Paul Daley

'This is a story—a great story—with all the tragedy and lies that is colonial Australia. Our circle of tragedy.' Thomas Mayor, author of Finding the Heart of the Nation 'Poignant and powerful; the best book I've read this year.' Chris Hammer, author of Scrublands 'A challenging statement about the mythology of Australian colonial history. It confronts the hard questions with...

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 but they'll never know just how good it is to live here. Canberra is a city of orphans. People come for the jobs but stay on as they discover unanticipated promise and opportunity. They become...

A white-knuckle ride into a nightmarish outback setting, where a man searching for mercy encounters a town baying for violent vengeance. A pulse-pounding literary thriller with a stunning final twist. Think three-fifths of the way to fuck-all-nowhere-ville. Pioneering grazing family. Once hallowed farming country gone to shit. Rabbit plagues and feral pigs. Never-ending drought. Full of Flat Earth Party-voting, climate-change-denying,...

How has militarisation come to define Australian valour? Why has the long shadow 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. 'Straight from the heart and deeply informed....

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...