When a small, ancient Irishman appears on a school fence post eating a cheese sandwich, entirely invisible to almost everyone — fifteen-year-old Immie Whitfield is not entirely surprised. She has always been able to draw characters who step off the page and speak to her. She has always known the world was stranger than it appeared.She doesn't know her estranged grandfather is a magician. She doesn't know that an organisation called the Collectors has been watching her fami...

Arthur Templar knows if he tries to rescue his parents, they could die.But if he does not rescue them, they will certainly die.General Zardaq learned that Arthur Templar's parents discovered how to control a runaway fusion reaction as part of their medical research.Zardaq took over the planet. He is terrorising its people, and he has kidnapped Arthur's parents to extract their secrets.Arthur has no option but to attempt a rescue. But he knows he will be tradi...

Alex Moreton thought she understood grief. She thought she understood archives too: their order, their absences, the way a missing page could say more than a hundred that remained.Then she finds a hidden vault beneath the university, and inside it a record of everything her family and her institution have spent generations trying not to know. There is a dead girl, a dead engineer, a ledger that keeps the dark half of the story, and a woman who has spent forty years standing guard o...

Six weeks since the skyrocket. Six weeks since Imogen Whitfield turned sixteen and her grandfather's gift became hers — and then kept becoming more than she'd bargained for. Immie can read objects now. Touch a button from someone's coat and receive their whole worried life. Hold an old iron key and find herself in a lamplit room in Edinburgh, watching a man write in an enormous leather-bound ledger with the certainty of someone who has been doing this for a very long time. The Collectors h...

The Intergalactic Council calls it the Devourer. The Order of Orphic Vitae thinks it is the path to eternal life. Arthur Templar calls it the worst thing he has ever felt — vast, hungry, and waking up beneath the earth.Arthur is eighteen now, and the stakes are no longer local. The ancient network that runs beneath Elderberry Valley extends across every continent on Earth, possibly across other worlds. Something has been imprisoned inside it for ten thousand years — not a creature ...

It is a Tuesday evening in the university choir. Lachie Drummond is twenty-two years old, a final-year computer science student, and he sings second tenor with an instinctive sense of line that the conductor acknowledges by directing the rest of the section to listen to him. He is also two moves ahead of everyone in every room he enters. He has been working on a thesis about seams — the invisible joins in institutional data architecture, the places where different systems meet.At e...

When the body in the bag is the wrong body, the case becomes the case. The seventy-three papers at the novel's centre are not, as you first assume, a list. They are a ledger. Academics rarely admit in public: that scholarship has always been inseparable from patronage, and patronage from obligation. Academic institutions, where power is quiet, consequences accumulate slowly, where power protects itself in beautiful rooms and Dr Alex Moreton's dining table at the Scholar's Table on the Swan...

The car alone should have been a warning. Long, low, the colour of wet slate, parked across two bays like the lines were somebody else's problem — and out of it steps a man who looks at the Safety Bay foreshore the way you'd look at a fish you're about to fillet.When a developer's marquee goes up over the lagoon every kid in Safety Bay has known their whole lives, Barry, Rose, Annie, Kath and Vic know exactly what's coming. What they don't have is proof — so they get some, at dawn,...

Something is moaning on the headland at Point Peron — and whatever it is, it empties a school camp in under an hour.Barry Carter is fourteen, constitutionally unable to lie to his mother, and — as the framed commendation on the HQ wall attests — President of the Safety Bay Six. When Year Nine camp ends two days early after an unearthly sound drives twenty-six boys and two teachers from their bunks, Barry knows, with the reluctant certainty of a boy who has been right about this sor...

When the prestigious Italian Bellini Foundation arrives at the Swan River Festival of Voices with a previously unknown Vivaldi manuscript, Dr Alex Moreton notices three things before the opening reception is half over.The provenance chain leads from a Swiss estate sale, through a Zurich auction house, through eighteen months of preliminary authentication in Rome, and arrives in Perth wearing the imprimatur of the Bellini FoundationBy the following morning, the manuscript wa...

The annual Classics Dinner is in full swing. Professor Hadley MacNamara — formidable, silver-haired, sixty-five, the kind of man rooms arrange themselves around — is holding court on the veranda of the Scholar's Table above the Swan. His toast is is genuinely brilliant. It moves from Homer to the geography of joy, and the room gives him exactly the silence he deserves.Then, after the silence, something is different.He begins a sentence he does not finish. He reaches for a c...

High-reliability management is a set of practices and competencies that help Organisations operating in high-hazard environments maintain a low risk of accidents. These Organisations recognise the inherent risks associated with their operations and actively work to minimise them, even in complex and challenging circumstances.Clear and understandable core management competencies are needed to prevent 'preventable' accidents.Dr Maher's research provides valuable insights into...