Books published by Wakefield Press

I drank Normandy farmhouse cider, ate strawberries dipped in red wine then sugar, and tasted truffles and soft goat cheeses for the first time. I returned to Australia inspired to become a food writer. France bewitched Barbara Santich as a student in the early 1970s. She vowed to return, and soon enough she did - with husband and infant twins in tow. Wild Asparagus, Wild Strawberries tells the story of the magical two years that followed. Buoyed by naïve enthusiasm, Barbara and her husband launched themselves into French village life, a world of winemaking, rabbit raising, cherry picking and exuberant 14 Juillet celebrations. Here we see the awakening of Barbara Santich's lifelong love affair with food history. And also a lost France, 'when the 19th century almost touched hands with the 21st'. Shepherds still led their flocks to pasture each day and, even near the bustling towns, wild strawberries hid at the forest's edge.

Bertha Schippan, beautiful but headstrong daughter of a Wendish-German family, is murdered on New Year's Day, 1902. A posse of Adelaide police arrive at the family's lonely Murray Flats farm thirty-six hours later, but by the time an Aboriginal tracker can start his work, a gale has blown all clues away. An inquest sends her elder sister Mary to trial. But why would she kill Bertha when everyone knew them as loving companions? The Noon Lady of Towitta, a novel based on real events, entwines fact and folktale to delve into the secrets of a family haunted by its past and ruled by a devout and tyrannical father.

Imagine visiting Florence to study Italian and being swept off your feet by a charming chef who takes you speeding through the moonlit hills in his Fiat to visit the village of his childhood, and into the kitchens of his Tuscan restaurants where he teaches you to cook. So begins Amore and Amaretti, Victoria Cosford's story of her long love affair with Italy, seasoned with the mouth-watering recipes she has mastered along the way.Twenty years later Victoria is once again leaving her unfulfilled life in Australia to cook for the volatile Gianfranco, an addiction fraught with challenges that has proved difficult to shake. The time has come for her to discover where happiness lies.

THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD is a tale of discovery andadventure, of pioneering deeds, great courage, heart-stopping rescuesand heroic endurance. This is Mawson's own account of his yearsspent in sub-zero temperatures and gale-force winds. At its heartis the epic journey of 1912-13, during which both his companionsperished. Told in a laconic but gripping style, this is the classicaccount of the struggle for survival of the Australasian AntarcticExpedition - a journey which mapped more of Antarctica than anyexpedition before or since.The photographs included in this book were taken on the journeyby Frank Hurley, later to achieve fame on Sir Ernest Shackleton'sEndurance expedition.

They wanted a love they could take into eternity.In a small town on the Australian coast Penny grows up to marry the boy who has waited for her. Few know the truth about her birth. Her uncle Jack is one, for he shared with her father not only his childhood but also the horror of their wartime experience. jack and Penny's special bond is as rare and precious as the nautilus shell they find washed up on the beach - entwined with its history are the secrets of their past and the tenacious passions of the other people who have had a stake in their lives.

Dark Dreams: Australian refugee stories is a unique anthology of essays, interviews, and stories written by children and young adults. The stories are the finest of hundreds collected through a nationwide schools competition in 2002. The essays and stories represent many different countries and themes. Some focus on survival, some on horrors, some on the experiences and alienation of a new world. This book will have a key role to play in schools across Australia. Eva Sallis's first novel Hiam won The Australian Vogel and the Dobbie Literary Awards. She is co-founder of Australians Against Racism and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

'... a work of raw, brutal power and of intense spiritual refinement, as visual and visceral as it is delicate and sensuous ... a tumult of battle for soul, for survival. All the while the sense is one of standing alongside the teller, listening as [the poet] proclaims what the edge of life and the threat of the void ahead most utterly feels like. Immense forces are ranged against the small, the human, the chances of victory seem forbidding, but all the while there is also an unyielding effort to wrestle them at least to a halt.' - Angelo Loukakis 'Barnett, like any great poet deserving of the title, is admired and loved for his revolutionary stance against regimes imposed on humans. Now, with Ô Horsey he deconstructs the regime of language, the regime of narrative, and of syntax itself. What results is the humanimal caught in the headlights, stripped naked and glorious.' - Brentley Frazer

Encountering Terra Australis traces the parallel lives and voyages of the explorers Flinders and Baudin, as they travelled to Australia and explored the coastline of mainland Australia and Tasmania. Unusually, the book takes its lead from the voyages of Baudin, rather than Flinders, providing a rather different interpretation than those presently circulating. Furthermore the authors have worked using their own totally fresh translation of Baudin's journals, sourcing original accounts including material which has never before been available in English. Extensively illustrated in black and white.

The Vanished Land is the Western District of Victoria stripped of its identity, its social elite of grazing dynasties departed for their own reasons.This melancholy exodus has increased recently as the myriad pressures of holding inherited land have become intolerable in a nation never intimidated by ditching its past. No longer is the Western District home of a ruling class that for 150 years bestrode an Australia riding on the sheep's back.The Vanished Land is a human tale of leaving, of a disconnect with the land, of submerged anguish and inhibited grief, a private story of loss told for the first time by an outsider with insider connection.

Sometimes I feel like I'm neither one thing nor another. I live in the Mallee but I don't like the desert. I live on a farm but I get hay fever and I'm scared of goats. I like school but my best mates don't. I'm stuck between stuff. It's like I'm not meant to be here but I am.Sandy Douglas knows that life at fifteen is hard, but it's even harder when your mother died a year ago and nothing's gone right since. His brother Red, on the other hand, is eighteen now and working the farm. He's amped up on rage and always looking for a fight. And then there's their dad Tom. He does his best, but - really - he doesn't have a clue.As Sandy and Red deal with girls, dirt biking, footy and friendship, both boys have to work out who they want to be, without their mum around. The Mallee, where they live, may seem like the middle of nowhere, but it turns out this is going to be one hell of a year.

The state of South Australia was a British imperial construct, its borders determined by three straight lines, with no reference to the Aboriginal presence.The colonial process in South Australia began decades before formal annexation with unregulated interactions between coastal Aboriginal people and European sealers and whalers.Despite catastrophic interventions in the lives of Aboriginal people during and following colonisation, many communities retain strong identities and cultural and linguistic knowledge, rooted in a deep connection to the land.Colonialism and its Aftermath traces the ongoing impact of colonialism on Aboriginal individuals, communities and cultures, the disruptions and displacements it has caused, and Aboriginal responses to these challenges.