Showing titles in Australia, New Zealand & Oceania

Easter Sunday, 1902, deep in the Carnarvon Ranges a police constable and station manager are slain then later incinerated, their remains stuffed into saddlebags. Accused of the ghoulish crime are two members of the bushranging Kenniff gang, fast gaining notoriety as Queensland's equivalent of the Kelly gang. Yet the murders are a bold escalation from the petty fraud, horse stealing and cattle duffing the gang is known for.

The controversial Battle at Xa Long Tan was not only a critical episode in Australia's Vietnam involvement; it was also a textbook nightmare in the history of jungle warfare. Reconstructing this dramatic action from secret documents and the vivid recollections of many diggers who fought at Long Tan, Terry Burstall challenges the official army version.

Just after Christmas 1803, convict William Buckley fled an embryonic settlement in the land of the Kulin nation (now the Port Phillip area), to take his chances in the wilderness. A few months later, the local Aboriginal people found the six-foot-five former soldier near death. Believing he was a lost kinsman returned from the dead, they took him in, and for 32 years Buckley lived as a Wadawurrung man, learning his adopted tribe's language, skills and methods to survive.

Bruce Pascoe has been described as a ‘living national treasure’ and his work as ‘revelatory’. This volume of his best and most celebrated stories and essays, collected here for the first time, ranges across his long career and explores his enduring fascination with Australia’s landscape, culture, land management and history.

When Ned Kelly and his band of young tearaways ambushed and killed three brave policemen in a remote mountain camp in 1878, they sparked the biggest and most expensive manhunt Australia had seen. The desperate search would end when Kelly and his gang, wearing suits of armour, tried to derail a train before waging their final bloody gun battle with police in the small Victorian town of Glenrowan.

In cemeteries throughout Australia, gravestones hint at our history - tales of true crime, early settlement, mystery, tragedy, health epidemics, unsolved murders, love lost, and sacrifice. The Grave Tales series reveals more than the headstone can ever tell. Written by journalists Helen Goltz and Chris Adams, these stories feature people who willingly or unwillingly were participants in events that made headlines. The series offers individual short stories of heroes, victims, trailblazers, and patriots, encapsulating the journeys that lead to their resting places.

An entertaining collection of insider yarns by an Aussie Test cricket legend. 'In the Test arena, Dennis Lillee was never beaten. West Indian champion Viv Richards had taken the sword to all the international bowlers of his era. But when he came up against Lillee, it was a heavyweight fight between unrelenting combatants. Their contests were always take-no-prisoners affairs.'

Australians will gamble on anything, from two flies crawling up a wall to less important things like federal elections. Thanks to the internet, mobile phones and gambling-tax loving federal and state governments, Australians can indulge their love of a punt no matter what they're doing. Aussies can be at the birth of a child, performing open heart surgery or handling heavy machinery and still put a bet on.

After his interest was piqued by a 19th-century photo of a camel train in a country town, Ryan Butta found himself on the trail of Australia’s earliest Afghan camel-drivers. Separating the bulldust from the bush poetry, he reveals the breadth and depth of white Australian protectionism and prejudice. Told with flair and authority, this gritty alternative history defies the standard horse-powered folklore to reveal the untold debt this country owes to humble dromedaries, their drivers and those who brought them here.

Provoked by a half-hidden account, Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’ has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence.

In Loving Country, co-authors Bruce Pascoe and Vicky Shukurolgou show travellers how to see the country as herself, to know her whole and old story and to find the way to fall in love with her, our home. Listeners are encouraged to discover sacred Australia by reconsidering the accepted history and hearing diverse stories of her Indigenous people. The intention of this audiobook is to foster communication and understanding between all peoples and country, to encourage environmental and social change.

From the marriage equality debate to the COVID-19 lockdown, ‘free speech’ has become the new battleground in Australian society. What does the furore over one footballer’s social media postings reveal about how it got that way?

After spending almost 20 years in city courtrooms reporting for the ABC on some of the country’s highest profile cases, in The Outback Court Reporter, Jamelle Wells takes you into our country courtrooms, from the grand sandstone edifices of Cobar and Grafton to the repurposed community halls and police stations in outback Queensland and the Northern Territory – introducing you to the court staff, the witnesses and the accused, in cases that shock, captivate and divide communities.

What ever happened to good government? What are the signs of bad government? And can Malcolm Turnbull apply the lessons of the past in a very different world? In this crisp, profound, and witty essay, Laura Tingle seeks answers to these questions. She ranges from ancient Rome to the demoralised state of the once-great Australian public service, from the jingoism of the past to the tabloid scandals of the Internet age.

On August 25, 1895, Ernest Alfred Hall was born into a pioneering Australian family that lived on a 313-acre property called "Cloverdale" near the hamlet of Beech Forest, south of the Otway Ranges, some 200 kilometres south west of Melbourne, Victoria. As a child, it seemed he would be destined for the life of a farmer in a country that was just realising its independence through Federation, yet his path was to be diverted by the cataclysmic events that befell Europe and the British Empire.

Australia has a unique place in the history of outlaw motorcycle gangs. From the clubs' beginnings in the swinging '60s, their entry into the amphetamine market in the 1970s, through to the 1984 Milperra Massacre that made world headlines, to the Sydney airport brawl between the Hell's Angels and Comancheros and the brutal murder of Anthony Zervas, Outlaw Bikers in Australia tells how these 'one per cent deviants' grew to dominate the recreational drug market and became major players in the international outlaw biker scene.

When Ned Kelly and his band of young tearaways ambushed and killed three brave policemen in a remote mountain camp in 1878, they sparked the biggest and most expensive manhunt Australia had seen. The desperate search would end when Kelly and his gang, wearing suits of armour, tried to derail a train before waging their final bloody gun battle with police in the small Victorian town of Glenrowan.

Australia is on the brink of momentous change, but only if its citizens and politicians can come to new terms with the past. In this inspiring essay, Mark McKenna considers the role of history in making and unmaking the nation. From Captain Cook to the frontier wars, from Australia Day to the Uluru Statement, we are seeing fresh debates and recognitions. McKenna argues that it is time to move beyond the history wars and that truth-telling about the past will be liberating and healing. This is an urgent essay about a nation’s moment of truth.

Going to war may be the gravest decision a nation and its leaders make. At the moment Australia is at war with the Islamic State. We also live in a region that has become much more volatile, as China asserts itself and America seeks to hold the line. What is it like to go to war? How do we decide to go to war? Where might we go to war in the future? Will we get that decision right?

For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South Australia's forensic pathology services. In cases of unexpected or unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their final breath, and whether they had died naturally - or not. But Manock did not have the necessary training for such a specialist role, and made serious errors in several major cases. The full extent of his wrongdoing, and the exact number of cases impacted by it, remain a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired.