Books published by Wakefield Press

South Australia was meant to be the perfect colony: free settlers, no crime, and no mental illness. But good intentions go awry. Within three years plans for a permanent gaol were well established, along with a governor to oversee it: William Baker Ashton. Researcher Rhondda Harris came upon Ashton's long-lost journal by happy accident, and was soon absorbed by 'The Governor's' handwritten pages. They told a hidden story of early Adelaide and its underbelly, of crashes and crises and crims. 'Ashton's Hotel', the colonists called their prison. His kindness of spirit, under nigh-impossible circumstances, shines through in this first published edition of his journal, expertly contextualised and introduced by Rhondda Harris.

George Goyder was the first European explorer to see great salt lakes in the inland in flood and to witness the amazing transformation that follows the breaking of drought. His experience put him decades ahead of his contemporaries - who satirised him as the discoverer of the inland sea - in understanding the Australian climate. When he attempted to adapt the pattern of settlement to climatic reality by defining the border of the zone of reliable rainfall, his repeated warnings about the threat of drought were scorned.Shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize and the Queensland Literary Awards

In 1870 a colonial government, on the brink of collapse, made an audacious move. South Australia's squabbling politicians briefly put aside their differences and took the bold decision to run an iron wire to the middle of nowhere and beyond. Stringing the Overland Telegraph Line across the silent heart of the continent was a momentous event in the country's history. It connected Adelaide to a global network of cables and wire: those travelling up and down the track through central Australia were seldom out of earshot of its hum. Alice Springs was its most important repeater station.Alice Springs: from singing wire to iconic outback town is the result of eight years of meticulous research unravelling the early history of central Australia's first white settlement. It contains information, never previously published, about that little outpost - a significant heritage site - and how an iconic town was born nearby, during a goldrush that made few people rich. It is a tale of the country's heart and some of its most remarkable but little-known characters, and of children torn between two cultures living at the telegraph station after the morse keys stopped clicking in 1932; children under the shadow of the most controversial piece of legislation in Australia's history. Central Australia has a black history.Alice Springs is no longer the small, outback community romanticised in Nevil Shute's novel A Town like Alice. But its people, black and white, are still living on the line.

The causation of two inflammatory bowel diseases, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, are usually considered unknown. This book was collated from the published scientific literature and observations that brought new avenues of thought on the disease processes of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.ULCERATIVE COLITIS Following the unexpected observation, made in the early 1980s, that bacterial products (short chain fatty acids) nourish the lining cells of the large bowel, it became possible to define biochemical alterations in these cells associated with ulcerative colitis. Agents that mimicked the biochemical alterations (nitric oxide with hydrogen sulphide) were subsequently found and also established to be derived from bacteria. These injurious agents are generated by bacteria from high protein diets, typical of Western diets. Countries where low protein and high carbohydrate diets are consumed, such as rural Africa, have a negligible incidence of ulcerative colitis. Bacteria in the human colon that produce nitric oxide still need to be defined.CROHN'S DISEASE Crohn's disease manifests in a biphasic clinical pattern: a mild early 'infective' stage responsive to antibiotics and a later 'antigenic' phase unresponsive to antibiotics but responsive to immune suppression. One organism, Mycoplasma fermentans, that follows this pattern can be detected in Crohn's disease. These bacterial observations need to be verified by further analyses.

Friedrich Gerstäcker, the most illustrious and prolific of German travel writers, set foot in Australia in March 1851, having walked across the Andes, traipsed the goldfields of California, and sailed over the Pacific in search of new adventures. Gerstäcker found adventures aplenty in Australia. He rowed and trekked down the Murray, absorbed the excitement triggered by the discovery of gold, visited his countrymen in South Australia, and trained his outsider's eyes on a colonial society gripped by profound change. In this translated edition of Gerstäcker's book Australien, his lively travelogue is made available for the first time in English. Rarely has Australia's colonial past been presented with such insight, humour and entertainment.

'It's hard to imagine a job that requires less education than that of government minister,' says John Hill. 'It's also hard to imagine a job where the occupant is less likely to seek help than that of government minister.' John Hill knew when he quit as a government minister that what he had learnt - often painfully - over 11 years was likely to disappear with him. So he wrote it down ...

I do not think that I believe in ghosts, but just for this morning, just for the time it will take to ramble through this quiet city under clouds the colour of tin, or of pigeons' wings, I am going to believe in them. Ordinary lives are revealed as extraordinary, as Carol Lefevre traces the stories of West Terrace Cemetery's little-known inhabitants: there is the tale of the man who fatally turned his back on a tiger, and the man who avoided one shipwreck only to perish in another; there is the story of the young woman who came home from a dance and drank belladonna, and those who died at the hands of one of South Australia's most notorious abortionists. Said to be the most poetic place in Adelaide, in this heritage-listed burial ground the beginnings of the colony of South Australia are still within reach. Amid a sea of weather-bleached monuments, the excavated remains of Australia's oldest crematorium can be seen, and its quietest corner shelters the country's first dedicated military cemetery. From archives, and headstones, the author recovers histories that time and weather threaten to obliterate. Quiet City is a book for everyone who has ever wandered through an old graveyard and wished its stones could speak.

