Booze Built Australia

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture by Bruce Pascoe

$19.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

JOE SKYRNSKI, CO-FOUNDER CHAMP EQUITY: 'A must read for every Australian! Drawn from the diaries of European explorers, it comprehensively explodes the self-serving myth we perpetrated about Terra Nullius, that the first Australians were hunter-gatherer savages with no traits of civilisation. Pascoe cle arly documents extensive contemporary evidence to the contrary'  'Dark Emu injects a profound authenticity into the conversation about how we Australians understand our continent ... [It is] essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Australia once was, or what it might yet be if we heed the lessons of long and sophisticated human occupation.' Judges for 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating, and storing -- behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence in Dark Emu comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources. Bruce's comments on his book compared to Gammage's: " My book is about food production, housing construction and clothing, whereas Gammage was interested in the appearance of the country at contact. [Gammage] doesn't contest hunter gatherer labels either, whereas that is at the centre of my argument."   ...Show more

Australia's Vietnam - Myth vs History by Mark Dapin

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

When Mark Dapin first interviewed Vietnam veterans and wrote about the war, he swallowed (and regurgitated) every misconception. He wasn't alone. In Australia's Vietnam, Dapin reveals that every stage of Australia's commitment to the Vietnam War has been misunderstood, misinterpreted and shrouded in myt h. From army claims that every national serviceman was a volunteer; and the level of atrocities committed by Australian troops; to the belief there were no welcome home parades until the late 1980s and returned soldiers were met by angry protesters. Australia's Vietnam is a major contribution to the understanding of Australia's experience of the war and will change the way we think about memory and military history. ...Show more

The Big Book of Australia's War Stories by Jim Haynes

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

Here are the stories of Australia's iconic battles and campaigns from the time of federation to the Vietnam War. Some are still household names, although their historical significance may be a mystery to most Aussies. Others are barely remembered now, but are part in our history and deserve to be retold . Most importantly, this collection demonstrates the extraordinary courage, resilience, stoic humour, personal heroism and sacrifice that created the legend of the Aussie digger, soldiers, sailors and airmen who did things their own way and earned the undying respect of both their allies and their enemies. These are the stories that explain Australia's wartime reputation. Fifteen years before Gallipoli, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing of stoic Australian courage, would say, 'When the ballad makers of Australia seek for a subject, let them turn to Elands River'. Of Gallipoli, a British officer called the cheerful, insubordinate Aussies 'the bravest thing God ever made'. And before the Normandy invasion, Field Marshall Montgomery's chief of staff remarked, before the Normandy invasion, 'I only wish we had the Australian 9th Division with us this morning'. ...Show more

Bedlam at Botany Bay by James Dunk

$34.99 AUD

Category: Australian History | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

What happened when people went mad in the fledgling colony of New South Wales? In this important new history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we find out through the correspondence of tireless colonial secretaries, the brazen language of lawyers and judges and firebrand politicians ,and heartbreaking letters from siblings, parents and friends. We also hear from the mad themselves. Class, gender and race became irrelevant as illness, chaos and delusion afflicted convicts exiled from their homes and living under the weight of imperial justice; ex-convicts and small settlers as they grappled with the country they had taken from its Indigenous inhabitants, as well as officers, officials and wealthy colonists who sought to guide the course of European history in Australia. This not a history of the miserable institutions built for the mentally ill, or those living within them, or the people in charge of the asylums. These stories of madness are woven together into a narrative about freedom and possibilities, and collapse and unravelling. The book looks at people at the edge of the world finding themselves at the edge of sanity, and is about their strategies for survival. This is a new story of colonial Australia, cast as neither a grim and fatal shore nor an antipodean paradise, but a place where the full range of humanity wrestled with the challenges of colonisation. ...Show more

