Historical / Literary Fiction Salt Upon the Water by Lyn Dickens
ISBN9781923388208 / October 2025
1836. At the edge of empire, a woman arrives to claim her past. And her future.
Clarissa FitzRoy, a spirited woman of mixed heritage, has crossed oceans to confront Colonel William Light, the Surveyor-General of South Australia.
Bound by a shared history of dispossession by the British East India Company and haunted by secrets, Clarissa and Light must grapple with truths neither is prepared to face.
Set against the stark beauty of the South Australian coast, Salt Upon the Water is a powerful story of love, identity, and resistance. As Clarissa seeks connection with her Asian family and Light is forced to confront his complicity in colonial violence, both are caught in a tide of prejudice, race, and power that will shape the course of their lives.
Sweeping from the pleasure gardens of London to the canals of Venice, the streets of Calcutta to the island of Penang, Lyn Dickens’ award-winning novel blends magical realism with historical depth, offering a luminous reimagining of Australia’s past. A groundbreaking, poetic debut, this is a story of reckoning, resilience, and the courage to reclaim one’s voice
Lyn Dickens is an award-winning writer, editor, and academic. Her debut novel Salt Upon the Water was the winner of the 2024 Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award. Of mixed Singaporean Peranakan Chinese and Anglo Celtic Australian heritage, Lyn is the Managing Editor and Co-Founder of The Saltbush Review. Lyn has won and been shortlisted for a variety of literary awards in Australia and internationally.
Praise for Salt Upon the Water
‘Resonant and lyrical, Salt Upon the Water celebrates the emergence of a powerful new voice in Australian literature.’ – Hossein Asgari
‘Written in lyrical, sensual and teasing tones, Salt Upon the Water is the tale of an indomitable woman caught in the littoral space between love and race, class and gender … Dickens has a fine eye for detail and disturbance, skilfully weaving her intriguing narrative between history and romance.’ – Brian Castro
‘Lyn Dickens is a distinctive and poetic voice. A fragrant and fierce act of narrative reclamation.’ – Anna Goldsworthy
‘An epic love story and an account of betrayals large and small, it offers a sobering vision of the ways the violence of the colonial encounter reverberated through so many lives, and in such startlingly different ways.’ – Patrick Flanery
Art / History / Indigenous The Heritage of Namatjira The watercolourists of Central Australia (revised and expanded edition) Edited by Jane Hardy, Janet Maughan, J.V.S. Megaw AM, M. Ruth Megaw
ISBN9781923042322 / November 2025
Albert Namatjira has become one of the most revered names in Australian art history, his artworks providing many Australians their first glimpses into the heart of this country and its meaning for First Australians.
Published in 1992, the successful original edition of this book — the first in-depth study of the Indigenous watercolourists and the major touring exhibition that accompanied it — looked beyond Albert Namatjira and the Western Aranda (Arrernte) who followed him.
This revised and expanded edition of The Heritage of Namatjira presents the developing art of the Aranda — decoration on wood, pottery, fabric; the continuing assistance of regional art centres in production and marketing; the equal role of women in representing new technologies such as oil rigs, telephones and the all-important motor vehicles.
In October 2017 the Namatjira Legacy Trust entered into an agreement with Legend Press, returning the copyright in Albert Namatjira’s works to the Namatjira family after 35 long years of injustice; the Namatjira family are now well and truly holders of this celebrated heritage.
The watercolour movement initiated by Namatjira now spans five generations. If a generation ago there had been some doubts in the future of the heritage of Namatjira, the work of Vincent, the youngest of the Aranda artists, has put paid to that.
Jane Hardy studied art at the South Australian School of Art before joining the Australian diplomatic service. She was posted to missions in Malaysia, South Korea, Washington DC, Spain and Honolulu, and was the Ambassador to Spain.
Janet Maughan is a lawyer, scholar, book collector and art writer specialising in Indigenous cultures.
Emeritus Professor J.V.S. Megaw retired in 2006, having held a personal Chair of Visual Arts at Flinders University. Previously he was Professor and Head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Leicester.
M. Ruth Megaw studied American and Australian History at the universities of Glasgow and Sydney and served in the UK diplomatic service before joining her husband in Australia. Having studied fine art in Adelaide, she worked with contemporary Indigenous Australian artists.
