AustLit

'Chris Hemsworth has been forced to film at a Gold Coast convention centre, such is the demand for sound stages in Australia. Next month, the Thor actor’s adopted home in Byron Bay will be invaded by Netflix’s Byron Baes, the streaming giant’s first Australian reality TV series, which has stirred controversy with locals and made headlines around the world. All around the country, it seems, the film and television industry is experiencing a gold rush. At least at first glance.'(Introduction)

'In early 2019, Rick Morton, author of acclaimed, bestselling memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, was diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - which, as he says, is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him the most during childhood didn't. 

'So, over the course of twelve months, he went on a journey to rediscover love. To get better. Not cured, not fixed. Just, better. This is a book about his journey to betterness, his year of living vulnerably. It's a book about love. What love is, how we see it, what forms it takes, how we practice it in our lives, what it means to us, and how we really, really can't live without it, even if, like Rick for many years, we think we can.

'As he says: 'People think they want cars, and they will, to get to jobs and appointments in cities and regions where public transport has failed them. But what gets them into those cars, out of the house, out of bed for God's sake, is love.''

Source : publisher's blurb

'Money makes the world go round, but does it make us happy?

'Money is one of the most fraught subjects; it raises powerful emotions in all of us. Too much money often corrupts people - too little can make people feel desperate.

'Growing up in rural Queensland, journalist Rick Morton has known poverty from the inside. Now he isn't poor, but his spending habits and attitude to money are still informed by growing up without it. In On Money, Morton examines the meaning of money and exposes the lie behind the government's mantra: have a go, get a go.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'For the longest time, the Australia I knew was all myth. Early reading didn’t dispel this languid stereotype because part of that upbringing was made possible only by the claustrophobia of the culture itself. It was a narrow existence, filled with outback hardship or romance novels, bush memoirs (how embarrassing that I appear to have done the same thing) and writers from America or worse, England. In short, the authors I knew were not a representative sample of this country. This is not a problem if your range is bigger and broader, but to the extent that my range left my cultural Umwelt at all, it stopped at Not Without My Daughter. Life, then, is about pushing back the borders of our observable universe. Especially when such a quest reveals much about the place we call home.' (Introduction)

'Social mobility is not a train you get to board after you’ve scraped together enough for the ticket. You have to build the whole bloody engine, with nothing but a spoon and hand-me-down psychological distress.

'Violence, treachery and cruelty run through the generational veins of Rick Morton’s family. A horrific accident thrusts his mother and siblings into a world impossible for them to navigate, a life of poverty and drug addiction

'One Hundred Years of Dirt is an unflinching memoir in which the mother is a hero who is never rewarded. It is a meditation on the anger, fear of others and an obsession with real and imagined borders. Yet it is also a testimony to the strength of familial love and endurance. ' (Publication summary)