Scotch and a good laugh, is a chess champion in his community, and amongst some of the islanders is regarded as a totem of good luck, someone to be touched or rubbed up against, so that the divinity or good luck which is so much part of him will rub off. He is a kind of living good luck charm. To this day he maintains that the story he told in Abduction to the Ninth Planet is entirely true. What makes a cult novel remains a mystery; time, circumstance, good luck, talent, and other elements intangible, or the world would be full of them. At one time Abduction to the Ninth Planet was outselling The Celestine Prophecy, a book which argued that humanity was gpoing through a fundamental shift in consciousness. Michelle Desparquet still maintins that the story he tells, of being abducted by advanced extra-terrestial beings, is simply a retelling of events which truly happened. With mankind’s knowledge of the universe expanding by the day, the claim that mankind is alone in the universe has come to seem increasingly bizarre.
Mark Latham is one of the greatest Prime Ministers Australia never had; unpredictable, brilliant, personable, closer to the electorate and the common aspirations of the Australian people than almost any prominent politician before or since. He was roundly defeated by conservative Prime Minister John Howard in 2004, and left politics the following year, crushed both by the internal complexities, hypocrisies and multiple incompetencies of the Labor Party; and by his own sometimes difficult personality. Latham at Large is an entertaining, thought-provoking, sometimes scathing, often humorous collection from a man who is not afraid to speak his mind. There is no one else like Mark Latham in Australian public life.
The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities is a rivetting firsthand account of a young British civilian woman, Emma Sky, who volunteered to go to Iraq immediately after the invasion in 2003, and within weeks found herself in the role of Governor of Kirkuk – the most dangerous place on Earth. As a Brit, a woman and a liberal, Emma Sky’s presence and position in Iraq following the invasion in 2003 is the stuff of fiction. Shortly after the coalition troops went in, Sky, an Arabist, volunteered to go to assist the Coalition Provisional Authority in the occupation. Alone, she made her way to Baghdad, was told they had enough people, so travelled north, to Kirkuk. Within days she became the most senior civilian there, Kirkuk’s lady governor.
The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Rainforest, by admired science journalist David Quammen, tells the real story how AIDS originated with a virus in a chimpanzee, jumped to one human, and then infected more than 60 million people in one of history’s most devastating pandemics. Described as a frightening and fascinating masterpiece, The Chimp and the River illustrates how the origin of AIDS is very different from what most of us think we know.
Model Citizens: Riding For A Fall is a romantic thriller about two models who blackmail their way to the top in Los Angeles. They’ve got it made, until the bad (boy) karma catches up with them. Overnight, France’s Angela Durand and blonde Californian Joanne Hart become Super Models and global celebrities. The LA high life is at their fingertips. Multi-million-dollar modelling contracts with fashion’s biggest names. Rich and famous lovers. Private jet travel. The best manager in the business. What could possibly go wrong?
By May of 2015 the security situation in Australia had deteriorated to an alarming extent. The authorities were scared witless another terror attack was imminent. For more than 12 months they had been putting out spot fires across the country, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, along with other regional and state centres. The increasing radicalisation of the Muslim minority, fanned by the rise of the single most powerful religious movement in modern times, the Islamic State, posed a major threat to the safety of Australian citizens. And as any firefighter could tell you, there were only so many spot fires you could put out before the forest ignited. The dreadful security situation in Australia had been fanned by a lunatic decision by the government to once again join America, the Great Satan as the Islamic community regarded them, in invading Muslim lands aka Iraq. There was no reason to do so; no treaty obligation, no security situation which could justify the invasion of sovereign lands. The Muslim minority was incensed by the inhumane killing of mujaheddin by high-tech drones launched from Australian fighter jets. They were incensed by the Australian governments labeling of some of their members as un-Australian, when in many ways, their regular attendance at mosque, their faithfulness to their wives, the good care they took of their children, the fact they did not smoke, drink or take drugs and had strong ties with their communities, all marked them as far better citizens than many members of the decrepit society they saw around them. The mishandling of the situation by the Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who repeatedly ignored expert advice on how to deal with a religious minority with which he clearly had no affinity or understanding, had ramped the terror threat through the roof. The entire devolving security situation was set against a rapid collapse in Australian society, which had seen a once proud, optimistic, larrikin country become impoverished, dispirited, and broken, the streets of Sydney, its major city, more like walking through a Mad Max movie than a major city, the only difference being the black birds were replaced by squawking seagulls from the nearby beaches; just as eery, just as apocryphal in their mournful cries.
Algorithms can learn. Algorithms can acquire bias. In The Black Box Society: How Secret Algorithms Control Money and Information, eminent Law Professor Frank Pasquale exposes the invasive technology running our lives. In The Age of Terror these systems can be used to extend the control of dark agencies into every corner of our lives. Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior-silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed and invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so-and to set limits on how big data affects our lives.
The worst scandal in the annals of modern tourism, the daily robbing, bashing, drugging, extortion and murder of foreign tourists on Thai soil, is exposed in Thailand: Deadly Destination.