Non-fiction

For and Against Feminism

by Ann Curthoys
Ligature untapped
genre Non-fiction

Written between 1970 to 1986, these essays chart the thinking emerging from, and the debates within, Women’s Liberation in Australia, showing how it grew into a diverse, complex, and lively feminist movement.

First published in 1988, this edition of For and Against Feminism has a new introduction from the author putting the work in the context of today’s feminist debates.

Ann Curthoys AM has published extensively with a focus on Australian history, cultural studies, gender and feminist theory. Her books include Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (2002), and with John Docker Is History Fiction? (2006). Her most recent work, with Jessie Mitchell, is Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in the Australian Colonies, 1830–1890 (2018).

Darby McCarthy

by Lauren Callaway
Ligature untapped
genre Non-fiction · Sport

An Indigenous boy who won his first race at just ten, Darby McCarthy OAM is considered one of Australia’s greatest jockeys. And while McCarthy faced considerable challenges to achieve his extraordinary success, both on and off the track, he never forgot his heritage. As the The Guardian’s 2020 obituary put it, McCarthy was ‘genius jockey who rode for princes’, ‘partied with Sinatra’, but also ‘made it a mission to teach everyone about Aboriginal culture.’ First published in 2004, with a foreword by Cathy Freeman, Lauren Callaway’s biography of one of Australia’s most significant sportsmen vividly captures the lows and highs of McCarthy’s extraordinary life.

Duntroon

by Chris Clark
Ligature untapped
genre History · Military · Non-fiction

Duntroon, the Royal Military College of Australia, was opened in 2011, after the Australian Government acquired a sheep station of that name from the Campbell family in an area that would some years later become the country’s capital city. This was the first history of the College, and the story of its establishment, its traditions, and its people. First published in 1986.

Chris Clark is an acclaimed military historian. His books include The Diggers (1993), Transforming Australia’s Defence Industry (1999), The Encyclopaedia of Australia’s Battles (2001), and, most recently, The RAAF History: 1921–1996 (2021).

Boxing Day

by Jeff Wells
Ligature untapped
genre Non-fiction · Sport

In 1908, Jack Johnson became the first African American World Heavyweight champion—after winning a fight in Australia. In a gripping piece of writing that brings the Edwardian sporting world to life, veteran sports journalist Jeff Wells explains just what happened, who was involved, and why this fight was so significant.

Boxing Day was first published in 1998.

Jeff Wells is an acclaimed sports journalist and novelist.

Business, Charity and Sentiment

by Susan Marsden
Ligature untapped
genre Non-fiction

Business, Charity and Sentiment is the history of the South Australian Housing Trust and the first substantial history of public housing in Australia. The book documents fifty years of not only housing history, but social history and economic development during a time of profound social, environmental, political and public sector change in South Australia—and across the country.

First published in 1986, and shortlisted for the South Australian Festival Awards the same year, Business, Charity and Sentiment quickly gained a wide readership including policy makers, town planners, landscape designers and public housing residents themselves.

Susan Marsden is a highly respected professional historian and consultant. She’s published over forty histories, as well as producing exhibitions, heritage studies, and recorded oral histories.

Bluestocking in Patagonia

by Anne Whitehead
Ligature untapped
genre Biography · Non-fiction

Dame Mary Gilmore’s portrait is on the ten dollar note. But before she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire for contributions to literature, she was Mary Cameron, a schoolteacher and feminist, and one of a group of Australians who, at the end of the nineteenth century, attempted to create a socialist Utopia in Paraguay. Historian Anne Whitehead retraces her steps in a compelling investigation that blends biography, history and contemporary travelogue.

‘This splendid and fascinating book is brilliantly balanced as part memoir, part well-researched recreation of the experiences of the young Mary Gilmore as inamorata of Henry Lawson, as radical, wife, Paraguayan and Patagonian settler, and as abidingly Australian soul.’ — Thomas Keneally

‘It deserves a popular success. From beginning to end, in its readability, its engaging narrative and its shrewd evocation of personalities and places past and present, it meets the classical criterion of being both instructive and entertaining.’ — Jennifer Strauss, Australian Book Review

First published in 2003, Bluestocking in Patagonia was shortlisted for the Magarey National Biography Award and is the companion book to Anne Whitehead’s award-winning Paradise Mislaid, also part of the Untapped Collection.

