Ten books to read this summer

1. Broken: Universities, politics & the public good

Graeme Turner AO FAHA FQA

Throughout his life, Graeme Turner was a staunch advocate for Australia’s higher education system, seeing it as fundamental to a functional civil society.  

Broken, which went on to become a national bestseller upon release, provides a reality check for those who imagine the academic life is one of privilege and leisure, laying bare the enormous challenges and lack of hope experienced by many in academia.  

 In this brief, yet powerful book, Graeme unearths the foundations of this crisis, then explains how the solution lies in an overhaul of the one-size-fits-all approach to university funding, the establishment of genuine full-time career paths, and the formation of an independent body to ensure our university system serves the national interest in both teaching and research, rather than the ferocious competitiveness of the marketplace. 

Above all, Graeme argues Australia needs to re-embrace the idea that higher learning is a fundamental public good—and should be funded as such. 

2. The Shortest History of Australia

Mark McKenna FAHA

In The Shortest History of Australia, Mark McKenna offers a compelling new version of our national story. This is a modern Australia permeated by First Nations history; a multicultural society with an island mindset; a continent of epic beauty and extreme natural events; a country obsessed by war abroad but blind to its founding war at home; and a thriving nation-state still to realise its political independence.  

McKenna’s wise and humane history reveals the surprising in the familiar and reframes the past so we can see the present more clearly. 

Larissa Behrendt AO FAHA called The Shortest History of Australia, “Remarkable… a deeply humane account of who we are and how we came to be.”

3. Golf Dreaming

John Maynard FAHA 

A fascinating book which weaves the personal and the historical, Golf Dreaming explores the overlooked Aboriginal connection to golf, detailing the barriers Aboriginal people faced in accessing golf courses and equipment, to the lesser-known links between Australian golf courses and significant Aboriginal sites, including burial grounds. 

The past and the present are connected through his love of the game, revealing the sport’s unique cultural intersections, and its challenging history in Australia. 

“In the summer, aged about seven, I would spend my time with mates swimming in the club dams and collecting golf balls to sell back up at the clubhouse.”

4. Yawulyu: art and song in Warlpiri women’s ceremony 

Myfany Turpin FAHA, co-authored with Megan Morais, Lucy Nampijinpa Martin, and the Warlpiri women in Willowra

From May 1981 to June 1982, ethnochoreologist Megan Morais lived in Willowra in the Northern Territory, working with the Warlpiri community. The Warlpiri women and Megan worked as an impromptu team documenting their dances as performed in yawulyu – women’s ceremony – as well as documenting traditional movement patterns. 

Warlpiri women in Willowra generously and with trust, shared their music, songs, dances, designs and associated knowledge of yawulyu which is now being returned to them. 

A recent collaboration between Megan and musicologist Myfany Turpin and the Willowra community has resulted in this book which provides the means for current and future generations to access the knowledge shared by the Warlpiri women. 

Women of land-owning groups who have inherited sovereignty, and other important women in the community, have granted permission to publish the designs, songs and jukurrpa stories in this book. More than that, they urged publication so they would have a resource to teach their children and grandchildren.  

5. Unsettled

Kate Grenville FAHA

What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’

Kate Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River.

More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, as she puts it, ‘on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation’.

So, she decides to go on a kind of pilgrimage, back through the places her family stories happened, and put the stories and the First People back into the same frame, on the same country, to try to think about those questions. This gripping book is the result of that journey.

6. Playtime: a history of Australian childhood

Dr Emily Gallagher

Supported by an Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy Grant, Playtime represents the first history of childhood play and imagination in pre-war Australia.  

The book charts the experiences of the generations who grew up at a time when nation and empire were being reimagined amid the globalising currents of war, technology and trade. Theirs were faces that would remain forever young in monochrome film, and whose thoughts and dreams would be preserved between the timeless blue lines of the modern school exercise book. 

Frank Bongiorno FAHA FASSA called Playtime, “a book of striking richness, originality and creativity”.

7. Mourning on mobile media

Larissa Hjorth FAHA

From Instagram eulogies of human and animal kin to witnessing mass human destruction on TikTok, mobile media practices play a significant role in contemporary grieving, memorialising, and mourning rituals in an age of permanent crisis. Our devices bear witness to the intimate, affective, embodied, and collective ways we mourn in, and through, contemporary media. In Mourning on Mobile Media, Larissa Hjorth aims to understand the role of mobile media mourning rituals as a reflection of our lives.

As disasters, pandemics, and war become more commonplace in and through mobile devices as affective witnesses, how can we learn from mourning practices as a reflection of contemporary media culture?  

Larissa argues that through these micronarratives—from eulogies about lost kin to more existential elegies about a loss of habit—we can connect, enhance kinship, and create hope in response to the overwhelming sense of crisis we face today. 

8. The Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War

Lyndal Roper FAHA

In The Summer of Fire and Blood, the first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation, leading historian Lyndal Roper uncovers the far-reaching ramifications of this doomed rebellion.

Though the victors portrayed the uprising as naive and chaotic, Roper’s deeply researched account reveals instead a coherent mass movement inspired by the radical principles of the Protestant Reformation. Told through the voices of and beliefs of the people themselves, this is the thrilling, tragic story of the peasants’ fight to change the world.

Summer of Fire and Blood won the 2025 Cundill History Prize, one of the richest literary prizes to celebrate authors who have published a book judged to have a profound literary, social, and academic impact on the subject.

9. Beyond Green: The Social Life of Australian Nature

Lesley Head FAHA FASSA

How are we to think about nature and the environment? 

The idea of nature as it relates to culture, society and humans has always been in constant flux and highly contested.  

Lesley Head interrogates the ways the cultures of nature have operated in Australia across time, and how these ways of thinking and being, limit our capacity to deal with the challenges of the climate change and biodiversity crises. Drawing on her life’s work and lessons she has picked up along the way, Head suggests that it is up to us to attentively listen, the better to destabilise and subvert dominant narratives, and to imagine new possibilities. She believes we have the nous, resources and lessons from Indigenous, settler-descendant and immigrant cultures to reduce risk in the face of the unexpected and the unimaginable.  

In Beyond Green, the story of nature and people weaves research and personal experience through many different times and spaces, offering new ways of understanding. It is a richly creative engagement with the abundant possibilities and pleasure of nature as a place of regeneration that is as warned by the rawk of the crow as it is accompanied by the carolling of magpies.

10. The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation

Julianne Schutlz AM FAHA FRSN

A new edition of Julianne Schutlz’s bestselling book The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of our nation was published in 2025 to complement an SBS-four-part series, hosted by Rachel Griffiths.  

What is the ‘idea of Australia’? What defines the soul of our nation? Are we an egalitarian, generous, outward-looking country? Or is Australia a place that has retreated into silence and denial about the past and become selfish, greedy and insular?  

These were some of the questions Julianne Schultz set out to answer when she wrote the book, in part using the pandemic as an X-ray, to trace strengths and weaknesses in the stories we tell ourselves. As the executive producer of the Blackfella Films/SBS series two years later, and after the defeat of the Voice referendum, the questions still loomed.  

A lifetime of watching Australia as a journalist, editor, academic and writer has given Julianne Schultz a unique platform from which to ask and answer these critical questions. The series explores these questions with a rich montage of leading experts, family stories and a unique use of the contemporary archive. It doesn’t flinch from the past, but points to a hopeful future.  

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