Showing titles in Australia, New Zealand & Oceania

Fearless, sharp-eyed and handsome, Matthew Flinders was one of the greatest of all maritime adventurers and undertook one of the most important voyages of discovery – to circumnavigate and map the famed Great Southern Land. Together with his Aboriginal interpreter and guide, Kuringgai man Bungaree, and his beloved rescue cat Trim, Flinders explored the furthest reaches of Australia and meticulously recorded its rugged coastlines on maps so accurate they are still used today.

In 1938 sculptor Karl Duldig, his wife Slawa Horowitz-Duldig—inventor of the modern foldable umbrella—and their baby daughter Eva, left their home in Vienna for an uncertain future. They found a brief refuge in Singapore before arriving in Sydney on 25 September 1940. Australia was at war: they were classified as enemy aliens and interned in an isolated camp in northern Victoria.

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.

The Buxtons are one of only a few families that were successful in the gold rush era and are still prominent today. They have survived and prospered through two world wars, two calamitous depressions, numerous recessions, and any number of political and economic crises. In The Buxtons, Peter Yule brings their story to life, tracing how this one family left a distinctive mark on Melbourne’s landscape.

This is the truly remarkable life story of the notorious Ethel Livesey, a serial fraudster and confidence trickster who became a media sensation after she ran out on her society wedding in 1945 and later was arrested for obtaining goods by false pretences. With a prologue by Ethel Livesey's granddaughter, this extraordinary tale of Australia's greatest fraudster is told for the first time in rich and fascinating detail.

Hailed as "a fearless exposer of folly, vice and crime" when it first hit the streets in the 1890s, Truth was later condemned by a High Court Judge as "a wretched little paper, reeking of filth, injurious to the health of house servants and young girls". Much later it earned the nickname "The Old Whore of La Trobe Street". Truth was called many things but it was never boring.

After a daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in occupied Yugoslavia, John Denvir reached the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, where he joined a partisan band as a machine-gunner. Believed shot and killed by New Zealand forces and his family in New Zealand, from January 1942 until the end of 1943, Denvir led brave and heroic attacks on German and Italian soldiers from behind enemy lines. He was wounded four times, received the Soviet Medal for Valour and was eventually appointed brigade commander.

When Campbell & Clark, Scottish merchants based in India, dispatched an Indian ship hurriedly renamed the Sydney Cove to the colony of NSW in 1797, they were hoping to make their fortune. The ship's 'speculative' cargo included all kinds of products to entice the new colony's inhabitants, including 7,000 gallons of rum intended to be sold to the Rum Corp. But when the ship went down north of Van Diemen's Land, cargo master William Campbell and 16 other crew members decided to walk the 600 miles to Sydney Town to get help and rescue crew and cargo.

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.

Over thirty five thousand Australian soldiers and airmen are still listed as Missing In Action from the wars of the 20th Century. Telling the moving story of the determination and skill of the searchers who apply old-fashioned detective work and cutting-edge science to solve the mysteries of the missing and bring peace of mind and solace to their families and to all those who serve, Where Soldiers Lie follows these investigators and scientists on their mission to locate and identify unrecovered war casualties and to unlock their secrets.

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?

From the Aboriginal Dreamtime to the arrival of the First Fleet, from the gold rushes to the world wars, this audiobook is a magical tale full of wonder and enchantment. And with a narrative style that will transport you to another world, you'll feel like you're right there, watching history unfold before your very eyes.

Since the referendum, supporters and volunteers have been asking for guidance as to how to continue to support Indigenous recognition. Mayo, a leader of the Yes 23 campaign and co-author of the bestselling The Voice to Parliament Handbook, has produced a new audiobook to answer that question. For the thousands of people who have been feeling sad, empty and powerless since last October, Always Was, Always Will Be aims to be a positive rallying cry. This will map the path toward next steps on how to create a fairer Australia.

We know the European story from diaries, journals and letters. For the first time, this is the other side. Who were the people watching the Endeavour sail by? How did they understand their world and what sense did they make of this strange vision? And what was the impact of these first encounters with Europeans? The answers lie in tales passed down from 1770 and in truth-telling of the often more brutal engagements that followed.

The story of how gold miners rebelled against British authority, beginning a process that would ultimately lead to democracy in Australia. The Eureka Stockade. It's one of Australia's foundation legends - yet the story has always been told as if half the participants weren't there. But what if the hot-tempered, free-spirited gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? What if there were women and children right there beside them, inside the stockade, when the bullets started to fly?

Australia has many stories and statues ‘lest we forget’ our military past. But from Simpson’s donkey to Ben Roberts-Smith, our history is full of events that didn’t happen the way most people think they did. The first Anzac Day, for example, was far from being a solemn march – it was a celebration where people dressed as cavemen and dinosaurs, among other things. And is it true that British officers callously dispatched Australian soldiers to their deaths in the Dardanelles, as we’ve been told?

In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence—from its beginnings in the first encounters of Black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy.

Award-winning journalist and author Andrew Rule distils the daring, the desperation and danger of the track into a bravura account of some of Australian racing's most famous and infamous moments, its celebrations and its secrets, the grittiness of the gambling life behind the glitz and glamour. With an ear for the colloquial, the humorous and the absurd, and an eye for physical bravery and financial folly, Rule shows how racing still defines part of the Australian character.

Chaplains of ANZAC: New Zealand's Fallen Chaplains of the Great War tells the story of seven New Zealand Expeditionary Force chaplains who served and died during the Great War. The beautiful collection of stories in this book tell the oft-overlooked tales of the chaplains who left New Zealand and served their god, king and country on foreign fields of battle. In all, over 140 chaplains served as part of the NZEF. This book contains the stories of seven of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.