Don Watson

After their military defeat in 1745, the Scottish Highlanders suffered a worse humiliation. They were displaced from their ancestral lands and became curiosities: objects of romantic nostalgia, charity, scorn, anthropology - and emigration. This is a tale of their dispossession. It also tells the rout of another people, the Kurnai of Gippsland in south-eastern Australia. Prominent among those who did...

A definitive anthology that captures the masterful Don Watson at his best—powerful, insightful and funny. No other writer has journeyed further into the soul of Australia and returned to tell the tale ... Watsonia collects the fruits of a writing life. It covers everything from Australian bush humour to America gone berserk; from Don Bradman to Oscar Wilde; from Animal...

The brilliant and bestselling companion volume to Don Watson's Death Sentence. The prime minister speaks of core and non-core election promises, your boss asks you to commit to an involuntary career event (you're fired), and hospitals refer to negative patient outcomes (you're dead). How to fight back? This book is a heavy weapon against politicians, managers, and all those whose...

If he had never become Prime Minister, Paul Keating's place in Australian history would still have been assured. He was the Treasurer who deregulated the economy; the weaver of Labor's modern story; its heavy weapon in the parliament. He was also the great enigma – a self-educated boy from Sydney's working class and a defining element of the head-kicking Labor...

While most of us live in cities clinging to the coastal fringe, our sense of what an Australian is, or should be, is drawn from the vast and varied inland called the bush. But what do we mean by 'the bush', and how has it shaped us? Starting with his forebears' battle to drive back nature and eke a living...

A compelling history of the world's most powerful country from acclaimed author Don Watson. The Shortest History of the United States of America is the extraordinary story of the United States, a nation that contains multitudes. When Britain's thirteen American colonies declared their independence on 4 July 1776, the United States of America was born. But it was hardly united....

Is the United States disintegrating? Don Watson offers a report from the United States that catches the madness and theatre of an election like no other. This is a historically informed, mordant account of Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and a country approaching democratic high noon. From Los Angeles to New York, from Detroit to Kalamazoo, Watson observes America in all...

A modern classic- Don Watson's history of Australia for children of the twenty-first century History told so well it gives us a better idea of who we are - and who we are likely to become. Don Watson's The Story of Australia is a modern history of our nation that integrates new understandings about Indigenous Australia and looks to the...

Don Watson, with his trademark wit and wisdom, says enough already! The English language is complex and evolving, and can win minds, hearts, and nations. Why don't we try using it? What is cluster deployment, and how can you be sure to engage multiple stakeholders through your strategic delivery channel? What’s the difference between backcasting and backfilling, and could it...

Award winning. Bestselling. A superb book about Don Watson's journeys around America. Featured as one of Newsweek's 50 'What to Read Now and Why' titles. Only in America—the most powerful democracy on earth, home to the best and worst of everything—are the most extreme contradictions possible. In a series of journeys, acclaimed author Don Watson set out to explore the...

Part diatribe, part cool reflection on the state of Australia's public language, Don Watson's Death Sentence is scathing, funny and brilliant. '... in public life the language has never been held in less regard. It withers in the dungeons of the technocratic mind. It is butchered by the media. In politics it lacks all qualifications for the main game.' Almost...

Corrosive, mad and frequently fatal, indignation is a great destructive force in human affairs, and just as often a wellspring of mirth and merriment. Don Watson traces this seemingly ineradicable emotion in a journey that takes us, via his forebears, Flaubert and The Sopranos, from the Old Testament to Donald Trump. Trump's pitch had less to do with offering voters...

From the bestselling author of The Bush, the highly acclaimed story of a fifty-year relationship between a Vietnam veteran and an isolated clan in north-east Arnhem Land – a unique window into Australia’s deep past and precarious present, by one of our master storytellers. ‘How to sum up this story? It’s uncontainable. It wrangles worlds. It keeps getting wider and...

Speechwriter, historian, essayist, word doctor; Don Watson has a gift for gently guiding us to the nub of a matter and a grinding of the teeth, an aha or a chuckle with his fine facility with words. Over the years, Don has written on politics and politicians — Australian and North American — sport, birds and nature, horse-racing, history and...

From the bestselling author of The Bush, the story of a fifty-year relationship between a Vietnam veteran and an isolated clan in north-east Arnhem Land – a unique window into Australia’s deep past and precarious present, by one of our master storytellers. Longlisted for the 2023 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award The Passion of Private White describes the...