Sutherland Shire Libraries News

Lily and the octopus/Stephen Rowley
When you sit down with Lily and the Octopus, you will be taken on an unforgettable ride.
The magic of this novel is in the read, and we don’t want to spoil it by giving away too many details.
We can tell you that this is a story about that special someone: the one you trust, the one you can’t live without.
For Ted Flask, that someone special is his aging companion Lily, who happens to be a dog.
Lily and the Octopus reminds us how it feels to love fiercely, how difficult it can be to let go, and how the fight for those we love is the greatest fight of all.
Remember the last book you told someone they had to read?
Lily and the Octopus is the next one.

Death of an owl/ Paul Torday
Andrew Landford is driving home one night, along a dark country lane, when a barn owl flies into his windscreen. It is an accident, nothing more. However Andrew is in line to be the country's next prime minister. And he has recently been appointed to a parliamentary committee concerned with the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Barn Owls are protected species, and it is a crime to kill one. If Andrew acknowledges that he has killed the owl, he could be risking his political career.

Under the visible life/ Kim Echlin
Half Chinese and half Canadian, Katherine Goodnow struggles through a 1950's childhood hostile to all she represents. Then, as a teenager, she discovers jazz, and her life is transformed. Her talent for the piano brings her freedom, adventure, and a sense of purpose, helping her survive unexpected motherhood and her incurable love for the unreliable father of her children. Half American and half Afghani, Mahsa Weaver is only twelve when, after the death of her parents, she is sent to live with strict relatives in Karachi. Struggling to break free, she escapes to Montreal, but the threads of her past are not so easily severed, and she finds herself forced into an arranged marriage. For Mahsa, too, music becomes her solace and passion, allowing her to dare to dream of a life that is really her own. When these two women meet in New York, they begin a friendship that will change everything. Vividly rendered and sweeping in scope, Under the Visible Life is a stunning meditation on how hope can remain alive in the darkest of times, if we have someone with whom to share our burdens.

Hester and Harriet/ Hilary Spiers
When widowed sisters, Hester and Harriet, move together into a comfortable cottage in a pretty English village, the only blights on their cosy landscape are their crushingly boring cousins, George and Isabelle, who are determined that the sisters will never want for company. Including Christmas Day...On their reluctant drive over to Christmas dinner, the sisters come across a waif-like young girl, hiding with her baby in a disused bus shelter. Seizing upon the perfect excuse for returning to their own warm hearth, Hester and Harriet insist on bringing Daria and Milo home with them...But with the knock at their front door the next day by a sinister stranger looking for a girl with a baby, followed quickly by their cousins' churlish fifteen-year-old son, Ben, who also appears to be seeking sanctuary, Hester and Harriet's carefully crafted peace and quiet quickly begins to fall apart...With dark goings-on in the village, unlooked-for talents in Ben, and the deeper mysteries in Daria's story, Hester and Harriet find their lives turned upside down. And, perhaps, it's exactly what they need...

This must be the place/ Maggie O'Farrell
Daniel Sullivan, a young American professor reeling from a failed marriage and a brutal custody battle, is on holiday in Ireland when he falls in love with Claudette, a world famous sexual icon and actress who fled fame for a reclusive life in a rural village. Together, they make an idyllic life in the country, raising two more children in blissful seclusion until a secret from Daniel's past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home. What follows is a journey through Daniel's many lives told in his voice and the voices of those who have made him the man he is: the American son and daughter he has not seen for many years; the family he has made with Claudette; and irrepressible, irreverent Claudette herself. Shot through with humor and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is a powerful rumination on the nature of identity, and the complexities of loyalty and devotion a gripping story of an extraordinary family and an extraordinary love.

