Text Publishing imprint: 415 books

An original and intriguing history of Melbourne at the tumultuous start of the twentieth century, illustrated throughout with contemporary drawings and photos. In 1901 Melbourne was a small city. Then the founders of the Australian Commonwealth decided it was the best place to house the new...

There seems no end to our hunger for the stories of real people facing impossible odds or dealing with the mundanity of life. Yet not every life story finds or deserves an audience in addition to Facebook.Such is Life presents a dazzling selection of new memoir, personal essay and biography by some...

Glyn Davis, professor of political science and vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, argues that there are more similarities between street gangs than business enterprises. He reviews the history of the leadership turbulence that besets both sides of Australian politics through this prism and reaches...

Winner of the Stella Prize, 2014. The Eureka Stockade. It's one of Australia's foundation legends yet the story has always been told as if half the participants weren't there. But what if the hot-tempered, free-spirited gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and...

Disaster strikes. A ship goes down, a plane crashes, a party of travellers is cut off. But when the panic and confusion subside and the dead are counted, the survivors must find a way to keep surviving. And in desperation, unconstrained by law or conventional authority, the tactics they resort...

We live in an age of Wicked Problems, Exquisite Dilemmas. From the scale and scope of natural disasters to managing climate change, asylum seeking or river systems, new paradigms of transparency and power demand a new style of leadership, collaborative action and non-linear solutions. UK journalist...

A timely, insightful and personal portrait of what it is to be a woman in power in Australia today. Iconic journalist and television presenter Geraldine Doogue turns her attention to an issue central to our times. How are we, as women, represented at the top levels of power in Australia? In...

My great Aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling fairly fast in the wrong direction. Growing up in the 1930s...

Internationally acclaimed award-winning author Lloyd Jones looks back at how rugby shaped his childhood, his worldview and his adult sensibilities. From childhood games in the suburbs of Wellington, to a reverence for the mythical members of the All Blacks, rugby provided a vast and complex sense...

This entertaining collection of pieces from the acclaimed director of Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy and Mao’s Last Dancer features memoirs, brief lives and revealing accounts of the film world. Alongside unsung heroes from behind the camera and producers of dubious repute are Madeleine...

Retirement is not the time to cut all ties and head off to live in a warm climate but rather to ask: Who do I want to be near? How will my relationships be reaffirmed? What do I care about? What can I create and contribute to the world? Meet Jim Brierley, who was still jumping out of planes...

John Clarke has been making Australians laugh for more than two decades. Here is a wonderful selection of his work, beginning with the Fred Dagg radio scripts of the late seventies, and concluding with Clarke's famous television interviews of the nineties. In between are his brilliant accounts of...

What is Australia For? asks the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles. In a powerful memoir, Frank Moorhouse confronts his own mortality when a routine trek through the bush at the back of...

It was a butcher on smoko who reported the man stashing the kid in the car boot. He didn't really know whether he'd seen anything at all, though. Maybe an abduction? Maybe just a stressed-out father. Detective Bart Moy, newly returned to the country town where his ailing, cantankerous father...