AustLit

'In 2016, New York Times correspondent Damien Cave moved his young family to Sydney to establish a foreign bureau for the newspaper. As he writes in his new book, Into the Rip, the experience has been transformational, teaching him among other things that ‘None of us is trapped within the nation we come from or the values we picked up along the way’. Despite political and economic alliances, Australia and the United States are not clones of each other, and in many ways Australia proves ‘the healthier model’ for a society. Cave learned these life lessons, he reports, through ‘the combination of fear, nature and community spirit’.' (Introduction)

'‘Come to the woods,” wrote the Scottish-American conservationist John Muir, “for here is rest.” Muir’s tenacity as an ­explorer and gifts as a writer galvanised the national park movement in the US. Teddy Roosevelt, who loved killing things as much as preserving them, was convinced by Muir that wild places needed to be kept for ­future generations.' (Introduction)

'Whose stories get to be told? An Unconventional Wife, Mary Hoban’s elegant biography of Julia Sorrell Arnold, who was born in Tasmania in 1826 and died in England 61 years later, challenges traditional notions of biography, examining a woman other writers might have ignored.' (Introduction)