Contributions by: Gus Williams OAM, J.V.S. Megaw AM, M. Ruth Megaw, John Morton, Robin Radford, Philip Jones, Jane Hardy, Tim Rouse, Daniel Thomas, Sylvia Kleinert, Ian Burn, Ann Stephen, Jenny Green, Roy Frost, Angela Tidmarsh, Mostyn Kentiltja, Janet Maughan, Sophia Marinos, Fiona Salmon, Colin Golvan AM, QC, Ruth Ellis, Kelli Cole
Media / Politics / Memoir After the Fall The battle to save independent media in the post-Soviet world by Michael Delahaye
ISBN9781923388253 / November 2025
It is 1998. After twenty-five years as a BBC TV reporter and producer, Michael Delahaye is sent to Russia as part of a UK/US programme to develop independent journalism in the former Soviet Union. With Boris Yeltsin in power, hopes are high of Russia, along with the other one-time Soviet republics, becoming functioning democracies.
Over the next five years, Delahaye and his fellow media missionaries will criss-cross the vast Russian Federation, south through Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan … and into Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Their brief is to bring enlightenment to countries where the very concept of journalism has been unknown for seven decades; to support – sometimes help create from scratch – television stations that will be independent, impartial and promote human rights.
What they find is the rouble in freefall, state assets being sold off, black BMWs cruising the streets and an ex-KGB officer tipped for promotion in Yeltsin’s administration … Vladimir Putin.
After the Fall, a foot-soldier’s story, charts Delahaye’s realisation of the challenges, both cultural and political, of transition; how, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West has repeatedly over-estimated its power to recast other nations in its own image.
Michael Delahaye is an independent television producer and occasional print journalist. He is a former BBC TV news reporter, correspondent & documentary producer. As a senior media consultant for the Thomson Foundation UK and Internews Network US, he has worked extensively across the former Soviet Union. Between 2004 and 2020, he trained journalists for the Al Jazeera Satellite Channel in Qatar, Bosnia and the US. Michael is the author of three thrillers commercially published in the UK, US and Japan: The Sale of Lot 236, The Third Day (US version: On The Third Day) and Stalking Horse. Born and educated in England, a graduate of Durham University, Michael is based in Adelaide, Australia, after many years living in France and the UK.
Praise for After the Fall
‘An absolutely fascinating insight into an all too brief interval between tyrannies… and a very fine, historically important document, which should be read widely.’ – Roger Bolton, broadcaster and former editor, BBC Panorama program
‘A valuable manual and resource written by someone who has been there, earned the T-shirt and reflected on the experience. An engaging read that is accessible to anyone interested and not just media pros.’ – Stephen Whittle, former Controller Editorial Policy, BBC
‘A rare insight into the new world disorder’ – Martin Bell (BBC War Correspondent)
Essays Beyond the Books Culture, value, and why libraries matter by Heather Robinson
ISBN9781923042896 / Now available
‘Libraries are a community’s secret weapon in the war against ignorance and isolation. They are also sites of pleasure and entertainment, and of rich cultural experience, knowledge transfer and social connection.’
This exciting and courageous book dares to look beyond economic impact to examine how the State Library of South Australia is valued by individuals and the community. Significantly, it demonstrates the real value of our nation’s libraries, museums, archives and galleries, and what we stand to lose when we don’t look after them.
This book reveals the vital role libraries and other cultural institutions play in our communities, promoting our civic ‘common ground’ and preserving our way of life. Bolstered by insights from across the Australian cultural sector, this book addresses what cultural value means to the public today – and what they see as the best return on government spending.
Heather Robinson is a writer and researcher specialising in the cultural history of the twentieth century. She is also a creative producer with thirty years of experience across the Australian GLAM sector and public service. In 2020, Robinson completed a PhD at Flinders University, exploring the creative industries policy impacts on cultural institutions and their communities. She is an Honorary Research Associate of Flinders University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
Art / History / Outback Hans Heysen Was Here by Barbara Cameron-Smith
ISBN9781923388192 / November 2025
Best known for his pastoral scenes featuring statuesque gum trees, Heysen won critical acclaim when he first exhibited his Flinders Ranges paintings in 1928, featuring the ‘bare bones of landscape’. From 1926 to 1949 Heysen spent many months in the Far North of South Australia, inspiring artworks that have rarely been seen. Hans Heysen Was Here brings together a vast selection of these artworks inspired by the stark landscape that helped reawaken his love of painting. The oil paintings, watercolours, charcoal drawings and field sketches in this book are illuminated by Heysen’s previously unpublished observations about his semi-arid surrounds and the challenges and joys of camping there. The letters and artwork serve as an irreplaceable time capsule of the Flinders Ranges before destocking and re-vegetation transformed the landscape, and an insight into the life and times of a giant of Australian art.
