Australia War

The colloquialisms of the British soldier on the Western Front were colourful and often irreverent. Many come from Indian and Arabic words acquired during earlier military actions in India and Egypt. Other colloquialisms are Anglicised words, phrases and place names learned from the French allies and German foes. The military phonetic alphabet, known as Signalese, also contributed. The term ‘Ack-Ack’ for example means 'Anti-Aircraft' fire and comes from the phonetic alphabet. The British forces on the Western Front was a diverse group. It comprised not just soldiers from Great Britain. ...

Growing up was tough for Daniel. When he was 11, his father showed up in his life, for the first time, with a gunshot wound to the stomach. He relocated his son, daughter and their mother 400 kilometres away from their loving grandparents and a coastal home to a shack with a dirt floor in outback Queensland. From then on, Daniel fought to maintain a sense of order and purpose amid the chaos of family violence and criminal activity. Inspired by his much-loved grandfather, a WWII veteran, Daniel joined the army.

As the son of 'the Colonial', legendary Queen's Captain Ian Steele, Josiah Steele has big shoes to fill. Although his home in the colony of New South Wales is a world away, he dreams of one day travelling to England so he can study to be a commissioned officer in the Scottish Regiment. After cutting his teeth in business on the rough and ready goldfields of Far North Queensland's Palmer River, he finally realises his dream and travels to England, where he is accepted into the Sandhurst military academy.

This is the story of how a teenage Australian soldier, George Aspinall, took his remarkable photographs as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, providing a detailed record of those desperate years from 1942-45, when British, Australian, Dutch and American troops were being driven beyond endurance as slave labour for the Imperial Japanese Army.

In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Poland, a Jewish child was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That child was Karen Kirsten's mother, but she knew nothing about this extraordinary event until one day a letter arrived from a stranger. After eventually discovering the grandparents she loved dearly were in fact not her biological grandparents, Karen travelled the globe to uncover her family's past and to find the answers to some baffling questions. Irena's Gift weaves together a mystery, history and memoir to tell the story of a family torn apart by war.

Paris, 1939. While working at the Louvre, Éliane Dufort falls for talented painter Xavier. But when the Nazis occupy the city, Xavier leaves for England and Éliane must send her sisters to the country. Broken-hearted, she finds herself working with the mysterious Rose Valland on a dangerous secret mission for the French Resistance. Present Day. Desperate to escape her grief, Remy Lang arrives at a stunning private estate on the French Riviera. While working on her vintage fashion business, she discovers a catalogue of artworks stolen during World War II.

Centred on the inter-war years - within the ivy clad walls of Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory, amid the windswept valleys of north Wales, and in the industrial heartland of Birmingham - The Basis of Everything is the story of the coming of the atomic bomb, and how the unlikely union of two scientists - Ernest Rutherford, the son of a New Zealand farmer, and Mark Oliphant, a peace-loving vegetarian from a tiny Australian hills village - would change the world.

Hector Cross, ex-SAS officer, private security expert, widower. His wife was taken much too soon, by a cruel man with evil intentions. Johnny Congo, psychopath, extortionist, terrorist, the man who murdered Hector's wife. Cross wants him dead. So does the US government. Congo is locked up on Death Row in the most secure prison in the free world, counting down the days until his execution. He's got two weeks. He wants out. He's escaped before and knows he can again. Cross, still licking his wounds from his last bruising encounter with Congo, is back and ready for work.

When the first convoys of the ANZAC Expeditionary Forces sailed from Albany’s majestic King George Sound in November and December 1914, they carried with them hundreds of horses. Many had been loaded in ports elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand. Some came from unexpected places, including Juna Downs, a vast pastoral station in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara region.

A battle that could not be won. An island that could not be defended. An ally that could not be trusted. A little known story of two Australian battalions abandoned in Java during World War II and the heroes who kept them alive in the worst of Japan's prisoner of war camps. They were thrown into a hopeless fight against an overwhelming enemy. Later, hundreds died as prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma Railway and in the freezing coal mines of Taiwan and Japan. Through it all, wrote Weary Dunlop, they showed 'fortitude beyond anything I could have believed possible'.

