The koala is both an Australian icon and an animal that has attained ‘flagship’ status around the world. Yet its history tells a different story. While the koala figured prominently in Aboriginal Dreaming and Creation stories, its presence was not recorded in Australia until 15 years after white settlement. Then it would figure as a scientific oddity, despatched to museums in Britain and Europe, a native animal driven increasingly from its habitat by tree felling and human settlement, and a subject of relentless hunting by trappers for its valuable fur. It was not until the late 1920s that slowly emerging protective legislation and the enterprise of private protectors came to its aid. This book surveys the koala’s fascinating history, its evolutionary survival in Australia for over 30 million years, its strikingly adaptive physiognomy, its private life, and the strong cultural impact it has had through its rich fertilisation of Australian literature. The work also focuses on the complex problems of Australia’s national wildlife and conservation policies and the challenges surrounding the environmental, economic and social questions concerning koala management. Koala embraces the story of this famous marsupial in an engaging historical narrative, extensively illustrated from widely sourced pictorial material.

A spirited memoir by a former Chinese factory worker who grew up in Nanjing, participated in the Tiananmen Square protest and ended up as an international journalist. As a teenager, Zhang worked in a factory producing missiles designed to reach North America, queuing every month to give evidence to the “period police” that she wasn’t pregnant. In the oppressive routine of guarded compound and political meetings, Zhang’s disillusionment with “The Glorious Cause” drove her to study English, which strengthened her intellectual independence – from bright, western style clothes to organizing the largest demonstration by Nanjing workers in support of Tiananmen Square Protest in 1989.

This funny and insightful book is written by a professor of economics who wonders what it would be like to apply key economic principles to raising his own three gorgeous children. Can incentives and rewards help to get them to do things like sleep through the night, eat healthy meals, clean up their rooms, do their homework? Can economics help the smart, caring, welladjusted, high-achieving little person that we know is in there to emerge? From the birthing class to the birthday party and the parent-teacher interview, Joshua Gans tells stories about everyday issues and conundrums that will be familiar to all parents. His fresh insights and highly original questions will have parents everywhere nodding in agreement and chuckling to themselves. Parentonomics shows that bringing together the hard questions of economics with the chaos, mess and love that children inspire is a wonderful combination.

Forgetting Aborigines explores a central paradox in Australian history: Aborigines are often remembered as absent in the face of a continuing and actual indigenous historical presence. Chris Healy argues that in the ways we remember our history, Aborigines keep disappearing. They are present and central at certain moments but then fade from memory. Aboriginal issues can be on the front page for weeks prompting white Australians to ask questions like ‘why weren’t we told?’ and then recede again. The book examines ways in which we can stop this dishonest and destructive cycle.

Australia’s often spectacular and unique birdlife, comprising almost 800 individual species, has inspired artists since the first explorations of the ‘Great South Land’.