From Ocean to Ocean - Across Australia on a Bicycle by Jerome Murif

$24.95 AUD

Category: Australian History

A captivating account of the first South to North crossing of the Australian continent on a bicycle, in 1897. "Then the bicycle, loaded now for the expedition, was lifted downstairs; I shook hands with the landlady, told her I might not be back for tea and not to keep it waiting, and quietly pedalled aw ay..." This is how, without any sponsor, and almost no one knowing about his plan, that Jerome Murif departed from Adelaide with the firm intent to reach Port Darwin, more than 3,000 km (1,900 miles) away, and be the first to cross the Australian continent by bicycle from South to North. He did so with very little food and gear, and at a time when roads were non-existent, on a bicycle that didn't have gears or brakes. Far from the speed record attempts, Murif did his crossing at a leisurely pace, even taking time to tour the Alice Springs region on the way. This account of his journey, first published in 1897, is based heavily on his own diary; it is full of humor and captivating from the first word to the last. ...Show more

Notorious Australian Women by Kay Saunders

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

NOTORIOUS AUSTRALIAN WOMEN celebrates the lives of some of Australia's most fearless, brash and scandalous women. There's Tilly Devine, who went from streetwalker in London to wealthy Sydney madam and standover merchant; Mary Bryant, the highway robber and First Fleeter who escaped by rowing from Port J ackson to Timor with her two children; Lola Montez, the Irish-born grande horizontale, who destroyed King Ludwig I of Bavaria; Ellen Tremaye and Marion Edwards, women who challenged the gender order and became men; and Helena Rubinstein, who rewrote her humble Polish background and became one of the most successful and astute businesswomen in the world. From bushrangers, courtesans and cross-dressers, to writers, designers and a radical or two, what these splendid rebels have in common is a determination to take their destinies into their own hands. ...Show more

Nurses of Australia: The Illustrated Story by Deborah Burrows

$34.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

From the First Nation caregivers who healed, birthed and nursed for millennia to the untrained and ill-equipped convict men and women who cared for the sick in the fledgling colony of New South Wales, nursing has been practised in Australia since the beginning. It would take the arrival of a group of de dicated Irish nuns, followed by Florence Nightingale-trained nurses-and decades of constant and continuing campaigning-to transform nursing into what it is today: the most trusted profession in Australia. Nurses have operated in hastily erected tents and vermin-ridden hospitals, out of the back of utes and in planes flying across remote corners of the country, under fire and under extreme pressure. In a time when medical knowledge was limited, they applied starch or mustard poultices, administered soap and water enemas and tranquilised patients with alcohol. Modern nurses process patient data, carry out research and make complex clinical decisions. But the core nursing values of kindness, compassion and courage have remained unchanged. Nurses of Australia is beautifully illustrated with images of nurses in the wards; relaxing after a shift; interacting with patients; posing for the camera. Readers will see uniforms change, as veils and capes disappear, hemlines are shortened and then replaced by scrubs. Portraits of nursing's trailblazers and leaders show formidable women who took on archbishops, the medical fraternity, institutionalised racism and sexism-and won. ...Show more

Socks , Sandbags and Leeches: Letters to My ANZAC Dad by Pauline Deeves

$9.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

Ivy and her mother live in Australia, far away from where the Great War is raging. They have moved in with Aunt Hilda whose flat is so small that Ivy has to sleep under the kitchen table. Not only that, but she also has to empty Aunt Hilda’s chamber pot! ‘The Pests’ live in the flat on one side and, on the other side, lives grumpy old Mr Wilson—who has a deep secret. Ivy writes to her father, who is fighting overseas. She tells him all about life at home—how the family has little money; how she and other children have to sew sandbags, knit socks and roll up bandages for the war; how she volunteers for the Cheer Up Society, making cups of tea at the wharf when the hospital ships come in; and how the Big Pest collects leeches for the hospital. Socks, Sandbags and Leeches is set against the backdrop of the First World War—the Gallipoli landings and withdrawal, the propaganda in Australia and the false reports in the newspapers, schoolchildren’s war work and fundraising, the return of wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, and eventually the wonderful news of peace.   ...Show more

The Golden Country: Australia's Changing Identity by Tim Watts

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian History | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

