Brennan Book Program

We invite all Brennanites, faculty and staff, from the Dean down to incoming first-years, to read the same book.

The idea comes from “campus books” at US universities (such as Stanford’s Three Books program). It gives everyone a chance to come to the Brennan Program with something in common. We hope it becomes a way to open up conversations between all years of the Program, and also between students and staff.

For 2025, we’ve chosen to streamline the options and stick one theme. By launching early over Summer Circle you are welcome to select one to read, reflect and claim ROJ, and be eligible for the bonus ROJ. Students can use the books for reflections, however there is a cap: two books per calendar year.

Are audiobooks or podcasts more your thing? Check if your titles are available Audible (PDF) or your preferred audiobook service.

Narratives of In/Equality in Australia

This year's theme, "Narratives of In/Equality in Australia," examines how class, gender, race, and power shape our society. Through a range of fiction and nonfiction titles, these narratives encourage us to critically analyse the inequalities present in Australian life and reflect on how societal structures shape our experiences of both equality and inequality. If you come across a book that fits this theme, we'd love for you to share it in the Brennan Collective on Facebook. We always appreciate new contributions and the fresh perspectives they bring.

2025 Titles

Safe Haven by Shankari Chandran

In 2018, on his way to a family holiday in Cairo, Australian-Egyptian citizen Hazem Hamouda disappears without warning, going missing somewhere between landing and customs. His eldest daughter, Lamisse, has recently moved to Egypt from Australia to study at University of Cairo. With little Arabic and even less legal knowledge, she finds out her father has been arbitrarily arrested. Going up against the notorious Egyptian prison system, Lamisse discovers that the Australian embassy provides shockingly little support to dual citizens arrested abroad.

Shouldering the responsibility of her father’s welfare, Lamisse learns to navigate both deeply flawed systems, and freeing Hazem involves a reckoning with the two countries she’s called home – coming to terms with the prejudice and racism of the country she grew up in and the corruption in the country she was hoping to reconnect with. The Shape of Dust is a haunting appraisal of the way Australia treats its citizens, both at home and abroad.

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller

Tessa is a thoroughbred. A young, brilliant barrister from a working-class background now at the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and lighting up the shadows of doubt in any case. The law is a game and she is its most talented player.

One sickening night, though, Tessa finds herself in a position countless women - one in three - have been in before her. And she's faced with a gut-wrenching, life-changing decision. Will she take the stand to testify about her rape, with the full awareness that the system has not been built to protect her?

Drawn from the internationally acclaimed play, Prima Facie is a propulsive, raw look at the price victims pay for speaking out and the system that sets them up to fail. With breakneck prose and a devastating emotional intensity, this is a novel for our times, by one of Australia's most impressive writers.

Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law by Alecia Simmonds

Until well into the twentieth century, heartbroken men and women in Australia had a legal redress for their suffering: jilted lovers could claim compensation for 'breach of promise to marry'. Hundreds of people, mostly from the working classes, came before the courts, and their stories give us a tantalising insight into the romantic landscape of the past – where couples met, how they courted, and what happened when flirtations turned sour. In packed courtrooms and breathless newspaper reports, love letters were read as contracts and private gifts and gossip scrutinised as evidence.

In Courting, Associate Professor Alecia Simmonds, UTS Faculty of Law, brings these stories vividly to life, revealing the entangled histories of love and the law. Over the long arc of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pre-industrial romantic customs gave way to middle-class respectability, women used the courts to assert their rights, and the law eventually retreated from people's romantic lives – with women, Simmonds argues, losing out in the process.

Dirrayawadha: Rise Up by Anita Heiss

Miinaa was a young girl when the white ghosts first arrived. She remembers the day they raised a piece of cloth and renamed her homeland ‘Bathurst’. Now she lives at Cloverdale and works for a white family who have settled there.

The Nugents are kind, but Miinaa misses her miyagan. Her brother, Windradyne, is a Wiradyuri leader, and visits when he can, bringing news of unrest across their ngurambang. Miinaa hopes the violence will not come to Cloverdale.

When Irish convict Daniel O’Dwyer arrives at the settlement, Miinaa’s life is transformed again. The pair are magnetically drawn to each other and begin meeting at the bila in secret. Dan understands how it feels to be displaced, but they still have a lot to learn about each other. Can their love survive their differences and the turmoil that threatens to destroy everything around them?

Mean Streak by Rick Morton

From award-winning journalist and writer Rick Morton comes Mean Streak, the gripping, utterly compelling and horrifying story of how, over the course of four and a half years, Australia's government turned on its most vulnerable citizens. Powerfully moving, deeply compelling and utterly enraging, Mean Streak reveals disturbing things about the country we have become and the government that was. In the mode of a corporate thriller, this is a scouring cautionary tale of morality in public life gone badly awry - a story that is bigger than robodebt, and far from over.

Love Across Class by Rose Butler and Eve Vincent

What does it mean to partner across class difference? This lucid and original book is the first to explore cross-class relationships in contemporary Australia, a society long-invested in the myth of egalitarianism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with people from a range of class and cultural backgrounds, Love Across Class brings to life the role of class in shaping people's childhoods, as well as the adult lives couples have built together. These stories move between the mundane, the profound and the taboo, as interviewees reckon openly with the pain, pleasure, humour and contradiction that comes with forming a close relationship across class. From escaping one's class background and confronting class dissimilarity, to managing money and negotiating holidays, this book offers rich accounts of personal worlds shared across class as they are lived Yet not only do those interviewed reflect on the classed dynamics and tensions present in their relationships and family.

Naku Dharuk The Bark Petitions by Clare Wright

In 1963—a year of agitation for civil rights worldwide—the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land created the Yirrkala Bark Petitions: Naku Dharuk. ‘The land grew a tongue’ and the land-rights movement was born.

Naku Dharuk is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the trailblazers who made it. It is also a pulsating picture of the ancient and enduring culture of Australia’s first peoples.

Joe Cinque's Consolation by Helen Garner

A true story of death, grief and the law from the 2019 winner of the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests-most of them university students-had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as 'evil'; and explores conscience, culpability, and the battered ideal of duty of care. It is a masterwork from one of Australia's greatest writers.

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