Barbara Cameron-Smith’s career spans more than 40 years researching and delivering natural and cultural heritage interpretation projects for the public and private sectors, including exhibitions, publications and outdoor interpretive signage.
Poetry Now–Then New and selected poems by Mike Ladd
ISBN9781923388215 / October 2025
Prove that you are a human.
Do something lovely
or vicious
or both.
‘Few fully appreciate his range and uniqueness as a poet living both in the Australian mindscape, and distinctly outside it … Ladd is an iconoclast and an icon-maker all at once.’ – John Kinsella
‘Ladd’s pace is subtle, his timing perfect. There is a thought-provoking playfulness that is not practiced, but rather intuitive.’ – Heather Taylor-Johnson
Mike Ladd was born in 1959 in Berkeley California to Australian parents and grew up at Blackwood in the Adelaide Hills. Mike is a poet, essayist and reviewer. He has published ten collections of poetry and prose, including the natural history haibun Karrawirra Parri: Walking the Torrens from source to sea (2012) and Dream Tetras (2022) an experimental collaboration with visual artist Cathy Brooks. Mike worked for ABC Radio for nearly forty years, firstly as a sound engineer and then as a producer of dramas and documentaries. He was the editor of Radio National’s Poetica program, which brought Australian and international poetry to a wide audience.
Photography / History Goyder’s Line in Kodachrome Colin Avery and the origins of colour photography in Australia, 1941–1944 by Roger Irvine
ISBN9781923388246 / November 2025
This book displays images from the earliest known collection of Kodachrome colour photographs in Australia, and one of the earliest internationally.
Colin Avery was one of the first photographers to use this revolutionary new film type, which marked the beginning of modern colour photography. He exposed thirteen rolls of Kodachrome during the Second World War, between 1941 and 1944, documenting in intimate detail life on his family’s isolated farm and its surrounding district, located on the northern side of Goyder’s Line in the Mid North of South Australia.
Roger Irvine is a former public servant and academic. He grew up on a farm in the upper southeast of South Australia near Tailem Bend. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Australian National University and a PhD from the University of Adelaide. He is an active volunteer and researcher in the library of the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia. His previous book, Colonial Settlers on the River Torrens, was also published by Wakefield Press.
History Hotels of Adelaide An illustrated history by Patricia Sumerling
ISBN9781923042186 / October 2025
While pubs exist primarily to sell alcohol, it’s where friends meet and enjoy the entertainment on offer, whether planned or unexpected. Formed as ‘public houses’ to serve mainly workers, each has their own story which Patricia Sumerling teases out from the nearly 200 hotels that were licensed since 1837, leaving 47 trading in 2022.
Often in bluestone, sandstone or brick, and located on main street corners, some of Adelaide’s hotels were adorned in iron-laced balconies and verandahs, all of which create a distinctive visual charm in the streetscapes. Endless shaggy dog tales and improbable myths, involving owners, publicans and patrons, linger within these architectural gems.
Patricia Sumerling is a co-author of the landmark publication Heritage of the City of Adelaide: An illustrated guide (1990) and the author of The Adelaide Park Lands: A social history (2011). She is author of Elephants and Egotists: In search of Samorn of the Adelaide Zoo (2016) and debuted as a novelist in 2010 with the historical crime mystery The Noon Lady of Towitta. Her most recent publication is Bert Edwards: King of the West End (2019). Patricia Sumerling’s first book about hotels, published in 1998, was Down at the Local: The history of hotels in Kensington, Norwood and Kent Town.
View the media release by following this link.
