Paul Daley

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 us – but they’ll never know just how good it is to live here. Canberra is a city of orphans. People come for the jobs on offer but stay on as they discover unanticipated promise and opportunity in a city that the rest of the country loathes but can’t do without. They become Canberrans – prosperous, highly educated and proud of both the planned and unplanned elements of their city. Daley’s Canberra begins and ends at the original lake and its forgotten suburbs, traces of which can still be found on the banks of the Lake Burley Griffin, opened in 1964. It chronicles the unsavoury early life of Canberra, meanders through the graveyard at St John’s where the pioneers rest, contemplates the unique social dynamics of the suburbs, visits the extraordinary cultural institutions and looks up to the mountains that surround the city. In the national capital people might not ask you where you went to school, as they do in Melbourne, or how much you paid for house, as they do in Sydney. They ask you where you’ve come from. And how long you’re going to stay. As it turned out, after the book was first published to great acclaim the author himself moved to Sydney, a change he found wrenching. In his new Afterword, Paul Daley reflects on how much he misses Canberra as it transforms into a thriving city. New edition of a classic with a new Afterword in which Daley reminisces about the city he loves and how much it has changed since his book was first published in 2012 One of the book’s themes is people coming and going from Canberra – even though Daley himself has moved to Sydney, he writes movingly about how so many of his family memories are there and how much he misses it Uncovers unknown suburbs, people and facts about the place Australia loves to hate showing it’s about much more than politics Shows that Canberra didn’t rise up fully formed after the competition to design it – it has a black – and white – history going back a long way Full of great anecdotes and great characters: the man after whom Mount Ainslie is named and whose descendants have some surprising revelations; King O’Malley and his stagger juice; Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin; even the fictional Edith Campbell Berry Afterword discusses the new light rail and Canberra’s real estate boom

How has militarisation come to define Australian valour? Why has commemorating the centenary of World War I dominated our sense of patriotism? On Patriotism explores what it really means to love and serve your country. Paul Daley contemplates ways to escape the cultural binds that tie us to Anzac, British settlement and flag-waving.

The discovery of the body of Beth Barnard in her Phillip Island farmhouse in 1986, began a homicide investigation that rocked a peaceful community. It also created an enduring mystery, for no one was ever brought to trial for her brutal death, and the main suspect disappeared - never to be seen again. Beth Barnard, a popular and attractive 23-year-old, had been having an affair with a local married man. On the night of her brutal murder, a car belonging to Vivienne Cameron - wife of Beth's lover - was found abandoned near the bridge that connects the famous tourist island to the mainland. No trace of Vivienne was ever found, and her disappearance has never been adequately explained. Nevertheless, a Coroner's Court found that Vivienne had killed her rival then jumped to her death into the waters of Westernport Bay. The case was closed but not forgotten. Ever since their first edition of The Phillip Island Murder, in 1993, Vikki Petraitis and Paul Daley have been regularly contacted by people wanting to know more; people who, like the authors, let the case get under their skin. More than three decades later the mystery, rumours and arm-chair solutions continue.

A hundred years ago in October 1917 members of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade participated in what is now regarded as the last great successful cavalry charge. Waving bayonets overhead in the dying light, they raced across six kilometres of exposed ground in Palestine, surprising the well-entrenched Turks. It was the decisive blow in the British capture of the strategic stronghold of Beersheba. The story of this remarkable military victory has largely slipped through the cracks of history, eclipsed in Australian sentiment by stories of dramatic defeat and loss at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Paul Daley goes in search of the story of Beersheba. What he uncovers is a story of ordinary men capable of extraordinary acts, as he sheds new light on a dark episode starkly at odds with the Anzac mythology.

Fast-paced Australian political fiction, Challenge unfolds over three days in an atmosphere of treachery and deceit, amid a looming federal leadership challenge. Opposition leader Daniel Slattery is a former sporting hero from the wrong side of the tracks, politically principled and courageous, but also personally unhinged and highly volatile. He is determined to stand the political moral high ground while fighting for his job—and a rearguard action against the phantoms of his dark past. Who is working to trash his reputation and derail his one tilt at the prime ministership? Is it real—or just demons inside his head? Blistering and blackly comic, Challenge puts us into the shoes of a man whose life is slipping away as he confronts the abyss of modern Australian politics.

Concentrating on the links of Great Britain and Ireland, this book discusses St. Andrews, Ballybunion, Royal St. Georges, and others.