City (NewSouth)

I keep coming back to the light of Brisbane. If you are born into it, this palette of gentle pinks and oranges at dawn and dusk, the blast white of midday in summer, the lemon luminescence of mid-morning and mid-afternoon, you keep it with you, and measure all other light by it. If you live away from it, then step back into it, it is the first thing that tells you you're home. Brisbane reveals a city of wooden houses where mango trees abound, where the serpentine river seems to be of the city and yet somehow not, where ghostly memories of demolished landmarks like Cloudland and The Bellevue Hotel hover and where the chime of the City Hall clock echoes through time and place. Taking readers on a unique personal journey, Matthew Condon unearths the city's history-sometimes literally-and paints a portrait of transformation from a sleepy capital city that's more like a big country town, to a vibrant, confident place, but one where time can still move slowly. In a new epilogue, Condon returns to the house he grew up in; standing and looking out from the verandah, the past collides with the present, but the view is as he remembers it.

A strong sense of 'otherness' defines Canberra to a point where there is a smugness, bordering on arrogance, that the rest of Australia can hate-but they'll never know just how good it is to live here. Canberra is a city of orphans. People come for the jobs but stay on as they discover unanticipated promise and opportunity. They become Canberrans- prosperous, highly educated, and proud of their city. Paul Daley's Canberra fuses narrative history with poignant memoir and contemporary observation to evoke a city he calls the 'accidental miracle.' Beginning and ending at the lake and its submerged, forgotten suburbs, it chronicles the city's unsavoury early life and meanders through St John's graveyard where pioneers rest. Daley contemplates Canberra's vibrant suburban dynamic, while musing on a rich symbolism and internal life fostered by the bush and the treasure of the national cultural institutions. As fate would have it, after Canberra was first published to great acclaim in 2012, Daley moved to Sydney, a change he found wrenching. In a new afterword, he reflects on how much he misses Canberra as it transforms into a thriving city.

Dispelling some of the more unflattering stereotypes of Perth, acclaimed author and Perth native David Whish-Wilson describes how the city strikes a perfect harmony with its own eccentricities and contradictions, presenting a place of surprising beauty-of brilliant light and sand-swept peace-where deeper historical currents nevertheless lurk beneath the surface. This examination looks beyond the shiny glass facades and boosterish talk of mining booms to get at the richness of the natural world and the trailblazers, rebels, ordinary people, and even the occasional ghost that bring Australia's remotest city to life. This beautiful portrait of Perth will move outsiders to revisit their preconceptions about the city and inspire residents to renew their connection to it.

A personal, evocative, and unflinching account, this book reveals the texture of everyday life in Alice Springs, Australia, through the passage of the local seasons. Alice Springs, the most talked about yet least familiar place in Australia, is isolated and has extreme seasonal weather: searingly hot and bitterly cold. It is the heart of black Australia and the headquarters of the controversial Northern Territory Intervention. Questioning why frontier conflicts still hold sway in a place possessing a striking landscape and modern facilities, it will appeal to locals and visitors alike.

Canberra, Australia, is a city of orphans. People arrive temporarily for work, but stay when they discover the unanticipated promise and opportunity Canberra has to offer. An exploration of the city Australia loves to hate, this book shows that there is more to this capital than politics, geometrically designed roads, and mid-century architecture. From the lake and its forgotten suburbs-traces of which can still be found on Burley Griffin's banks-to the mountains that surround the city, this account also examines the unsavory early life of Canberra and the graveyard at St John's, where the pioneers rest.

A journey through Hobart-Australia's smallest, most southerly, least prosperous, but arguably most beautiful state capital-this updated edition reveals a city in transition, shaking off its dark and troubled past to claim its special place in the post-modern world. From Hobart's convict legacy, its spectacular natural setting, heritage architecture, and climate to crime rates, economic hardship, the recent disfigurements of the developers, and the opening of the Museum of Old and New Art, this book brings a wealth of fresh insights. Those who have experienced Hobart as tourists will be surprised and intrigued by the lively, complex society while residents will surely discover their city anew.

Any place you have experienced first-hand is a museum of memory, one whose exhibits conjure up, in widening ripples of association, a whole city: a red paddle-boat, a photograph of three children on a hot day, a marble Venus fetchingly half-naked in the shade. Kerryn Goldsworthy's acclaimed Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of objects, iconic and everyday. Goldsworthy navigates her southern home, discovering its identifying curios and passing them to the reader to touch, inspect, and marvel at. These objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark, and contradictory history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics, and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the homey friendliness. They paint a lively portrait of her home city-as remembered, lived in, thought about, missed, loved, hated, laughed at, seen from afar and close up by assorted writers, citizens, and visitors-as it exists in her memory and imagination. In a new afterword, Goldsworthy ponders changes and revelations since Adelaide was first published in 2011 including, inevitably, the record-breaking heat of a 46.6-degree day.

Darwin is a survivor, you have to give it that. Razed to the ground four times in its short history, it has picked itself up out of the debris to not only rebuild but grow…Darwin has known catastrophes and resurrections; it has endured misconceived projects and birthed visionaries. To know Darwin, to know its soul, you have to listen to it, soak in it, taste it. This is a book about the textures, colours, sounds, and frontier stories of Darwin, Australia's smallest and least-known capital city. Darwin is a place that has to be felt to be known. Readers will sense the heat, smell the odours, hear the birds and the frogs, encounter the mosquitoes, fathom racial politics, and learn how the moon-base that is Darwin is kept alive. They will understand that Darwin is a military garrison and a portal into Australia's possible futures. In a new postscript, Tess Lea suggests how Darwin might deliver lessons for living under the climatically assaulting and culturally uncomfortable times of the Anthropocene.

A year in Melbourne's city life told in diary form, this contemporary and personal portrait depicts major events from the Australian heat wave, which culminated in more than 400 bushfires, to the destructive deluge of a hailstorm. While walking through Melbourne's oldest suburb to its largest market, experiencing an Australian Rules Football game, and attending the comedy festival, writer Sophie Cunningham journeys deep into her own recollections of the city she grew up in, and tells stories from its history. She strolls by Melbourne's rivers and creeks and considers the history of the wetlands and river that sit at Melbourne's heart, for it is water-the corralling of it, the excess of it, the squandering of it, the lack of it-that defines Melbourne's history, its present, and its future.