Travel Memoir On the Wrong Side of the Road Europe on four wheels by Roger Zubrinich
ISBN9781923388178 / October 2025
For decades Roger Zubrinich and Judy Peters have left Australia to collect a leased car in Paris. From there they have driven to literally hundreds of towns and cities across Europe and the UK. Many of these places are far removed from the usual tourist trails. Roger drives, Judy navigates and, yes, they’re still together. They’ve ventured as far north as Lulea in Sweden, which is not far below the Arctic Circle, and as far east as Zamosc near Poland’s border with Ukraine, and Constanta and Mamaia on the Black Sea in Romania.
The stories in this collection are personal reflections on the triumphs, the travails, the idiosyncratic, and the insights and ignorance they experienced during these years.
Roger Zubrinich has spent time teaching English to adults and reluctant adolescents. He established a professional writing section at the Adelaide College of the Arts, and to add a bit of variation to his work history, he was an adviser to State Government Ministers. He has co-written four books, occupied judging panels for significant literary awards and has graced Arts funding committees. He had learned to drive by the time he was twelve but needed to wait until he was sixteen to get a licence. He’s made the most of that opportunity. He and his wife Judy live in Adelaide overlooking the exceptional parklands that surround the city centre.
Poetry Being a Creature The Christ in the Wilderness paintings of Stanley Spencer by Helen Parsons
ISBN9781923388239 / November 2025
They come out of failure, these paintings, which is why I love them … Well, one of the reasons. There are many.
In Being a Creature, poet Helen Parsons explores Stanley Spencer’s Christ in the Wilderness, a series of nine paintings depicting Christ’s days spent in the wilderness during Lent.
Helen Parsons grew up in Adelaide and studied history and English literature at the University of Adelaide, where she completed an Honours Degree. After university she spent time in Europe, including a year of study in Italy and a year working in London. Back in Adelaide she worked as a teacher of English as a second language, and later in the Australian office of New Internationalist magazine. Her poems have been published in Australian and overseas journals, and her previous collection The Feeling of Bigness: Encountering Georgia O’Keeffe was published in 2020 by Wakefield Press.
Poetry / Prose Accidental Gardens New and revised by Rob Carney
ISBN9781923388055 / November 2025
There is a centuries-old Japanese form of writing called the haibun: meditative narratives ending with a haiku that acts as a summary or extension of the ideas and moods in the prose. In Accidental Gardens, Rob Carney both honors this form and gives it an update for the 21st century. These 48 essays – including sixteen collected for the first time in this new and revised edition – are all short and end, haibun-style, with poems or encapsulating images. These essays are impressed by the natural world, and unimpressed by politics. They are lessons on poetic craft, and poetic themselves. They are at home in the American West but aware of the whole earth, all its landscapes and animals and magic, but also its fragility since so many of its human inhabitants are reckless and absurd. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes reverent, Accidental Gardens is always smart, and vital, and concerned.
Rob Carney is the author of Accidental Gardens: New and revised (Wakefield Press), a collection of 48 flash essays about place, the environment, and writing poetry, as well as nine books of poems, most recently The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press).
History The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History Hard cover edition Edited by Wilfrid Prest, Kerrie Round, Sandra Kearney, Bernard O’Neil
ISBN9781923042780 / December 2025
The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History is a one-volume guide to events, institutions, people, places, themes and topics of significance in the history of South Australia. It provides an authoritative and comprehensive source of historical background information, presented in readily accessible language and format. While paying attention to distinctive, innovatory and unusual elements in South Australian history, the Companion also underlines the contribution made by South Australians to the broader national culture, polity and society.
Born and schooled in Melbourne, after post-graduate study in Oxford Wilfrid Prest AM moved to Adelaide, where he has lived and worked for more than fifty years and is now Emeritus Professor of History and of Law. Besides contributing to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The Oxford Companion to Australian History and the Journal of Australian Studies, he has edited a history of History at the University of Adelaide.
History / DIY Holden FX and FJ Handbook Information for the enthusiast by Don Loffler
ISBN9781923042759 / November 2025
Don Loffler knows his early model Holdens. In addition to researching them for decades, he has owned an FX and an FJ, and he now owns another FX. He is therefore well qualified to present this must-have handbook for early model Holden enthusiasts.
This full identification guide for FX and FJ Holdens includes tables for body and trim colours, serial and engine numbers, and the dating of window glass.
