Australian History

While doing fieldwork on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, anthropologist Gregory Forth came across people talking about half-apelike, half-humanlike creatures that once lived in a cave on the slopes of a nearby volcano. Over the years he continued to record what locals had to say about these mystery hominoids while searching for ways to explain them as imaginary symbols of the wild or other cultural representations. We follow Forth on the trail of this mystery hominoid, and the space they occupy in islanders' culture as both natural creatures and as supernatural beings.

A firsthand account of the 1854 Eureka Rebellion in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. Carboni, an Italian revolutionary and participant in the uprising, wrote the book to document the miners’ struggle against the colonial authorities. The story captures the miners’ frustrations over oppressive mining licenses, police corruption, and lack of representation. It details the events leading up to the violent clash at the Eureka Stockade, where miners built a makeshift fort and confronted government troops.

Never Let Me Go meets Zone of Interest.
A creepy, compelling novel that takes place in a version of our world where some lives are valued less than others. It will shock you with each new revelation.

The Sydney Opera House is a breathtaking building, recognised around the world as a symbol of modern Australia. Along with the Taj Mahal and other World Heritage sites, it is celebrated for its architectural grandeur and the daring and innovation of its design. It showcases the incomparable talents involved in its conception, construction and performance history. But this stunning house on Bennelong Point also holds many secrets and scandals. In his gripping biography, Peter FitzSimons marvels at how this magnificent building came to be.

When my full-blooded Hawaiian mother was a very young girl, she was hanai adopted by her Aunty Ida. Being a personal friend of Queen Emma, Anty Ida lived in her summer palace in Nu'uanu. It was there that my mother lived and played. Many years later, my brother and I went to visit Queen Emma's summer palace with my mother. The palace was now a museum. I did not understand my mother's subdued spirit and silence. As we walked the palace, I could clearly see emotions welling up within her and then being suppressed.

They called her Red Jack, for her hair was as bright as an outback sunset, hanging to her waist from beneath a stained cattleman’s hat. On her jet-black stallion, Mephistopheles, she roved the north in the 1880s and 90s. Where did she come from, and where did she go? No one knows for sure, but the mystery lives on. The Ragged Thirteen were a band of thirteen larrikins who put their stamp on Australian folklore with their devil-may-care journey across the wild Northern Australian frontier. They were not bushrangers, but were certainly inclined to bend the law. This fictional account is ...

“I love food” Nakkiah Lui says, and in the next breath whispers “so give us back our land”. In First Eat, a confrontational, raw and highly personal exploration of food politics, power and body sovereignty, Nakkiah Lui asks how our meals would look different if First Nations people owned the land from which the food came. First Eat is about more than just food, it’s an aural feast for a rich future.

King David Kalākaua introduces us to the people upon whom the legend of the Pele family is based. They departed Samoa as war refugees in the 12th century, settling in the foothills of Mauna Loa. As earthquakes and eruptions occurred during their interactions with the Hawaiians, this family of kahuna were accorded what the king described as “unique sanctity and power”. Pele was as mighty as she was beautiful. The tales of the volcano goddess earned the attention of Kamapuaa, the outcast son of the chief of Oahu who terrorized the island with his band of renegades.

There’s plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like? In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It’s a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and now and then surprisingly appealing. It’s the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late '60s and early '70s. Let’s break the news now: they didn’t have avocado.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the British asked Australia for help. With some misgivings, the Australian government sent five destroyers to beef up the British Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. HMAS Vendetta, Vampire, Voyager, Stuart and Waterhen were old ships, small with worn-out engines. Their crews used to joke they were held together by string and chewing gum; when the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels heard of them, he sneered that they were a load of scrap iron.

The Rip Curl Story is the remarkable tale of two young surfers who pursued an audacious dream to make a living in pursuit of the ultimate ride. The brand they built, Rip Curl, not only satisfied their own surf- and wanderlust but also inspired countless others, both fuelling and riding the wave of the global youth revolution of the late '60s. Rip Curl's mantra became 'the Search' - the chasing of new waves on distant shores - as they embraced new thrills such as skiing, snowboarding and windsurfing and aimed always to make better equipment to elevate the experience.

The Battle of Le Hamel on 4 July 1918 was an Allied triumph and strategically very important in the closing stages of WWI. A largely Australian force, commanded by the brilliant Sir John Monash, fought what has been described as the first modern battle - where infantry, tanks, artillery and planes operated together as a coordinated force. Monash planned every detail meticulously, with nothing left to chance. Peter FitzSimons brings this Allied triumph to life and tells this magnificent story as it should be told.

On July 21, 1944, a US Marine division landed on the beaches of Guam, a once sleepy island in the Pacific that had been seized from the Americans by the Japanese in the hours after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese would not be giving Guam up easily. The large enemy force defended the island viciously, punching holes through the American lines, attacking from the flanks, and eventually resorting to banzai suicide attacks. The fighting was bloody and brutal, every bit as deadly as Iwo Jima or Okinawa would be.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

In 1902, newly-married Jeannie Gunn (Mrs Aeneas Gunn) left the security and comfort of her Melbourne home to travel to the depths of the Northern Territory, Australia, where her husband had been appointed manager of 'The Elsey', a large cattle station. One of the very few white women in the area, she was at first resented by people on and around the station, till her warmth and spirit won their affection and respect. This is her moving and simple account of her life amidst the beauty and cruelty of the land.

The incredible account of Sister Betty Jeffrey OAM and the Australian war nurses who survived the bombing of evacuation ship SS Vyner Brooke in February 1942, and subsequently spent three years in Japanese prison camps in Sumatra. During those perilous years surviving in squalid conditions, Sister Jeffrey kept a secret diary of day-to-day events which, after the war, was turned into a hugely successful book and radio serial: White Coolies. Sisters in Captivity builds on those diaries.

In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nick Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between the Americas and the western coast of Asia from late prehistory onwards: firstly the colonization by speakers of Austronesian languages of the western Pacific littoral, from around 3000 BC, of the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia; followed by the later settlement, by Polynesian peoples, of Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and eventually New Zealand, up to AD 1250.

From the earliest days of European settlement in New Zealand, Maori have struggled to hold on to their land. Tensions began early, arising from disputed land sales. When open conflict between Maori and Imperial forces broke out in the 1840s and 1860s, the struggles only intensified. For both sides, land was at the heart of the conflict, one that casts a long shadow over race relations in modern-day New Zealand.

In 1858, 14-year-old Narcisse Pelletier sailed from Marseilles in the French trader Saint-Paul. With a cargo of Bordeaux wine, they stopped in Bombay, then Hong Kong, and from there they set sail with more than 300 Chinese prospectors bound for the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. Around the eastern tip of New Guinea, however, the ship became engulfed in fog, struck reefs and ran aground.

The history books are full of heroes and villains… but what about all the idiots? Comedian and armchair historian Mikey Robins tells the astonishing story of human stupidity, one idiot at a time. Idiots, Follies and Misadventures shows that human stupidity has always been our constant companion. History tends to omit tales of human fallibility. We overlook the dubious and ridiculous contributions made by history’s tawdry parade of knuckleheads. But this book is a call to arms … Knuckleheads Assemble! And once assembled, prepare to be mocked.