by Andrew Rule
Biographies
Phillip Adams AO, FAHA is a broadcaster, writer and filmmaker. He has presented Late Night Live for twenty-six years. He has written more than twenty books, and his work has appeared in scores of Australian newspapers and journals, the London Times and The New York Times. His many films include The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, The Getting of Wisdom, Don’s Party, Lonely Hearts and We of the Never Never. Phillip has chaired the Australian Film Institute, the Australian Film Commission, Film Australia, the Commission for the Future, the National Australia Day Council and the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Mind at Sydney University and the Australian National University. As well as two Orders of Australia, Phillip was Australian Humanist of the Year (1987), Republican of the Year 2005, and received the Longford Award, the film industry’s highest accolade, in 1981, the year he was appointed Senior Anzac Fellow. He received the Henry Lawson Arts Award (1987) and in 1998 the National Trust elected him one of Australia’s 100 Living National Treasures. He has six honorary doctorates and was appointed to the Media Hall of Fame in 2014. A minor planet was named ‘Phillip Adams’ by the International Astronomical Union in 1997.
Greg Baum has been a journalist for almost forty years, mostly covering sport. He is presently chief sports columnist and associate editor at The Age. He has always lived in Melbourne. He has only ever owned one dog outright, but has been exposed to many others in a blended family environment.
Tony Birch is the author of five books: Shadowboxing (2006), Father’s Day (2009), Blood (2011), The Promise (2014) and Ghost River (2015). He is currently the Bruce MacGuinness Research Fellow in the Moondani Balluk Academic Unit at Victoria University.
John Birmingham has published lots of books, most of them with his dog sitting under the desk, gently farting. He won the National Award for Non-Fiction with Leviathan:an Unauthorised Biography of Sydney. Then he started writing airport novels because they were more fun. His most recent series of books that improve with altitude are the Dave Hooper novels. You can join his book club and get a free story at jbismymasternow.com.
Anson Cameron had his first collection of short stories, Nice Shootin Cowboy, published in 1998. The title story was made into a short film a decade later. He has written six novels, and an acclaimed second collection of short stories, Pepsi Bears. Boyhoodlum, a memoir of his childhood in Shepparton, was published last year.
He has written for The Bulletin, The Drum, and currently writes a regular column for Fairfax.
Les Carlyon was born in northern Victoria into a family steeped in racing and horses. He began his journalistic career with Melbourne’s Sun News-Pictorial and has been editor of The Age, editor-in-chief of the Herald and Weekly Times group and has lectured in journalism. He has won the Walkley Award and the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year and wrote the critically acclaimed and popular military histories Gallipoli and The Great War. But his first love is horse racing, on which he has written for almost fifty years.
John Clarke is a writer and performer, known for twenty-seven years of interviews with Bryan Dawe on ABC television, for The Games, for Fred Dagg and for various movies including Death in Brunswick. For some reason he has also written some books. He is twenty-seven.
Greg Combet is known for public roles as the leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and as a Labor government minister. He has been a key player in several high-profile issues: the 1998 waterfront dispute, the fight to recover the entitlements of former Ansett employees, obtaining compensation for victims of James Hardie asbestos products, leading the campaign against the Howard government’s WorkChoices laws, and delivering Labor’s carbon pricing and renewable energy legislation. Less well known is that his public life has been underpinned by knowledge and experience gained growing up at a winery, as a mining engineer, union activist, superannuation trustee, bank director, industrial negotiator and advocate, politician, communicator and campaigner. He was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2006, and published The Fights of My Life in 2014. Following two terms in parliament, he is now pursuing a career in the superannuation industry and the private sector. He is a director of IFM Investors, ME Bank, advises Industry Super Australia and does consulting work.
Trent Dalton writes for The Weekend Australian Magazine. He has twice won a Walkley Award for excellence in journalism, been a four-time winner of the national News Awards Feature Journalist of the Year Award, and was named Queensland Journalist of the Year in 2011. His journalism has twice been nominated for a United Nations of Australia Media Peace Award. In 2014 and 2013, he was named Best Feature journalist at the annual Kennedy Awards for excellence in New South Wales journalism. His writing includes several short and feature-length film screenplays. His first short film, Silencer, was a finalist at the annual Tropfest Australia short film festival. He was nominated for a 2010 AFI Best Short Fiction screenplay award for his short film Glenn Owen Dodds, starring David Wenham. It won the International Prix Canal award at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France, and Dalton was named Best Writer at Aspen Shortsfest 2010. His latest feature film screenplay, Home, is a love story inspired by his 2011 non-fiction collection Detours: Stories from the Street, the culmination of three months immersed in Brisbane’s homeless community.
Robert Drewe’s novels, short stories and memoirs—including The Drowner, Our Sunshine, The Shark Net and The Bodysurfers—have won national and international prizes, been widely translated, and been adapted for film, television, radio and theatre around the world.