The muse/ Jessie Burton
England, 1967. Odelle Bastien is a Caribbean émigré trying to make her way in London. When she starts working at the prestigious Skelton Institute of Art, she discovers a painting rumored to be the work of Isaac Robles, a young artist of immense talent and vision whose mysterious death has confounded the art world for decades. The excitement over the painting is matched by the intrigue around the conflicting stories of its discovery. Drawn into a complex web of secrets and deceptions, Odelle does not know what to believe or who she can trust, including her mesmerizing colleague, Marjorie Quick.
Spain, 1936. Olive Schloss, the daughter of a Viennese Jewish art dealer and an English heiress, follows her parents to Arazuelo, a poor, restless village on the southern coast. She grows close to Teresa, a young housekeeper, and Teresa’s half-brother, Isaac Robles, an idealistic and ambitious painter newly returned from the Barcelona salons. A dilettante buoyed by the revolutionary fervor that will soon erupt into civil war, Isaac dreams of being a painter as famous as his countryman Picasso.
Raised in poverty, these illegitimate children of the local landowner revel in exploiting the wealthy Anglo-Austrians. Insinuating themselves into the Schloss family’s lives, Teresa and Isaac help Olive conceal her artistic talents with devastating consequences that will echo into the decades to come.

Music and freedom/ Zoe Morrison
Alice Murray learns to play the piano aged three on an orange orchard in rural Australia. Recognising her daughter's gift, her mother sends Alice to boarding school in the bleak north of England, and there Alice stays for the rest of her childhood. Then she's offered a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, and on a summer school in Oxford she meets Edward, an economics professor who sweeps her off her feet.

Alice soon finds that Edwards is damaged, and she's trapped. She clings to her playing and to her dream of becoming a concert pianist, until disaster strikes. Increasingly isolated as the years unravel, eventually Alice can't find it in herself to carry on. Then she hears the most beautiful music from the walls of her house.

Here where we live/ cassie Flanaghan Willanski
"That's the thing about climate change, it comes home to you. In our case, literally. The fifth night after my husband's departure, while the children and I were sleeping in the front bedrooms, the old tree next door gave way and smashed through the kitchen roof at the back". Brave and beautifully written, the stories that make up Here Where We Live chart the relationships white Australians have with the land and the Indigenous people they share it with. A woman moves her three young children south in search of rain; a girl throws her glasses in the river to avoid bearing witness to uncomfortable truths; a boy involved in an act of desecration becomes a man with an identity crisis at an Indigenous healing ceremony; a pair of desperadoes take lessons in love from a woman and the ghost of her lifelong partner.

National Science Week offering a chance for everyone to help build the body of knowledge which will support many future research projects.
Wildlife Spotter is calling for animal lovers, aspiring scientists, concerned citizens and anyone with some spare time to view some of the millions of photos collected from automatic cameras in many of Australia's wilderness areas.

NSW coastal rainforest

The purpose is to see if there is an animal in the photo and if there is, identify it. Scientists have been doing the work, but it will take them years to do it all and recheck the results. Meanwhile some of Australia's animals could be threatened and the data to prove it, is not in a usable form.

NT arid zones

Join in on this citizen science project and help scientists organise vital research which will inform the community's knowledge of its wildlife.
Would you like to guess at what shape the future will be due to advances in science? The Future Vision Quiz is your chance to put your choices to the test.
Are you looking for reliable scientific research on any topic? Want to read issues of these magazines .....New Scientist, Scientific American, Psychology Today, National Geographic, Physics Today Wired, Amateur Astronomy, American Scientist, Antiquity, ECOS, Nature, Popular Mechanics, Australian Science Teachers Journal? Visit Science Research Center. Sutherland Shire Library membership required.
The library Zinio magazine collection has the latest issues of Astronomy, Australasian Science, Australian Geographic National Geographic Interactive, New Scientist, New Scientist Australian edition, Popular Science Australian, Save Our Seas and Smithsonian Magazine for you to download and read on your digital device.
Interested in what else is happening during National Science Week? Visit http://www.scienceweek.net.au

Sutherland Shire Flag
The Sutherland Shire is often said to have taken its name from Forby Sutherland, a seaman who died on board the HMS Endeavour when it was anchored off Kurnell and thereby became, on 1 May 1770, the first British subject to be buried in Australian soil. In recognition of Forby Sutherland and the Shire’s historical significance as the place from which the first landing from the HMS Endeavour was made on 29 April 1770, Sutherland Shire Council, desirous of an official flag in 1929, stipulated that the essential points of the Arms of Captain James Cook be incorporated into the new design when they approached the Royal Australian Historical Society on the matter. The RAHS referred them to Mr C.R. Wylie, designer of the Canberra coat of arms.

