ABC Books
Crackpots, Ratbags and Rebels by Robert Holden & Up Close by Peter Wilmoth
Making ‘Black Harvest’: Warfare, filmmaking and living dangerously in the highlands of Papua New Guinea by Bob Connolly
Dating Aphrodite: Modern adventures in the ancient world by Luke Slattery
Young Murphy by Gary Crew, illustrated by Mark Wilson & 101 Great Killer Creatures by Paul Holper and Simon Torok, illustrated by Stephen Axelsen
Griffith Review 8 edited by Julianne Schultz & Heat 9 edited by Ivor Indyk
The Accidental Developer: The fascinating rise to the top of Mirvac founder Henry Pollack by Henry Pollack
Tasting Life Twice: Conversations with remarkable writers by Ramona Koval
Tales Of Two Hemispheres: Boyer Lectures 2004 by Peter Conrad
The Book of Beginnings: A miscellany of the origins of superstitions, customs, phrases and sayings by R and L Brasch
Four artists have taken the natural world – its wildlife, its ecology, and its geology – and produced four books with entirely different aims. Kim Michelle Toft describes The World That We Want (UQP, $26.95hb, 32 pp) as ‘one that protects, feeds and shelters everything that lives on it’. Essentially, this is a factual book, but one suffused with a sense of wonder because of Toft’s exquisite pictures. Are We There Yet? (Are We There Yet? A Journey Around Australia, Viking, $24.95hb, 32 pp) is Alison Lester’s bubbling account of a family’s ‘journey around Australia’, with cheerful pictures of boab trees, fairy penguins and everything in between. Again, it is factual; if you want to know what a quokka looks like, just find the right picture. This is not so true of Graeme Base’s Jungle Drums (Viking, $29.95hb, 38 pp); although the leopard, the elephant and the warthogs are clearly recognisable in the early pictures, by the middle of the story they all look strange.
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