Booze Built Australia

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

Ten Rogues by Peter Grose

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

From the grim docks of nineteenth-century London to the even grimmer shores of the brutal penal colony of Norfolk Island, this is a roller-coaster tale. It has everything: defiance of authority, treachery, piracy and mutiny, escape from the hangman's noose and even love. Peopled with good men, buffoons, incompetents and larrikin convicts of the highest order, Ten Rogues is an unexpected and wickedly entertaining story from the great annals of Australia's colonial history. With the lightness of touch of the master storyteller that he is, Peter Grose brings to irresistible life the story of a small band of convicts who managed to escape the living hell of the Tasmanian penal colony of Sarah Island. Their getaway began by stealing the leaky and untested brig they had helped to build, and then sailing it across the Pacific from Tasmania to Chile with neither a map nor a chronometer. But their story does not begin or end there. From the strong connection between the slave trade and convict 'transportation' to the possible illegality of the whole convict system, Ten Rogues shines a light into some dark and previously well-hidden corners of colonial history. ...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 Convict Valley: The Bloody Struggle on Australia's Early Frontier by Mark Dunn

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

In 1790, five convicts escaped Sydney by boat and were swept ashore near present day Newcastle. They were taken in by the Worimi people, given Aboriginal names and started families. Thus began a long and at times dramatic series of encounters between Aboriginals and convicts in the second settlement in Australia. The fertile valley of the Hunter river was the first area outside of Sydney explored by the British, and it became one of the largest penal settlements. Yet today manicured lawns and prosperous vineyards hide the struggles, violence and toil of the thousands of convicts who laid its foundations. The Convict Valley uncovers this rich colonial past, as well as the story of the original Aboriginal landholders. While there were friendships and alliances in the early years, in the mad scramble for land in the 1820s as the Valley was opened to free settlers, tensions increased and bloodshed ensued. With fascinating stories about convicts, white settlers and the Aboriginal inhabitants that have long been forgotten, The Convict Valley is a new Australian history classic. ...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

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

$19.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the 'hunter-gatherer' tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession. Accomplished author Bruce Pascoe provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that sugge sts that systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required. ...Show more

Friends and Rivals: Four Great Australian Writers: Barbara Baynton, Ethel Turner, Nettie Palmer, Henry Handel Richardson by Brenda Niall

$34.99 AUD

Category: Australian History

Four Australian women writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-a time when stories of bush heroism and mateship abounded, a time when a writing career might be an elusive thing for a woman. Friends and Rivals is a vivid and engaging account of the intersecting and entwined lives of E thel Turner, author of the much loved Seven Little Australians, Barbara Baynton, who wrote of the harshness of bush life, Nettie Palmer, essayist and critic, and Henry Handel Richardson, of The Getting of Wisdom and The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney fame. Brenda Niall illuminates a fascinating time in Australia's literary history and brings to life the remarkable women who made it so.   ...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

From SUNBEAMS to Sunset - The Rise and Fall of the Australian Comic Book (1924 To 1965) by Graeme Cliffe

$64.95 AUD

Category: Australian History

A loving tribute to an undeservedly forgotten local industry and to the people who created comic books between 1924 and 1965. This book contains details of all the publishers and the biographical details of all the creators who worked on original Australian comics in what is now regarded as the Golden A ge of comics. ...Show more

In Search of Ancient Queensland

$39.95 AUD

Category: Australian History

The search for ancient Queensland is a journey through deep time, revealing its unique landscapes, a fascinating geology and, most importantly, its incomparable fossils.   This beautifully illustrated book charts the complex evolution of life over the past 250 million years, set against a backdro p of momentous geological events and dramatic environmental change.   It offers tantalising, but incomplete, glimpses of the primeval environments that have shaped modern Queensland and, in doing so, signposts understanding of our largely unknown future.   In Search of Ancient Queensland celebrates the remarkable geological and natural heritage of the State and showcases the outstanding fossil collections and research of the Queensland Museum. ...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