The Sutherland Shire Flag (seen flying here in 1938) bears the red cross of St. George upon a white background, symbolising the naval ensign under which Captain Cook sailed. At the centre of a blue field (the ocean) surrounded by a green wreath of laurel lies a globe amid two ‘estoiles’ representing the north and south polar stars (Cook’s Arms).
“What do we want a bally old flag for?” asked the Cronulla-Sutherland Advocate newspaper on 6 September 1929 when the new flag was revealed, “For pride in our Shire… On its eastern boundary the great waves of the Pacific break unceasingly. Over its bridge-spanned river the Prince’s Highway, linking east and west, runs. Southward lies a monument for all time to the farsightedness of a great statesman who reserved, in all its natural beauty, a playground for the people, the National Park. Progress is evidenced on every hand. Why should we not wave a flag over it and “tell the world” how pleasant is the place whereon our tents are pitched?”
“A flag is not merely a piece of bunting fluttering on the breeze,” the Advocate continued poetically, “it is a symbol … (and our) flag symbolises pride, remembrance (and) hope.”

What do these have in common? Science brings them to life...well maybe not the zombies, as they have to be dead to be zombies, right?

National Science Week provides the impetus to explore this pressing question, as we gear up for the ANSTO Future Vision Quiz.

Ant colonised by zombie virus

Common knowledge tells us that zombies are created by a virus. (Cue every zombie apocalypse books or films )
Scientific knowledge tells us they are created by a humble fungus.
Cordyceps unilateralis spore infects the carpenter ant, takes over it's brain and keeps it alive just long enough for it to be steered to a place where the fungus likes to grow and then it immobilises the ant. It uses the ant's body for sustanence to grow and produce more spores which will drop onto more unsuspecting ants, who will in turn become zombie slaves!

Aurora Australis

Many people have heard of the Aurora Borealis, a stunning light display in the skies of the northern hemisphere. Did you know that it's sister the Aurora Australis can be seen in the southern states of Australia and of course, Antarctica? These brilliant displays are best able to be seen during the coldest nights, and have been visible on the horizon as far north as Coonabarabran. They are created by the Sun's solar flares sending out particles at huge velocity, which intersect with the Earth's magnetic field an few days later. If this all occurs at the correct angles and conditions, an aurora occurs. See more glorious photos and a full explanation of this awe inspiring natural phenomena.

No chance for dinosaur eggs though!

2015 saw 25 years worth of  Ig Noble prizes being awarded in many disciplines.
Begun by a science magazine editor who decided to celebrate the funny and the curious, he includes research which provides a laughable moment and then makes him think! Past winners of the  Less noble Nobels have been in Safety Engineering for 'developing and testing a suit of armour impervious to grissly bears', and in Veterinary Medicine for showing 'that cows who have names give more milk than those who are nameless'.
In the 2015 awards two Australian scientific teams were honoured. One with the Biology award for unboiling an egg! Although this could seem like a waste of effort the Vortex Fluidic Device built to do the job is now being used for many other applications including creating biodiesal much more cleanly.
The other prize winners in Linguistics found that Huh! is a universal word in every language studied. The same sound and meaning, the only word ever found to be so. This has wider implications for how language is studied generally, and our understanding of human development.

Go to Science Research Center with any and all your moments of curiosity and open worlds of discovery. Just type in your library card number and pin for full access.
Pictures supplied by Brittanica Image Quest

Today 1 August is celebrated as the Horses' birthday. This date was chosen  for horses in the Southern Hemisphere as it falls at the beginning of the foaling season.

