Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd: 316 books

Non-freedom to the Western mind is inevitably linked with images of backwardness – Soviet tractors, East German Trabants, Kim Jong Il’s haircut. But non-freedom these days is also iPads, iPhones and a dazzling array of less iconic but ubiquitous consumer goods that flood our stores, our homes...

In The Best Australian Essays 2013, Robert Manne draws out this year’s most distinctive voices. This superb collection encompasses the personal, with Robert Dessaix’s distant summer of love and touch-typing and Helen Garner’s reaction to the death of Jill Meagher; and the political, with Chloe...

‘Some essays in this collection plunged me into thought. Some caused me to weep. Some brought tears of laughter. Some essays won me over by the power of their imagination. Some by their analytic clarity. Some by their excruciating honesty. Some by the pain of things past or present faced without...

‘Turn the page and hear the voices within …’—Ramona Koval The Best Australian Essays 2011 offers up bliss and illumination in equal measure – from the pleasures of the flesh to the events that convulsed the world in a year of change. Paul Kelly meditates on Frank Sinatra, and Robert...

A century ago we got it wrong. We sent thousands of young Australians on a military operation that was barely more than a disaster. It’s right that a hundred years later we should feel strongly about that. But have we got our remembrance right? What lessons haven’t we learned about war, and what...

In A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power, John Birmingham ponders the Australian way of war. After East Timor and Bali, a combination of primal fear and primal ambition has transformed attitudes to our region, to security and to war as an instrument of politics. Australian defence policy has...

As the convoy growled and squeaked to a halt in the dark, angry militiamen and soldiers began to shout and wave at the Australians, demanding they move aside. The Brave Ones' vanguard presented as a B-movie vision of some pirate biker gang from Hell, a rat bastard outfit in black tee-shirts, camouflage...

There are few original ideas in politics. In the creation of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was responsible for one. This essay reveals the making of Julian Assange – both his ideas and his world-changing actions. Robert Manne explores Assange's unruly childhood and then his involvement with...

In Whitefella Jump Up, Germaine Greer suggests that embracing Aboriginality is the only way Australia can fully imagine itself as a nation. In a wide-ranging essay she looks at the interdependence of black and white and suggests not how the Aborigine question may be settled but how a sense of being...

In Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance, David Malouf looks at Australia's bond with Britain and wonders whether it wasn't the Mother Country which did most of the giving. This is an essay which presents British civilisation, the civilisation of Shakespeare and the Enlightenment and the...

Winner of the 2013 ACT Book of the Year Award Cross-dressing convicts, effeminate bushrangers and women-shortage woes – here is the first ever history of sex in Australia, from Botany Bay to the present-day. In this fascinating social history, Frank Bongiorno uses striking examples to chart the changing...

This is the story of a quest – a journey down the red highway. On returning from a war zone, Nicolas Rothwell begins to explore the deserts and towns, sleepy coastline and hidden worlds of Australia’s north. As he travels, his journey gathers momentum and finds a shape. He has unforgettable, even...

‘The essay creates a place for slow thought on hectic subjects, and that is what the best of this year’s crop manage to do.’ —Geordie Williamson In The Best Australian Essays 2016, Geordie Williamson curates the year’s best non-fiction writing from Australia’s finest writers. The...

‘I was struck … by just how many poems depended on the ancient devices of the storyteller … Many have a lyrical or meditative feel, but most have a story to tell, captured in a brief glimpse of the meaning of life, or a dramatic climax.’ —John Tranter In this impressive anthology...