Hundreds of photographs provide examples of the data being described, including those showing fascinating crayon writing on the firewall. There are even photographs of rare ex-government vehicles in colours not available to the general public.
Don Loffler is Australia’s premier Holden historian, and author of several books including She’s a Beauty and Cars We Used to Drive.
Primary Health Care / Memoir The Heaslip Bequest for Health by Peter McDonald, with (assistance from) Robert Fitzsimons and Peter Preece
ISBN9781923388154 / Now available
This is the story of Gordon Heaslip and his bequest to a medical school in South Australia to remedy the deficiencies in medical education he suffered before graduating MBBS (Adelaide) in 1929. Born in 1902 in mid-north South Australia where the pioneering Heaslip family created an agricultural dynasty, Gordon chose to become a Methodist medical missionary. After completing medical and theological studies, Gordon and wife Barbara went to Fergusson Island in Papua. After medical discharge with polycythemia vera in 1946, Gordon developed farms in Tintinara and Gilles Downs Station near Iron Knob. Gordon died in 1961 from leukemia and polycythemia. Flinders University received the bequest which is being applied to preventive medicine and primary health care.
Emeritus Professor Peter McDonald was the inaugural head of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Flinders University. As Chair of the Commonwealth AIDS Research Grants committee, he coordinated research in Australia that underpinned the control of HIV in Australia and contributed to global control. He was awarded AM for services to Infectious Diseases and control of HIV/AIDS.
Art and Design South Australian School of Art 170 years shaping South Australian visual arts and culture by Jenny Aland
ISBN9781743058527 / October 2025
From its inception, the South Australian School of Art has been a wellspring of our arts and cultural life, and not merely in the home state.
In this richly illustrated, lovingly researched book, Jenny Aland tells the lively story of the School’s 170 years to the present day, set against a background of social, political and cultural progress and change. Along the way, we meet a host of influential individuals who taught or studied at the School.
Dr Jenny Aland PSM is an Adelaide-based visual arts educator, researcher and writer. She has authored, co-authored (Heinemann: Australian Artlook, Art Connections 1 & 2) and edited numerous publications. Jenny has a PhD from the University of South Australia, a Masters in Education from the University of Canberra and Bachelor degrees in Education and Fine Arts (Painting). In 2003, she was awarded a Public Service Medal (PSM). Dr Aland is now an Adjunct Research Fellow at UniSA.
Social History Onwards and Upwards The Uniting Communities story by Vincent Burke
ISBN9781923388161 / Now available
This is the story of Uniting Communities (UC) which evolved from the Adelaide Central Mission, created by the Methodist (now Uniting) Church over 120 years ago.
It is a story of community support for people in need, through the provision of service delivery and through powerful advocacy to government and other authorities, fighting for social justice. Onwards and Upwards features individuals who provided leadership, staff with professional skills, and volunteers who give up their time to help others.
Adelaide writer Vincent Burke was born in war-torn London in 1942. Raised as a Catholic, he trained for the priesthood for several years, including a few years in Rome, but decided this was not for him. Penguin UK published his book about the first national strike by British teachers. More recently he has focused on commissioned works, such as the history of Southern Cross Care and this book, the history and development of Uniting Communities.
Sport Australian Cricket Digest 2025–26 by Edited by Lawrie Colliver
ISBN9781763659018 / October 2025
The fourteenth edition of the Australian Cricket Digest covers in detail Australia’s 3-1 Test series win over India – the first Test tour to the West Indies since 2015. Plus, South Australia’s drought-breaking wins in the Sheffield Shield (29 years) and the One-Day Cup. This edition also remembers greats like Bob Simpson, Keith Stackpole, Ian Redpath and Bob Cowper. It features book reviews with Barry Nicholls, and all the stats and numbers for a brilliant 12 months of cricket.
Brought up in country South Australia, Lawrie Colliver has been following the game since the summer World Series Cricket started, in 1977–78. He went on to play grade cricket at Tea Tree Gully, then to work as a freelance cricket statistician for Fox Sports (where he is currently head cricket statistician), Macquarie Radio and Network Ten. Lawrie was also a credited ghostwriter on Dizzy: The Jason Gillespie Story, published by HarperCollins, and as a producer/statistician on three Ashes tours to England.