As part of the French Resistance in Paris, Arlette LaRue and American Josie Anderson steal so many Nazi secrets they become known as the 'Golden Doves', renowned across France and hunted by the Gestapo. Their courage costs them everything. When finally arrested, they and their loved ones are taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There a reclusive Nazi doctor does appalling things to Josie's mother, while Arlette's baby son is stolen from her, never to be seen again.

Destroying every vampire on earth can get messy.... Cadence Findley and the LIGHTS team are on a mission to annihilate every vampire in existence, especially Holland, the vampire queen, who has sworn vengeance for the attack in Melbourne. But something's not right in Kansas City, and not everyone is on board with the plan, which makes taking Holland down even more difficult. Is Holland infiltrating the ranks, and if so, can Cadence stop it in time to wipe out the queen's growing vampire army once and for all? The Clandestine Saga follows the story of Cadence Findley, Vampire Hunter ...

The accounts in the contents of my father’s diaries expose the raw truth about the sacrifices, trauma, and the intense drive that drove our soldiers to fight and to win World War II. My father realized our God-given freedoms were being threatened and in harm’s way. I’ve heard him say: “There was a mission at hand and any sacrifices I made were all worth the fight to save this country from all the evil that was trying to overtake us.” He was also very explicit about how he felt toward those enemies. Some excerpts and entries in his diaries and letters are not politically correct. I...

Brisbane, 1943: The war continues to devastate, and the battle for the Pacific threatens Australian shores. For Ellie O'Sullivan, helping the war effort means utilizing her engineering skills for Qantas as they evacuate civilians and deliver supplies to armed forces overseas. Her exceptional logic and integrity attract the attention of Central Bureau - an intelligence organization working with England's Bletchley Park codebreakers. But joining Central Bureau means signing a lifetime secrecy contract. Breaking it is treason.

I joined the Navy in 1978 and was discharged in late 2016 after almost 39 years service. I served as a medic and also a Medical Administration Officer during my time. The book contains my memories of an awesome career and covers many subjects from my attendance at car accidents; reviving people who had had heart attacks; working in disaster zones to give humanitarian aid and many other stories.

Australia's contributions in the Pacific War are often forgotten in history lessons today. However, Australia faced the bombing of its cities and invasions of nearby islands much like the rest of the world, and stood up to fight as needed. They placed a central role from 1942 to 1943 in the New Guinea Campaign and defended Japanese forces invading Port Moseby. Japanese forces then invaded the Australian mainland, trying to cut supply lines, but were fought back by valiant forces. Take to the ground and skies during this mix of intense land and air battles.

Dean Yates was the ideal warzone correspondent: courageous, compassionate, dedicated. After years of facing the worst, though, including the Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami, one final incident undid him. In July 2007, two of his staff members were brutally gunned down by an American helicopter in Iraq. What followed was an unravelling of everything Dean thought he knew of himself. His PTSD was compounded by his moral wound - the devastation of what he thought he knew of the world and his own character and beliefs.

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.

Bangka Strait, Indonesia, 1942. Allied ships are evacuating thousands in flight from Singapore, the island having fallen to Japanese Imperial forces. Facing terrifying assaults by fighter planes, one ship, the Vyner Brooke, is badly bombed and sinks. Its survivors swim or paddle for hours to the nearest land, a beach on Bangka Island, parched, many dreadfully injured One of the survivors is Australian Army nurse Dorothy 'Bud' Elmes, the great-aunt of Georgina Banks. Bud makes it to the island, where she, colleagues and a matron tend to the wounded as a plan is formulated.

In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young Slovakian women were deported to Poland on the second transportation of Jewish people sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The women were told they'd be working at a shoe factory. At Auschwitz the SS soon discovered that by putting Jewish prisoners in charge of the day-to-day running of the accommodation blocks, camp administration and workforces, they could both reduce the number of guards required and deflect the distrust of the prisoner population away from themselves.