'The Collesses. Theirs is the story of Australia itself. Convicts, bushrangers, cattle thieves, pioneers, punters, graziers, ANZACs; floods and droughts, boom and bust, they lived right through it all. Their story is every bit as comprehensive as Dorothea Mackellar's "I love a sunburnt country". They were right in the thick of our founding cultural history; they helped to make it, helped make this land. From Bird's Eye Corner to the far corner country. Henry Colless's line - corner to corner, through the middle of everything. And it is not a line without trace. George, William, Henry, they each handed on their sterling character - a more telling legacy than money can buy.' Henry Colless, one of the old pioneers. In his mid-teens he set out as a carrier across the Blue Mountains and then further along the track to the northwest. He was still a teenager when he helped his father and his brother establish legendary Come-by-Chance. He was one of the early settlers in Bourke, and later became one of its leading lights; and he drove a great mob of cattle across the corner country to establish the first station at Innamincka. This is his story.

Siblings tells what it is like to grow up with a brother or sister with a disability or illness. The siblings of children with a disability are often the overlooked ones in families struggling to cope.Kate Strohm, a sibling herself, bravely shares the story of her journey from isolation and confusion to greater understanding and acceptance. She provides a forum for other siblings to describe their challenges and provides them with strategies to make sense of their experiences.Through the workshops she has presented around Australia and overseas, Kate has been able to incorporate the experience and wisdom of many families and professionals, and provide clear tools for parents and practitioners to support brothers and sisters of those with a disability.

Are you uncomfortable with the thought of controlled crying? Unwilling to share your bed with your baby for months in an effort to sleep?Parents need facts about infant sleep and development - up-to-date information based on evidence rather than myths, old wives' tales and opinions.The Sensible Sleep Solution is a moderate approach, providing month-to-month advice to guide you through your baby's first year and establish good sleeping habits that can last a lifetime.The Sensible Sleep Solution and the COTSS techniques outlined in this book have been devised and successfully used for many years by Dr Sarah Blunden in her sleep clinic and by Angie Willcocks in her psychology practice. Sarah has experience researching and working with families to diagnose and treat children's sleep problems. Angie's area of interest and expertise is with new parents, helping them to adjust to life with children.Sarah and Angie wrote this book to meet a need they saw in their day-to-day work with parents - the need for a sensible, middle-of-the-road approach to establishing healthy sleep habits in the first year of life.

Zalman Shneour's inaugural novel: a story of suicide in the form of a diaryIn a Yiddish take on Notes from Underground, a dark love affair develops in an unnamed Eastern European city between the young, impoverished, violently self-loathing teacher, Shloyme--and a hungry, spiteful and unsettlingly sensual revolver. Ostensibly purchased to protect Shloyme from the pogroms sweeping the empire, the weapon instead opens a portal to his innermost demons, and through it he begins his methodical mission to eradicate any remnants of life and humanity in him and pave the way for his self-destruction. A Death takes the form of a diary that follows the Jewish calendar. Written in Yiddish in 1905 and published with immediate success in Warsaw in 1909, A Death utilizes the influences of Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer to depict a distinctly Jewish experience of uprooted modernity, and presents a lesser-known strand of Jewish decadent literature. This translation of his inaugural novel is Schneour's first appearance in English since 1963. Its exploration of alienation, mental health, toxic masculinity and violence is remarkably contemporary. Born in Shklow, Zalman Shneour (1887-1959) was one of the major figures of Jewish modernity, and was the most popular Yiddish writer between the World Wars. He wrote poetry, prose and plays in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Like many of his generation, his life was spent moving from city to city in search of literary community or escaping political turmoil: from Odessa to Warsaw to Vilne, and on to such Western cities as Bern, Geneva, Berlin, Paris, New York (where he died) and Tel Aviv (where he is buried).

Written by a mathematician, a poet, and a mathematician-poet, this 1969 guide to the ancient Japanese game of Go was not only the first such guide to be published in France (and thereby introduced the centuries-old game of strategy into that country) but something of a subtle Oulipian guidebook to writing strategies and tactics.

Mr. Gica is the world's greatest barber. He holds the world record for sculptural hairstyling and has won three Olympic golds in neck massage. But his specialty is the shave. Mr. Gica's shop has six mirrors on the walls, six sinks, six barber chairs and no employees. Always crowded, its chairs always occupied, the barbershop forms an off-kilter microcosm: a world of melancholic kitsch that includes opera singers, football players, gladiators, the secret police, four lost hippies and other ludic figures--including our superhuman protagonist's ever-lurking antagonist in perpetual disguise, Dorel Vasilescu. Trying on a variety of voices and modes like so many work coats, Curl scissor-snips love poems, mock-critical commentaries with footnotes, dreams, diary entries, streams of words without punctuation, cultural references and a number of rebellious hairs off a number of necks to sculpt a patchwork portrait of universal loneliness. This is the first translation of T.O. Bobe into English. T.O. Bobe (born 1969) is a Romanian poet, novelist and screenwriter living in Bucharest. Two of his books have been finalists for prestigious Romanian ASPRO prizes.