Showing titles in Australia, New Zealand & Oceania

This is the story of Tom Phelps and the 'other Kokoda Track'. Seventy-five years later, Tom's grandson, award-winning actor and writer Peter Phelps, is sharing this inspiring tale of resilience and survival. March 1942: The world is at war. Too old to fight and with jobs scarce at home, Tom...

A unique collection of poignant, horrific, sad and sometimes dryly humorous stories and yarns from the bloody battlefield of Gallipoli. This is not a history, nor is it an individual soldier's story. Rather Jim Haynes has done what he does so well and pulled together the many yarns and stories and verses written about Gallipoli - everything from the firsthand accounts of being recruited to memories of ordinary soldiers written from the trenches and accounts of the aftermath.

A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained almost entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. From there, however, the subjugation of Australia would take place rapidly. Within 20 years of the first British settlements being established, the British presence in Terra Australis was secure, and no other major power was likely to mount a challenge. In 1815, Napoleon would be defeated at Waterloo, and soon afterwards would be standing on the barren cliffs of Saint Helena.

Wearing the colour red and having the patch with the emblem of the mighty bulldog on your back was what ex-Mongrel Mob leader Tuhoe 'Bruno' Isaac called being True Red. "Because all levels of society hated us we created a new society of hatred symbolised by the bulldog. Its ferocious habits were engraved on our hearts", Tuhoe says, "If you weren't a mobster you weren't worth knowing." He lived this way for 17 years. However, constantly living for the bash, beer, prison and the possibility of dying in a pool of blood eventually saw Tuhoe search for another way of doing life.

The story of the emergence and dominance of two brilliant Australian soldiers who commanded the most effective armies in defeating the Germans and the Turks in the Great War. Monash and Chauvel is a gripping narrative history that follows the extraordinary campaigns of the two most outstanding battlefield commanders of the First World War across all the Allied armies: John Monash and Harry Chauvel.

In 1868, Charles Dickens dispatches his youngest child to Australia. Like his brother Alfred before him, sixteen-year-old Edward is expected to learn to apply himself in what his father considers to be the new land of opportunity. Posted to a remote sheep station in New South Wales, Edward...

Although many denied it, a giant ocean liner was dying. The superstitious nodded their heads, knowing her fate had already been sealed. The freezing Atlantic crept up to the forecastle head as the massive vessel, with all her lights aglow, slowly, almost imperceptibly, sank at the bow.

The greatest escape story of Australian colonial history by the son of Australia's best-loved storyteller. In 1823, cockney sailor and chancer James Porter was convicted of stealing a stack of beaver furs and transported halfway around the world to Van Diemen's Land, before being sent to Sarah Island. Many had tried to escape Sarah Island; few had succeeded. But when Governor George Arthur announced that the place would be closed and its prisoners moved to the new penal station of Port Arthur, Porter, along with a motley crew of other prisoners, pulled off an audacious escape.

An enthralling journey, showcasing Watson's trademark literary gift and sardonic wit, through the Australian landscape and character. While most Australians live in cities clinging to the coastal fringe, our sense of what an Australian is, or should be, is drawn from the vast and varied inland called the bush. But what do we mean by 'the bush', and how has it shaped us?

In 1769, Captain James Cook’s historic expedition in the region would lead to an English claim on Australia, but before he reached Australia, he sailed near New Zealand and spent weeks mapping part of New Zealand’s coast. Thus, he was also one of the first to observe and take note of the indigenous peoples of the two islands.

A rich, complex and engaging account of Cook's voyages across the Pacific, from actor and raconteur Sam Neill. Captain James Cook first set sail to the Pacific in 1768, just over 250 years ago. These vast waters, one third of the earth's surface, were uncharted but not unknown. A rich diversity...

The first comprehensive biography of the godfather of Australian bushranging – Frank Gardiner – leader of the Lachlan gang and mastermind of the largest gold heist in Australian history. Atop the hierarchy of Australian bushrangers sits Ned Kelly – the ultimate outlaw – and just below...

In 1769, Captain James Cook’s historic expedition would lead to an English claim on Australia, but before he reached Australia, he sailed near New Zealand and spent weeks mapping part of New Zealand’s coast. Thus, he was one of the first to observe and take note of the indigenous peoples of the two islands.

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 suggests that systems of food production and land management have been understated in modern retellings of Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required.

The Best Australian Yarns is a substantial and definitive work collected from memory, mates, word of mouth and decades of researching popular Aussie culture and history.

Including oft-told legendary yarns, reminiscences from the shearing shed, tall stories from the bush, sporting yarns, railway yarns, stories from the world of show business, digger yarns from both world wars, convict and bushranger yarns and anecdotes from the colonial days, yarns from shanties and gold rushes, ghost stories, bunyips and yowies, hauntings, and weird happenings.

In August 1948, 545 passengers boarded an overcrowded, clapped-out vessel in Marseilles to face an uncertain future in Australia and New Zealand. They came from displaced persons camps in Germany, death camps in Poland, labour camps in Hungary, gulags in Siberia and stony Aegean islands. There were those who had been hunted by the Nazis and those who had welcomed them; those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled them.

1914, Fiji: Sergeant Akal Singh would rather be anywhere than this tropical paradise - or, as he calls it, 'this godforsaken island'. After a promising start to his police career in Hong Kong, Akal has been sent to the far-flung colony of Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake...

The Tin Ticket takes us to the dawn of the nineteenth century and into the lives of Agnes McMillan, whose defiance and resilience carried her to a far more dramatic rebellion; Agnes's best friend Janet Houston, who rescued her from the Glasgow wynds and was also transported to Van Diemen's Land; Ludlow Tedder, forced to choose just one of her four children to accompany her to the other side of the world; Bridget Mulligan, who gave birth to a line of powerful women stretching to the present day. It also tells the tale of Elizabeth Gurney Fry, a Quaker reformer who touched all their lives.

Once the sacred guardian of New Zealand's native forests, the huia was a symbol of the land's unique beauty and spirituality. The rare bird's tragic extinction in the early 1900s represents a shot to the heart of Aotearoa and is a potent metaphor for a country's conflicted history. Using the story of the untimely extinction of the huia, J. Ruka offers a fresh perspective on the narrative of New Zealand: a tale of two cultures, warring worldviews, and the things we lost in translation.

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...