Faces of the nation
26 February 2018
Our latest video celebrates 20 years of the National Portrait Gallery.
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Showing 20 of 1136 results, most relevant first.
Community Heritage Grants round opens
5 March 2018
Applications are now open for the 2018 Community Heritage Grants Program.
Floundering
Tom and Jordy have been living with their gran since the day their mother, Loretta, left them on her doorstep and disappeared. Now Loretta’s returned, and she wants her boys back. Tom and Jordy hit the road with Loretta in her beat-up car. The family of three journeys across the country, squabbling, bonding, searching and reconnecting. But Loretta isn’t mother material. She’s broke, unreliable, lost. And there’s something else that’s not quite right with this reunion. This beautifully written and gripping debut is as moving as it is frightening, and as heartbreaking as it is tender.
The Chemistry of Tears
When her lover dies suddenly, all Catherine has left is her work. In an act of compassion her manager at London's Swinburne Museum gives her a very particular project: a box of intricate clockwork parts that constitute a nineteenth-century automaton, a beautiful mechanical bird. It's an object made of equal parts magic, love, madness and science, a delight that contains the seeds of our age's downfall. When Catherine discovers the diary of the man who commissioned it, one obsession merges into another.
Questions of Travel
A mesmerising literary novel, Questions of Travel charts two very different lives. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events.
Around these two superbly drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories - from Theo, whose life plays out in the long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman determined to reinvent herself in Australia.
Lost Voices
Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter – a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in an inherited Tasmanian farmhouse – for help. As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid nineteenth century. Dramatic, insightful and evocative, Lost Voices is an intriguing double narrative that confirms Koch as one of our most significant and compelling novelists.
Mateship with Birds
On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the...
Jam Tree Gully
In this daring new collection, Australia's preeminent environmental poet confronts the legacy of Thoreau's Walden. With Walden as his inspiration, John Kinsella moved with his family back to rural Australia, where he wrote the poems in this original collection exploring the nature of our responsibility and connection to the land.
One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English."—Harold Bloom
Crimson Crop
This volume has at its core a series of elegies, several about his late father Bob Rose (a respected Australian Rules footballer and coach), thus continuing the themes of his bestselling memoir Rose Boys (2001). The volume also contains new ‘Catullan’ poems, imitations of Catullus that Rose has been writing and publishing since the 1980s.
Crimson Crop is elegant, poignant and, at times, wickedly droll.
Applications open for the Regional Arts Fund
7 March 2018
Check the closing dates in your state or territory for submissions.
Burning Rice
These poems were written while Eileen Chong was an Australian Poetry Fellow in 2011-2012, mentored by Anthony Lawrence....
The Sunlit Zone
Set on the east coast of Australia between 2020 and 2050, this surprising verse novel imagines a futuristic world in which technology has changed the daily texture of human life but life itself hasn’t changed much at all. Jacobson uses a casual-seeming voice that belies the craft and care in the writing. In a world radically different from ours in some ways, in others it is disconcertingly the same. Designer babies and hybrid pets abound. Yet the love stories and family tragedies depicted have the same qualities as those we know, as do the experiences of loss and recovery.
Liquid Nitrogen
Jennifer Maiden’s ‘weaving’ poems are like verse essays or conversations, in which the political issues of our time and the figures who dominate them are presented with the same clear intelligence and eye for detail, as the most personal aspects of the poet’s experience. This is the quality of liquid nitrogen which gives the book its title – ‘the frozen suspension which is risky/ but also fecund and has beauty’ – a substance which permits intense and heated interactions, and at the same time the survival of delicate organisms. In the cool medium of Maiden’s poetry Julia Gillard is...
Australia Council Awards
8 March 2018
Eight of Australia’s leading artists and arts workers have been recognised in the annual Australia Council Awards for their outstanding...
Bold Palates: Australia's gastronomic heritage
In Bold Palates Professor Barbara Santich describes how, from earliest colonial days, Australian cooks have improvised and invented, transforming and 'Australianising' foods and recipes from other countries, along the way laying the foundations of a distinctive food culture....
Plein Airs and Graces: The life and times of George Colingridge
Plein Airs and Graces examines the extraordinary life of George Collingridge de Tourcey, a landscape painter of the late nineteenth century, just ahead of the Australian impressionists. When he emigrated from France to Australia he grew passionate about the possibilities of his new country, and worked tirelessly to contribute to it – not least for his Discovery of Australia (1895), in which on the evidence of ancient maps he argued controversially for Portuguese and Hispanic pre-discovery of Australia.
Bradman’s War
The Australian and English Test cricketers who fought and survived together in WWII came home planning to resume the Ashes in a new spirit of friendship. Australia's legendary captain had something else in mind....
Uncommon Soldier
Chris Masters turns his penetrating gaze on the young men and women who make up the Australian Army. Having been taken into their ranks in a way rarely afforded an outsider, he gives heart and soul to the contemporary digger: how they are selected, how they are led, and how they are transformed from civilians to disciplined professional soldiers. And by sharing their experiences, he puts under severe challenge that soldiering is the province of dumb grunts....
The Australian Moment
George Megalogenis, one of our most respected political and economic writers, reviews the key events since the 1970s that have forged institutional and political leadership and a canny populace. He examines how we developed from a closed economy racked by the oil shocks, toughed it out during the sometimes devastating growing pains of deregulation, and survived the Asian financial crisis, the dotcom tech wreck and the GFC to become the last developed nation standing in the 2000s. As a result, whatever happens next, we're as well positioned as any to survive the ongoing rumblings of the...
Celebrating World Poetry Day
21 March 2018
To mark World Poetry Day, we’re taking a look at the work of the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Poetry winner.
