Exploring the city of Hobart, Tasmania, from a personal view, resident Peter Timms builds a lively, evocative and sometimes highly critical picture of Hobart today. The narrative deftly interweaves the views and opinions of residents and visitors—from the early convicts to the current mayor—with press reports and literary references to uncover how the city has developed over the past 200 years, how its sometimes brutal past has helped shape its special character, and what it is like to live in a small city on an island so far from the rest of Australia and the world. By thoughtfully examining Hobart’s architectural and planning history, cultural life, economy, and, above all, its people, this thorough exploration helps explain why Hobart is changing in the ways it is and what its future might hold.

Part of a series in which leading Australian authors write about their hometowns, this unique and evocative exploration is part memoir and part guide to Australia's Brisbane. Intertwining personal stories with the city's historical past, this account paints a portrait of the contemporary transformation of the city.

Part memoir, part guide to Sydney, Australia, this melancholic, moving, and funny exploration intertwines novelist Delia Falconer’s own stories with the city’s historical and literary past, showing how the city has evolved from the 1970s through today. From mad clergymen and amateur astronomers to Indigenous weather experts and local artists, this personal and unique record depicts the inhabitants of a beautiful, violent, and deeply spiritual city.

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.

Consisting of a painting, a frog cake, a landmark, a statue, a haunting newspaper photograph, a bucket of peaches, pink shorts in parliament, concert tickets, and tourist maps, this book is a museum of sorts—a personal guide to the city of Adelaide, Australia, through a collection of iconic objects. These objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark, and contradictory history of Adelaide, including the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics, the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors, and the homey friendliness. A unique way of looking at the city through a small-scale lens, this evocative handbook will engage residents 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.

Alice Springs, Alice, The Alice, Mparntwe is the most talked about but least familiar place in Australia. It is a town of extremes and contradictions: searingly hot and bitterly cold, thousands of miles from anywhere, the heart of black Australia and the headquarters of the controversial NT Intervention. It’s seen as a place where blokes are blokes, yet the town has a high lesbian population. It is the gateway to the red centre, but relatively few Australians have been there. Its striking landscape and modern facilities attract those looking for a desert change, yet it is a town where frontier conflicts still hold sway. Eleanor Hogan’s Alice Springs reveals the texture of everyday life in this town through the passage of the local seasons.

David Whish-Wilson’s Perth is a place of surprising beauty, of sand-swept peace and brilliant light, yet a place where the deeper historical currents are never too far beneath the surface. Like the Swan River that flows in two directions at once at certain times, with the fresh water flowing seawards above the salty water flowing in beneath it, Perth strikes perfect harmony with the city’s contradictions and eccentricities. We look beyond shiny glass facades and boosterish talk of mining booms to the richness of the natural world and the trailblazers, the rebels, the occasional ghost and the ordinary people that bring Australia’s remotest city to life.

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. To write about her home town, Tess Lea waded knee-deep in memories of the city, including those of her family and her own. The story begins in 1974, when Cyclone Tracy shattered Darwin, and Lea was a little girl. Then it takes us back to the wild times of early settlement, explores the backstory of the White Australia policy, paints a vivid picture of the bombing of Darwin during World War II – the first Australian city to experience direct attack from a foreign power – and guides us to Australia’s militarised future, led by Darwin, sitting as it does under the largest aerial defence training space in the world. Lyrical and visceral, Tess Lea’s ode to her hometown is suffused with the textures, colours, scents and the many gritty realities that beset this tough, fragile, magical, foolhardy and unique place.