Former Keating speechwriter and lover of language Don Watson has already given us Death Sentence (Vintage. PB. $24.95) and Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words (Vintage. PB. $24.95), and his crusading satire once more has management in its sights as he gathers baffling language from real workplaces and contemporary media. Or should that be synergising documentary substantiation from actual venues of labour and real-time media events? From ‘building the brand’ of universities, mosques and even hockey teams to euphemisms for sacking including ‘right sizing our business’ or ‘down balance with personnel implications’, nothing escapes Watson’s wit. With recent banking collapses and business questioning its ethics, his reflections on the hilarious hypocrisy of our era have never been more timely.

Australia’s funniest and most perceptive political cartoonists are always on the job, pencils sharpened and eager to draw fresh blood. The seventh edition of this bestselling series features the work of editorial cartoonists from all around Australia including: Alston, Brown, Davidson, Dyson, Katauskas, Knight, Kudelka, Leahy, Leak, Moir, Nicholson, O’Farrell, Petty, Pope, Rowe, Spooner, Tandberg, Weldon, and many more. Not just a collection, more a subversive first draft of history, Best Australian Political Cartoons 2009 is the essential guide to the current Labor era.

Water is modern Australia’s biggest challenge. As bushfires and dust storms occur more often, Australians are coming to terms with the way our continent is changing and how our lives will have to adapt. Many Australian Photographers (MAP) Group is a collective of photographers who have been documenting this change with powerful images that vividly realise this dryness and deprivation. Their lenses capture the heartbreak of erosion, the toughness of ordinary Australians and the melancholy of closed-down main streets. But they also show that there is still hope in photo essays such as that on Ngarringdjeri elder, George Trevorrow, who talks about ‘the difference between greed and need’. Few Australians could look on these images and not hear the urgency of its environmental call to arms.

Bob Ellis is one of Australia’s leading political wits, a kind of antipodean Michael Moore. This provocative series of 345 arguments against free-market capitalism is in many ways a sequel to his prophetic 1988 book on economics, First Abolish the Customer. He equates the idea at the core of The Capitalism Delusion to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion: ‘if you simply surrender your heart to the Deity, his Invisible Hand would look after you’. But, as Ellis pointedly (and often humorously) shows, the free markets, far from taking care of everything, have created the gross inequalities in our society that enable the likes of Osama bin Laden to build a following among the disenfranchised. Ellis builds a damning case, but also offers a range of startlingly sensible solutions.

Thinking man’s petrolhead Clinton Walker resurrects a uniquely Australian icon in this full-colour salute to the muscle car. A music and pop culture journalist, Walker takes his eyes off the road as he looks at how cars like the Holden Monaro, Torana, Falcon GT and Super Bird represented a cultural awakening for 1960s and ’70s Australia. The book traces the revving engines from origins in Detroit to the evolution of Australia’s own Holden, from the Oil Crisis of the late ’70s to the retrofuturism of the Monaro’s re-release in 1998. It’s pedal to the metal with an adrenaline chaser as Walker takes Billy Thorpe, Mad Max and Ivan Milat along for the joyride. More than glossy images, this is a thoughtful celebration of a cultural phenomenon.

Tim Winton last collaborated with a photographer for Land’s Edge, which looked at our national obsession with the beach. Here the lens and the pen move inland to look at a regional Australia airbrushed from tourist brochures. Winton’s essay opens the book with raw personal observations of towns in decay or overrun by tack. The haunting photography by Martin Mischkuling strikes notes of melancholy and loneliness – few images feature people, as Winton notes that less than 14% of us live outside major coastal cities. Names that speak of mythical road trips – the Oodnadatta Track, Fitzroy Crossing and the Great Northern Highway – are re-imagined with an eye for what Winton calls ‘built ugliness’. A potent testament for forgotten Australia.

Sydney Harbour doesn’t just dominate the city of Sydney – it’s also integral to Australia’s self-image. Historian Ian Hoskins tells the story of the waterway, from the days when the Gamaragal people fished its waters to its postindustrial future now that its days as a working harbour seem numbered. Filled with details capturing moments in time, the book traces the harbour’s history as a source of leisure, employment, inspiration and wealth. A case in point is Lavender Bay, defaced by a railway line in the 1890s, painted by Brett Whiteley in the 1970s and resurrected by Wendy Whiteley as a reclaimed public garden in recent times. This is an absorbing and original work that sheds light on Sydney, its history, people and geography by focusing on its greatest asset, that exhilarating blue harbour.

The latest Quarterly Essay investigates political leadership in Australia, past and present. Also available on audiobook (Bolinda. $16.95).

The first volume of this unique history of Australia brings to life the vast range of characters who have formed our national story.

Daley travels from Australia to Israel, from the battlefields to the archives, and discovers an episode that sits at odds with the Anzac myth and legend.

Now a highly anticipated annual publishing event, Black Inc.’s three ‘Best of’ volumes are essential summer reading. This year’s Essays showcases pieces as diverse as Annabel Crabb on Julia Gillard, David Marr on Christmas Island and Peter Conrad on Michael Jackson. Poems features work by Clive James, Robert Gray, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter and other notables. Stories offers quality short fiction by writers including Mandy Sayer, Steven Amsterdam and Peter Goldsworthy.

A fascinating photographic glimpse of Sydney’s criminal class in the 20th century, complete with accounts of their crimes – an antique Underbelly.

A diverse and often moving collection of over 50 speeches ranging from colonial times to the present day.

Political commentator Paul Kelly portrays Paul Keating and John Howard as conviction politicians, tribal warriors and national-interest patriots.

Never before published, Harnett’s book takes the reader on an eye-opening tour of life in and behind the trenches on the Western Front in WWI.

An environmental and cultural history recounting the story of the settlement of Australia and how our culture has been shaped by the scarcity of water.