John Howard was the unlikely reformer of Australian society. He loosened migration laws, massively boosting the population and making it less white. Simultaneously, his divisive rhetoric about national identity--a legacy of White Australia--hamstrung discussion of these huge changes. As the MP for a div erse electorate, the partner of a Hong-Kong-Chinese-Australian and father of Eurasian-Australians, and the descendant of a proponent of laws stopping Chinese people from coming here, Tim Watts asks: Why don't we remember Billy Sing, the Chinese-Australian sharpshooter at Gallipoli, or that Ararat was founded by Chinese miners? Why is Australia's imagined community so far behind our lived community? The Golden Countrychallenges us to reckon with the dark heart of Federation, the racial core of the Australian Legend, and to confront outdated notions of Australianness. It crunches the numbers on the economic and social effects of migration, and looks to a more inclusive future. ...Show more

The Memory Pool: Stories from Australian Childhoods at the Pool by Therese Spruhan

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian History | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

Smell the chlorine, taste the hot chips and feel the burning concrete underfoot as you read these stories of Australian childhoods at the pool. Swimming is a central part of most Australian childhoods. We idealise beaches and surf, but for many kids the local pool – whether it’s an ocean, ti dal or a chlorinated pool – is where they pass summer days. Pools are places of imagination, daring, belonging, freedom, friendship and romance. For some they are places of hard-core swimming training. This delightful, nostalgic anthology brings together reflections and recollections about the swimming pools of childhood from a range of Australians of diverse ages and backgrounds, well known and not-so-famous, including Trent Dalton, Leah Purcell, Shane Gould, Bryan Brown and Merrick Watts. Evocative, funny and sometimes bittersweet, 28 people remember the pools that shaped their childhoods. Everyone who has ever dived into their local Olympic pool, bush waterhole or saltwater baths will want to submerge themselves in this beautiful book. 'A joyful, moving, nostalgic and original take at what it means to be Australian. Dive in!' — Robert Drewe ‘These immersive stories remind us that the swimming pool is not just the place we first learn to sink or swim. It’s a space of respite and renewal, playtime and pilgrimage, limerence and liminality, community and connection. Dive in – go on – I double dare you.’ — Sian Prior ‘Crisscrossing the nation, spanning generations and histories, these stories celebrate the joy and freedom of being a body in water. Read it while beside your favourite beach or pool, or read it and be transported there.’ — Bernadette Brennan ‘These immersive stories remind us that the swimming pool is not just the place we first learn to sink or swim. It’s a space of respite and renewal, playtime and pilgrimage, limerence and liminality, community and connection. Dive in – go on - I double dare you’. — Sian Prior, lap swimmer and author of  ‘Shy: a memoir’ (Text Publishing). ‘I didn’t go to church as a kid but that was my church – that was my sacred space – a pilgrimage to Sandgate swimming pool.’ — Trent Dalton 'The Memory Pool is a joyful dive into that paradise of Australian childhood, the local swimming pool. In a series of beautifully recalled stories by well-known Australians, it evokes both the sensory bliss of forgetting self in the sights, smells and feel of the swimming pool, and the communal warmth of sharing long summer days simply hanging about at the pool with family and friends. It’s a book for anyone who remembers the sting of chlorine or salt in eyes, the silky feel of water slipping over limbs, and the feel of hot cement under a wet cossie.' — Patti Miller ...Show more

White Rag Burning - Irish Women Committing Arson to Be Transported by Dianne Snowden

$49.95 AUD

Category: Australian History

Between 1841 and 1853, nearly 250 women were trans­ported from Ireland to Van Diemen's Land on the other side of the world for committing arson. During the Great Famine, the number of Irish women transported for arson increased dramatically. In comparison, only small numbers of other convicts were t ransported for arson.Many of these Irish women committed arson in order to be transported. Why did these women com­mit arson and not some other crime? What led to the increase in numbers? Why didn't the women simply emigrate if they wanted a better life? White Rag Burning reveals the answers to these questions and in doing so, tells the individual stories of the convict women.The arsonists were poor and actively sought to change their circumstances and improve their con­ditions. This book looks at the Irish experience of the arsonists, when and where they were tried and their motivation in committing arson. The book follows them to Van Diemen's Land and explores their colonial experience, when they were under sentence and when they were free.The story of the Irish arsonists is a remarkable one, challenging the idea that Irish convict women were passive victims, particularly during the years of the Great Famine. Using original records, this study reveals the reality of convict life together with the legacy left by these women in Tasmania and beyond. ...Show more