History > Australian

An account of life as a sheep-shearer.

Birmingham drills beneath the cover story of a successful multicultural metropolis and melts the boundaries between past and present to reveal a ghost city beneath the surface of concrete and glass. Combining intensive research with the pace of a techno thriller, this is a history for the Tarantino generation.

<b>In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australiaï¿ÂÂÃ... read more

Terence Murray Lewis lifted himself out of poverty and emotional neglect to reach the pinnacle of power as the knighted Commissioner of Police in Queensland. Then, with the advent of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into Police Corruption in 1987, his life and that of his family fell apart overnight. He served ten years in prison for o... read more

"Sydney may look golden, but this is the sunniness of Mozart, whose bright notes, especially at their most joyous, seem to cast themselves out across a great abyss." Sydney has always been the sexiest and most gaudy of our cities. In this book, the third in a series in which leading Australian authors write about their hometo... read more

In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia-An epic description of the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia.... read more

Australians are generally uncomfortable in the global spotlight - outside of sports stadiums. But after seeing us negotiate the Asian financial crisis, the tech wreck and the Global Financial Crisis that bred the Great Recession, the world is now turning to us, the 'miracle economy', for guidance. This is the page-turning sto... read more

For 40,000 years the Central NSW area of Wellington was Aboriginal - Wiradjuri - land. Following the arrival of white men, it became a penal settlement, mission station, gold-mining town and farming centre with a history of white comfort and black marginalisation. In the late 20th century, it was also the subject of the first... read more

In this companion volume of Thomas Keneally's widely acclaimed history of the Australian people, the vast range of characters who have formed our national story are brought vividly to life. Immigrants and Aboriginal resistance figures, bushrangers and pastoralists, working men and pioneering women, artists and hard-nosed radi... read more

1940. Wartime Australia. Key members of Menzies' government die in a fiery plane crash. What went wrong and what happened next? In August 1940 Australia had been at war for almost a year when a plane a Hudson A16-97 carrying ten people, including three cabinet leaders, crashed into a ridge near Canberra. In the ghastly infe... read more

Countries don't get lucky; people do. The secret of Australia's good fortune is not found in its geography or history. The key to its success is the Australian character, the nation's greatest renewable resource. Liberated from the constraints of the old world, Australia's pioneers mined their reserves of enterprise, energy ... read more

Through objects and stories from the National Museum of Australia's collections, Landmarks: A History of Australia in 33 Places traces how people have lived across the Australian continent since 1788. It explores how generations have made their homes here, nurtured families, established enterprises and shaped the places that ... read more

Following the success of his A Short History of the World, eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey has abridged his account of the grand adventure of human history to create ad eve more accesible version of his absorbing work. A Very Short History of the World traces the story of the world's people during the last four million... read more

In 1835 an illegal squatter camp was established on the banks of the Yarra River. In defiance of authorities in London and Sydney, Tasmanian speculators began sending men and sheep across the Bass Strait - and so changed the shape of Australian history. Before the founding of Melbourne, British settlement on the mainland amou... read more

Australia's centre and north are a world apart from its big coastal cities.Here one finds unique natural wonders, visionary art, original thinkers and, sometimes, distilled despair and death. In Journeys to the Interior, Nicholas Rothwell travels deep into the northern realm, combining the storytelling flair and persistence o... read more

Darwin's Armanda is both a gripping adventure story and a brilliantly enlightening work of history, for the first time portraying the Darwinian revolution as a collective enterprise forged in Australasia. Four remarkable men: Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Wallace, did what one alone could not - combe... read more

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In 1787 a convoy of eleven ships, carrying about 1500 people, set out from England for Botany Bay. According to the conventional account, it was a shambolic affair: under-prepared, poorly equipped and ill-disciplined. In this book, Alan Frost draws on previously forgotten records to debunk these persistent myths.

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In 2010, what began as a routine long-haul flight from Singapore to Sydney came within a knife-edge of becoming one of the world's worst ever air disaster. When a sudden mid-air explosion shattered engine no. 2 of the Qantas A380 - the largest and most advanced passenger plane ever built - shrapnel ripped through the wing and... read more