John Elder is a Melbourne-based writer and ornithologist. He’s currently completing a novel about poetry and disrupted childhood for his daughters, and a non-fiction book about birds and the meaning of the meaning of life.
Jonathan Green is a writer, editor and broadcaster, who rides when he can.
John Harms is the energy behind www.footyalmanac.com.au. He recently worked with Michelle Payne on her autobiography, Life as I Know It. A Queenslander, he lives in Melbourne with Susan and their young family. He doesn’t get to Fraser Island enough.
Malcolm Knox is the author of more than twenty books and has been a journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald since 1994. He grew up with beagles, survived without a dog for many years, but settled down with a blue heeler–kelpie cross called Bruce.
Garry Linnell can recall that when he started in journalism in the 1980s, he had hair. He has covered Olympic Games, football, cricket tours and written several books. He has also edited various newspapers and The Bulletin magazine and worked in commercial television. He is now a radio broadcaster in Sydney. He misses his days as a junior footballer in Geelong, a career he embellishes at every opportunity.
William McInnes is an award-winning actor and author. He lives in Melbourne with his two children and Ray and Delilah, two lovely kelpies as silly as wheels.
Shaun Micallef is an Australian comedian who has appeared in many TV shows (Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, The Ex-PM and Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation), films (Aquamarine, Bad Eggs and Fitzcarraldo) and also written a few things (Preincarnate, Black Beauty and February Dragon by Colin Thiele).
Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man and lives at Mallacoota in Far East Gippsland. He has published thirty-one books and was editor and publisher of Australian Short Stories magazine for sixteen years and sixty-five issues. In 2000 he won The Australian Literature Award for his novel Shark and in 2013 he won the Prime Minister’s Award for his YA novel Fog a Dox, and in 2016 won the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year Award for the history Dark Emu: Black Seeds.
Liam Pieper’s books include The Feel-Good Hit of the Year, shortlisted for the National Biography Award, and Mistakes Were Made, a short collection of essays. He was co-recipient of the 2014 M Literary Award, and was the inaugural creative resident of the UNESCO City of Literature of Prague, where he completed his first novel, The Toymaker, which is available now.
Frank Robson is a well-known journalist and author.
He has won two Walkley Awards for feature writing, and has worked for a range of publications here and overseas, including TIME and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Andrew Rule grew up in eastern Victoria surrounded by animals. Too small to be a mounted policeman, too big to be a jockey, too frightened to be a rodeo rider, he won the 1974 Sale Agricultural Show essay competition (first prize $5) before starting as a reporter with the Gippsland Times and Maffra Spectator. He later worked at The Age, The Herald and the Herald Sun, has written and published several books and claims to have once spent a week with a circus. He has variously maintained three terriers, two cats and too many old ponies and slow racehorses.
John Silvester has been a crime reporter in Melbourne since 1978, first with The Sun News-Pictorial then with The Sunday Age and The Age. He worked for The Sunday Times Insight team in London in 1990 and has co-authored many true crime books, including The Silent War, Leadbelly and the Underbelly series. He admits harbouring several dogs, including a three-legged Jack Russell terrier.
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster. He’s the immediate past editor of Overland, he contributes a fortnightly column to the Guardian and he appears daily on ‘Breakfasters’ on 3RRR.
Paul Toohey is a senior reporter for News Corp Australia. He has won three Walkley Awards and the Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year. He lives in Darwin.
Don Watson’s most recent books are The Bush (Hamish Hamilton) and Worst Words (Vintage). He lives in Melbourne.
Tony Wilson has written for both children and adults for more than a decade. His satirical novels for adults include Players (2005) and Making News (2010) and he’s penned features for The Age, The Monthly and Good Weekend. His most recent release is The Selwood Boys books for middle-grade kids—a fictionalised childhood for the four footballing brothers. His picture book, The Cow Tripped over the Moon, is shortlisted for CBCA Book of the Year 2016. Tony also curates and maintains the Speakola website, which promotes great speeches, famous and otherwise.
Tony Wright has been a journalist since 1970, when he began a cadetship at the tri-weekly Portland Observer in far southwest Victoria, where he had been raised on farms. He has written for numerous publications in the forty-six years since, apart from a hiatus in 1975, when, after a brush with a pony and a governor-general, he became a rock’n’roll roadie and sound mixer. He has been a senior writer for The Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Bulletin and is currently National Affairs Editor of The Age. Wright has written two plays and two bestselling books, was named Magazine Feature Writer of the Year twice, has won several UN Media Peace Prizes, a Quill Award and has been a Walkley Awards finalist five times.
More great titles from MUP
Comeback
The Fall and Rise of Geelong
James Button
ISBN 9780522866155 (pb)
ISBN 9780522866162 (ePub)
One town. One football club. One struggle for greatness.
