Bedlam at Botany Bay
James Dunk
NewSouth, $34.99

From the start early visitors to New South Wales discerned something that was often called colonial madness. This comprehensive study, complete with case studies and drawing on primary material such as colonial reports and reportage from the time, creates a portrait of a fledgling settlement that, often as not, emerges as just this side of barking mad. James Dunk, whose style is distinctive, often using imagery the way fiction does, not so much diagnose the times as evokes them. Although patient records are thin – the colony was not equipped to deal with insanity – Dent raises varying causes: from the trauma of being sentenced to death before being transported, the need for the place to be seen as a terrifying deterrent, the ubiquity of violence (lashings and executions), the tension between autocratic rule and enterprise, and the deeply embedded trauma of brutal colonisation.

The Fate of Food
Amanda Little
One World, $29.99

One theory about why the message on climate change isn’t getting through is that it’s too abstract. Well, try this – simply not having enough food to eat. The projections of the Inter-Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says Amanda Little, in this study of the world food industry, are ‘‘flat out scary’’. Millions of acres of farming land in the US – from Kansas to California – will be wiped out by droughts. Food prices could be doubled by 2050. In countries such as Britain, where half the food is imported, shortages will be acute: supermarkets, with half the food on the shelves. There are already companies making long-life ersatz food that can be squirreled away and they’re making big profits. Little examines how the industry is adjusting, looking at vertical farms, robotic harvesting and lab-grown and plant-based meat. It’s lightly written, lots of case studies, but serious stuff.

Breaking Badly
Georgie Dent
Affirm Press, $29.99

Reading much of Georgie Dent’s warts and all memoir about her breakdown is like being in someone else’s lived nightmare. On the outside she led a charmed life, loving relationship, family and glamorous job, but for much of her life suffered from a horrendous mix of Crohn’s disease, vertigo, stress, anxiety and depression that gradually took over and nearly destroyed her. Before she was offered a prize job with a Sydney law firm at 24 she had pelvic pain, but thought she could cope with the stress of the job and her own expectations. The result was a breakdown that culminated in a vertigo attack that left her huddled in a ditch. This is a searing, honest, sometimes harrowing record of a woman’s journey into the heart of darkness and back, after rehab. Mentally, she says, she lived in ‘‘a house of straw’’ but she has built a new house, and, ‘‘brick by brick, I put myself back together’’.