Short Blacks

'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 and which increasingly are used to define our ideas of worth and happiness. It is a full-lipped smile achieved with the aid of collagen made from skin flensed from dead Chinese convicts.' The Australian Disease is Richard Flanagan's perceptive, hilarious, searing expose of the conformity that afflicts our public life. From Weary Dunlop to Vassily Grossman, from David Hicks to Craig Thomson, Flanagan takes us on a wildly entertaining and unsettling trip. If we are to find hope, he says, we must take our compass more from ourselves and less from the powerful.

'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 pants, long hair and bandanas, with axes in their eyes and guns at the ready.' The Brave Ones follows the Indonesian Army's Battalion 745 as it withdrew from East Timor after the 1999 independence vote, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. Birmingham's unflinching account reveals the scorched-earth tactics of the retreating troops, and shows just how close Australia came to armed conflict with Indonesia.

'I am trying to light the fire in our young men and women ... The flame will burn and intensify – an immense smoke, cloud-like and black, will arise, which will send off a signal and remind people that we, the Gumatj people, are the people of the fire. There are people of the fire around Alice Springs – and I reach out to them, too. We can then burn united, together.' Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow is 'no mere essay. It is an existential prayer,' writes Noel Pearson. Galarrwuy Yunupingu tells of his early life, his dealings with prime ministers, and how he learnt that nothing is ever what it seems. And behind him, he writes, 'the Yolngu world is always under threat. This is a weight that is bearing down on me; at night it is like a splinter in my mind.'

'In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu Sadhu, leaving behind family and wealth to live as a beggar; the pilgrims of Compostela walking away their sins; the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora; the Hajj ... By taking to the road we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.' Robyn Davidson has spent a good part of her life with nomads. In this fascinating and moving essay she evokes a vanishing way of life and notes a paradox: that even as classical nomads are disappearing, hypermobility has become the hallmark of contemporary life. In a time of environmental peril, she argues, the nomadic way with nature still offers valuable lessons. No Fixed Address is part lament, part evocation and part exhilarating speculative journey.

'How many Australians born in the 137 years since Truganini's death learnt her legend and scarcely thought deeper about the enormity of the loss she represented, and the history that led to it? Her spirit casts a long shadow over Australian history, but we have nearly all of us found a way to avert our eyes from its meaning.' In The War of the Worlds, Noel Pearson considers the shadow over Australia's history: the question of genocide, in early Tasmania and elsewhere. With eloquence and passion, he explores the 'emotional convulsions of identification and memory' that he feels on encountering these events. Re-reading Dickens and Darwin, Pearson acknowledges the 'fatal logic' of the colonial project, and seeks to draw out its meaning for Australians today.