James Button fell in love with the Geelong Football Club as a boy. It was a family affair. But as the years wore on and the defeats mounted, one nagging question became louder and louder: would his team ever win a premiership again?
Comeback tells the Geelong story—how a town unloved by the big city up the road turned to football to show it was as good as anyone.
It paints the characters—two Gary Abletts, ‘Polly’ Farmer, Bob Davis, ‘Bomber’ Thompson, Matthew Scarlett, Joel Selwood and many others—who helped to make Geelong a byword for excitement, and it explains how a bunch of talented but flashy individuals ended years of despair by finding the magic ingredient that makes a great team. More than a book about sport, Comeback shows how the history of a town and the spirit of a place can be funnelled through the fortunes of a football club.
James Button was an Age journalist and speechwriter to former prime minister, Kevin Rudd. His 2012 book Speechless: A Year in My Father’s Business, was shortlisted for the National Book Industry Book of the Year, the National Biography Award, the Walkley Award and the Melbourne Prize.
Light and Shadow
Memoirs of a Spy’s Son
Mark Colvin
ISBN 9780522870893 (pb)
ISBN 9780522870909 (ePub)
Mark Colvin is a broadcasting legend. He is the voice of ABC Radio’s leading current affairs program PM.
He was a founding broadcaster for the groundbreaking youth station Double J; he initiated The World Today program; and he’s one of the most popular and influential journalists in the twittersphere.
Mark has been covering local and global events for more than four decades. He has reported on wars, royal weddings and everything in between. In the midst of all this he discovered that his father was an MI6 spy.
Light and Shadow is the incredible story of a father waging a secret war against communism during the Cold War, while his son comes of age as a journalist during the tumultuous Whitlam and Fraser years and embarks on the risky career of a foreign correspondent.
Mark was witness to some of the most world-changing events, including the Iranian hostage crisis, the buildup to the first Gulf War in Iraq and the direct aftermath of the shocking genocide in Rwanda. But when he contracted a life-threatening illness while working in the field, his life changed forever. Mark Colvin’s engrossing memoir takes you inside the coverage of major news events and gently navigates the complexity of his father’s double life.
Press Escape
Shaun Carney
ISBN 9780522870022 (pb)
ISBN 9780522870039 (ePub)
Getting away was always a driving ambition for Shaun Carney—from an outer-suburban house in the 60s and 70s, from a family with a secret: a father with a double life and a borrowed name.
Journalism gave Shaun that escape, to another life, to becoming a different person. For 34 years he took every opportunity it offered, flourished and knew success even while dealing with the personal struggle of his own child battling cancer. But a greater sense of freedom came when he forgave the people he’d wanted to flee and, unexpectedly, let go of the life that he’d worked so hard to create. In this beautifully crafted memoir one of Australia’s leading political journalists writes movingly about discovering the one story that really matters.
Shaun Carney has been a journalist, editor and columnist with The Herald, The Age and the Herald Sun. He is an adjunct associate professor with the School of Social Sciences at Monash University.
The Peter Thomson Five
A Golfing Legend’s Greatest Triumphs
Tony Walker
ISBN 9780522869118 (pb)
ISBN 9780522869200 (ePub)
On the 51st anniversary of his last open championship, Peter Thomson talks about his life, golf and how he achieved Open glory.
Peter Thomson won five golf Open Championships. He is only the third golfer to have won five or more, behind the great Harry Vardon, who won six. It is a feat unlikely to be repeated in the modern era and puts him in the legendary league of sports players like Don Bradman, Rod Laver, Margaret Court and Dawn Fraser.
Tony Walker is a golf tragic who has spent his career as a foreign correspondent and a political editor for various Fairfax papers. He has won two Walkley awards and was awarded the Centenary Medal for contributions to journalism in 2001. He is an adjunct professor at LaTrobe University in the School of Communications. He has written a biography of Yasser Arafat. A frustrated sports journalist, this is his first sporting book.
The Turnbull Gamble
Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen
ISBN 9780522866155 (pb)
ISBN 9780522866162 (ePub)
The Liberal Party took a risk replacing Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull. They had seen how voters could turn when the ALP tore down a first-term prime minister. But MPs were desperate, having witnessed the collapse in polling during Abbott’s prime ministership. By the time Turnbull called the election it was still unclear what he wanted to achieve. He seemed strangely underprepared for a job
that he had fought so long to win.
Turnbull leads a party whose culture he doesn’t share. While the narrow election victory may have justified the gamble to place him in office, does Turnbull have the leadership qualities needed to break the cycle of division and instability of the last decade?
Wayne Errington is Associate Professor in Politics and Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) in the Faculty of Arts at Adelaide University.
Peter van Onselen is Contributing Editor at The Australian and a presenter at Sky News. He is a professor in politics at the University of Western Australia.
Together they wrote the bestsellers John Winston Howard: The Definitive Biography and Battleground: Why the Liberal Party Shirtfronted Tony Abbott.