It’s the time of year where we begin to think about how we want to make our lives and the lives of those around us better in the new year. Committing to the work of challenging and deconstructing the thoughts, preferences and values that derive from oppressive systems is a good place to start. Below are our recommendations for books published in 2021 that can help you along the way.

Another Day in the Colony by Chelsea Watego

A ground-breaking work - and a call to arms - that exposes the ongoing colonial violence experienced by First Nations people. In this collection of deeply insightful and powerful essays, Chelsea Watego examines the ongoing and daily racism faced by First Nations peoples in so-called Australia.

The End of Bias: How We Change Our Minds by Jessica Nordell

Implicit bias leads us to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, age, body type and a host of other factors. In this landmark book, Jessica Nordell meets the people and organisations whose discoveries are set to change the world, and examines how we might begin to eliminate the biases that have settled in our societies, and even in our own minds.

_Lies Damned Lies: A Personal Exploration of the Impact of Colonisation_by Claire G. Coleman

In Lies, Damned Lies acclaimed author Claire G. Coleman, a proud Noongar woman, takes the reader on a journey through the past, present and future of Australia, viewed through her own experience. Coleman’s work blends the personal with the political, offering readers an insight into the stark reality of the ongoing trauma of Australia’s violent colonisation.

White Feminism by Koa Beck

A timely and impassioned exploration of how our society has commodified feminism and continues to systemically shut out women of colour. Combining a scholar’s understanding with hard data and razor-sharp cultural commentary, White Feminism is a witty, intelligent and profoundly eye-opening book that will challenge long-accepted conventions and completely upend the way we understand the struggle for women’s equality.

For further reading, we also recommend

True Tracks by Terri Janke

True Tracks is a ground-breaking work that paves the way for respectful and ethical engagement with Indigenous knowledges and cultures. Combining real-world cases and personal stories, award-winning Meriam/Wuthathi lawyer Terri Janke draws on twenty years of professional experience to inform and inspire leaders across many industries.

Seeking Asylum by Asylum Seeker Resource Centre

In their own voices, contributors share how they came to be in Australia, and explore diverse aspects of their lives: growing up in a refugee camp, studying for a PhD, changing attitudes through soccer, being a Muslim in a small country town, campaigning against racism, surviving detention, holding onto culture, dreaming of being reunited with family. There are stories of love, pain, injustice, achievement and everything in between.

What White People Can Do Next by Emma Dabiri

We need to talk about racial injustice in a new way - one that builds on the revolutionary ideas of the past and forges new connections. In this robust and nuanced examination of race, class and capitalism, Emma Dabiri draws on years of academic study and lived experience, as well as personal reflections on a year like no other. With intellectual rigour, wit and clarity, Dabiri articulates a powerful vision for meaningful and lasting change.

Racism: Stories on Fear, Hate and Bigotry edited by Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, Phoebe Grainer

Are we a nation of racists? Thirty-nine writers confront our darkest truths in this fearless collection of short stories, poems and essays edited by members of Western Sydney’s Sweatshop literacy movement.

My Body Keeps Your Secrets by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Widely researched and boldly argued, My Body Keeps Your Secrets reveals the secrets a body keeps-the trauma that can rewrite our biology, our relationship with sex, and how we connect with others-in a daring and immersive literary form, establishing Lucia’s credentials as a key intersectional feminist thinker of a new generation.

Country: Future Fire, Future Farming by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe

For millennia, First Australians harvested this continent in ways that can offer contemporary environmental and economic solutions. Country: Future Fire, Future Farming highlights the consequences of ignoring this deep history and living in unsustainable ways. It details the remarkable agricultural and land-care techniques of First Nations peoples and shows how such practices are needed now more than ever.

For further reading, we also recommend

Black and Blue by Veronica Gorrie

With a great gift for storytelling and a wicked sense of humour, Gorrie frankly and movingly explores the impact of racism on her family and her life, the impact of intergenerational trauma resulting from cultural dispossession, and the inevitable difficulties of making her way as an Aboriginal woman in the white-and-male-dominated workplace of the police force.

Growing Up Disabled in Australia edited by Carly Findlay

One in five Australians have a disability. And disability presents itself in many ways. Yet disabled people are still underrepresented in the media and in literature. Growing Up Disabled in Australia is the fifth book in the highly acclaimed, bestselling Growing Up series and contains a rich collection of writing from those negotiating disability in their lives.

The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

To grasp sex in all its complexity - its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power - we need to move beyond ‘yes and no’, wanted and unwanted. We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon.

For those looking to begin with more bite-sized works, we recommend the series, In the National Interest for accessible introductions to a number of topics. You can browse the collection here.