Anne Whitehead is an historian, screenwriter and award-winning author. Her most recent book is Betsy and the Emperor: The true story of Napoleon, a pretty girl, a Regency rake and an Australian colonial misadventure (2015). For more information visit www.annewhitehead.com.

Blessed City

by Gwen Harwood
Ligature untapped
genre Biography · Letters · Non-fiction

An award-winning collection of wartime letters from a young Gwen Harwood, living with her family in Brisbane and yet to become an award-winning poet, to Thomas Riddell, a soldier stationed in Darwin.

‘In her extraordinary book Blessed City: Letters to Thomas Riddell 1943, we are offered a remarkably comprehensive insight into the twenty-three-year-old Gwen Harwood – or Gwen Foster as she was then. Her letters were vivacious, witty, observant, self-aware and self-satirising, and vivid with insights. The early brilliance of her letters left no doubt as to her talent.’ — Thomas Shapcott, in A Tribute to Gwen Harwood, Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week 1996, reprinted in Australian Book Review

First published in 1990, this collection won the The Age Book of the Year Award for Non-Fiction in that same year.

Gwen Harwood AO (1920–1995) was an award-winning poet. Her collection Bone Scan (1988) won the John Bray Award for Poetry (1990) and The C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry (1989). In 1977, she was awarded the Robert Frost Medallion, in 1978 she was the recipient of the Patrick White Award, and in 1994 she received the UK Society of Authors’ Cholmondeley Award, an annual award founded to ‘recognise the achievement and distinction of individual poets’.

Blue China

by Jan Gothard
Ligature untapped
genre Non-fiction

Blue China is an award-winning examination of the emigration of single working-class British women to the Australian colonies in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

This form of emigration was voluntary and extensive—with the number of female emigrants outnumbering convicts almost four to one—yet stigmatised, as distinguished historian Jan Gothard reveals in this meticulously researched work. Combining analysis of the changing policy landscape and differing practices across colonies, and the women’s own stories, this important book shines a light on women’s experiences that have been lost in the wider colonial narrative.

‘The whole subject of single female migration is far more complex than the reader might have assumed, and Gothard weaves her considerable research into a human-interest document of great appeal.’ —History West

First published in 2001, Blue China won the WA Premier’s Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001. Jan Gothard has lectured in history and been Director of the Centre for Western Australian History. Her books include, along with the acclaimed Blue China (2001), Legacies of White Australia: Race, culture and nation (2003) co-edited with Laksiri Jayasuriya and David Walker and The Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia (2009), co-edited with Jenny Gregory.

Barefoot and pregnant?

by Trevor McClaughlin
Ligature untapped
genre Non-fiction

Important account and record of survivors of the Irish Famine sent to Australia between 1848–1851. Introduced and compiled by Trevor McClaughlin. First published in 1991.

Historian Trevor McClaughlin is the author of From Shamrock to Wattle (1985; 1990) and the editor of Irish Women in Colonial Australia (1998). He has also compiled a second volume of Barefoot and Pregnant? Irish famine orphans in Australia, which is currently being digitised.

Behind the Banana Curtain

by Hugh Lunn
Ligature untapped
genre Essays · Non-fiction

Travel back the 1970s and north to Australia’s sunshine state with bestselling author Hugh Lunn. ‘Many people – both inside and outside Queensland – have asked me what it is that makes this expanding northern state so distinctive,’ he writes in the introduction to Behind the Banana Curtain. ‘And while everyone in Australia, it seems, has an opinion on Queensland, few have any idea at all what really goes on there.’ As The Australian’s Queensland-based features writer, his job was to reveal what went on there to the rest of the country. And in this collection of odd, funny and sometimes disturbing pieces, he does so with relish.

First published in 1980, the collection includes ‘The Battle of Ballymore’ which won the 1979 National Press Club Award for Best Sporting Feature.

Hugh Lunn is a Walkley Award-winning journalist and the bestselling author of Over the Top with Jim (1989) and Vietnam: A Reporter’s War (1985), winner of The Age Book of the Year Award for Non-Fiction.