Celebrate by saddling up with these seven horse themed fiction books(for adults) below.

The horses/ William Lane
 An Australian author...
On the outskirts of Sydney, a boys' boarding school prides itself on the horses it keeps. David, a gifted working class student, receives a scholarship to attend. At the same time Gregory, a new master, is appointed. Both soon learn, from their different perspectives, that what is said bears little relation to what is done. The school isolates itself from the outside world and over the course of several months of rain, the atmosphere inside the school becomes increasingly lawless and violent. School buildings slip away in floods. Underlying differences between various parties in the school turn into open conflicts, and the school community begins breaking up. These tensions are focused in the conflict between two masters, Val and Mr C. These two men loathe one another, and both recruit boys in the war of ideas they are waging.

Half broke Horses/ Jeanette Walls
A true life novel...
“Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls’s no-nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town—riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car and fly a plane. And, with her husband, Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one who is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.

All the Pretty horses/ Cormac McCarthy
 A coming of age tale...
The national bestseller, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself.  With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.




Fortress Iron Eyes/ Rory Black
A Black Horse Western ...
Tracking outlaws Dobie Miller and Waldo Schmitt into a deadly desert, the notorious bounty hunter Iron Eyes is closing the distance between them with every beat of his determined heart. Yet the magnificent palomino stallion beneath his ornate saddle is starting to suffer. For years the deadly Iron Eyes has never been concerned about his horses, but since acquiring the powerful stallion, his attitude has changed. Iron Eyes knows that the horse has saved his life many times, due to its remarkable strength, but now it needs water badly. Every instinct tells the bounty hunter to stop his relentless hunt for the wanted outlaws, but then his steely eyes spot something out in the sickening heat-haze: It is a towering fortress. Iron Eyes presses on.

Triple Crown/Felix Francis
The latest horse racing thriller by Felix Francis, the son of Dick Francis.

Jeff Hinkley, a British Horseracing Authority investigator, has been seconded to the US Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency (FACSA) where he has been asked to find a mole in their organisation, an informant who is passing on confidential information to fix races.  
  
Jeff goes in search of answers, taking on an undercover role as a groom on the backstretch at Belmont Park racetrack in New York. But he discovers far more than he was bargaining for, finding himself as the meat in the sandwich between FACSA and corrupt individuals who will stop at nothing, including murder, to capture the most elusive and lucrative prize in the world – the Triple Crown.

Tag: A Man, A Woman, And The War To End All Wars/ Barry Heard
A bush tale, a family saga, a romance, and a revelation of the human spirit's ability to survive war's inhumanity...

As a lad in the high country of eastern Victoria, Tag Wardell shows an extraordinary gift with animals: he is followed to school by his pets; his rapport with his horse, Dimble, Becomes the talk of the district; and hi even manages to befriend a mob of brumbies during an adventure with his schoolmates in the Dargo high plains.
Later, when he becomes a blacksmith, locals come to watch him at work, amazed at his ability to clam the meanest of nags.  But 1914 brings war, and the government's patriotic fervour entices Tag and his mates to join the Light Horse regiment.

For Tag, war begins as an adventure.  On the convoy to Egypt, he is quickly singles out to help the distressed horses.  Then, while on leave in Cairo, he meets Jill, a nurse, but their brief romance is cut short as Gallipoli looms.  Tag's life spirals into one of survival in the day-to-day madness of the trenches.

The red pony/John Steinbeck
A Twentieth Century Classic short story...
Like most ten-year-old boys, Jody Tiflin has the urge for rebellion as well as the need to be loved. In these stories, jody begins to learn about adulthood – its pains, its responsibilities and its problems – through his acceptance of his father's gifts. First he is given a red pony and later he is promised the colt of a bay mare. Yet both of these gifts bring tragedy as well as joy, and Jody is taught not only the harsh lessons of life and death, but made painfully aware of the fallibility of adults.