Wakefield Press: 112 books

This title recounts the turbulent life and career of Marjorie Lawrence, one of Australia's most renowned opera stars. From humble beginnings in rural Victoria, Lawrence rose to become one of the pre-eminent Wagner singers of her generation, acclaimed and honoured in Europe and at the Metropolitan Opera...

Don Dunstan, Premier of South Australia in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, is acknowledged as one of Australia's foremost civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. He actively promoted the rights of Indigenous Australians and women, and he passionately pursued multiculturalism. More than...

Europe was the first continent to win a name for itself, and is the smallest of them all. So it should be easy to comprehend and its people should share a common outlook, right? Wrong. In his second book, wheelchair traveller Ken Haley crosses the Continent the long way round - from Russia to Portugal...

Among the coppiced carob trees and arum lilies of the Barossa Valley, old-school Lutheran William Miller lives a quiet life with his wife, Bluma, and son, Nathan, making wine and baking bread. But William has a secret. He's been studying the Bible and he's found what a thousand others couldn't: the...

"Dissonance" begins with piano practice. Fifteen-year-old Erwin Hergert is forced to tackle scales and studies for six hours a day by his mother, Madge, who is determined to produce Australia's first great pianist. To help Erwin focus, Madge has exiled her husband, Johann, to the back shed....

As Hitler's war looms, famous Australian artist Roland Griffin returns home from London with his family to live a simple life of shared plums and low-cut lawns in the suburbs. In the yard: a daughter, and a son, Hal, growing up with a preoccupied father w

This book brings together the best Australian authors of fantasy fiction writing today. From Isobelle Carmody's tragic romantic style to Terry Dowling's complex and technical worlds, Damien Broderick's straight-faced player in the game of worlds, and Carmel Bird's intriguing "genetic unconscious...

"It all started in 1975. I was fifteen years, three hundred and forty-four days old, nothing but a kid, albeit a kid they'd highlighted in The Year Book as a hard case. I was four months out of juvey, give or take, and I had a swagger, an edge, abrasion ..." So begins the hilarious, often...

"Colouring the Rainbow" uncovers the often hidden world of Queer and Trans Blak Australia and tells it like it is. Twenty-two First Nations people reveal their inner reflections and outlooks on family and culture, identity and respect, homophobia, transphobia, racism and decolonisation, activism, art,...

In these fourteen stories, Cameron Raynes traverses landscapes of regret, joy and redemption. In a country town, a woman plots to ruin her rival with an act steeped in racism. A welfare worker is asked to spy on a colleague. And in the award-winning title story, a taxi driver accepts a fare he knows...

The Sentimental Bloke and Doreen are famous characters in Australian popular culture, but their creator deserves to be better known. C.J. Dennis transformed the larrikin from a street thug into a respectable image of Australian identity, and helped shape the Anzac legend. Many people regarded Dennis...

"Sometimes I feel like I'm neither one thing nor another. I live in the Mallee but I don't like the desert. I live on a farm but I get hay fever and I'm scared of goats. I like school but my best mates don't. I'm stuck between stuff. It's like I'm not meant to be here but I am." Sandy Douglas...

Following the success of "Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Stories", this extraordinary collection of stories creates a narrative picture of Australians, past and present. It is also a mosaic of journeys, for we are all displaced peoples or the descendents of displaced peoples, whether we...

"I am indeed a part/ of all those I have met,/ and must learn who I am." A politician, a cooking contest winner, a troubled clergyman, a much-married socialite, a TV evangelist - what could they have in common? Why do they (and half a million others) travel to Oberammergau, the small German...