Australasian and Pacific history Books

Was Menzies's unprecedented electoral success merely a matter of luck, or did he make fortune bend to his will? On 30 November 1954, Robert Menzies became Australia's longest serving prime minister. Between the closely fought 1954 and 1961 elections, the...

The eleven years that passed between the 1943 and the 1954 elections were arguably some of the most pivotal in Australian history. This was a period of intense political, policy and strategic transition, which saw a popular Labor Government and its...

From the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770 to classic children's tale Dot and the Kangaroo, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver examine hunting narratives in novels, visual art and memoirs to discover how the kangaroo became a favourite quarry, a relished...

The state of South Australia was a British imperial construct, its borders determined by three straight lines, with no reference to the Aboriginal presence.The colonial process in South Australia began decades before formal annexation with unregulated...

In Great at Heart Gavin Long finally gets the biography he richly deserves.While Charles Bean is the subject of several major biographies, this is the first life story of his acolyte, war correspondent and editor and principal author of the official...

The members of the Australian battalion of Gull Force endured some of the harshest prisoner of war conditions of any Australian during the Second World War.In February 1942, on the remote island of Ambon in Indonesia, 1150 Australian soldiers were...

Dazzling, poetic and vivid storytelling from one of Australia's greatest writers, which tells the bloody, brutal and enthralling story of the epic journey of the First Fleet. Originally published as a multi-part serial in The Australian, By Sea and...

A breathtaking collection of 200 photographs expertly colourised by Aotearoa New Zealand's premier colourist, Brendan Graham, with commentary from award-winning historian Jock Phillips ONZM Our Land in Colour celebrates the rich story of Aotearoa...

In 1914, despite being forbidden, many a Kiwi soldier's kitbag included a portable camera known as 'The Soldier's Kodak'. The images they recorded form the basis of this poignant collection of our soldiers from the First World War. In a major research...

Revised and updated version of the bestselling political biography of 2010. This edition contains some completely new content from Mr Howard, including his thoughts on the 2013 election campaigns. John Howard's autobiography, Lazarus Rising, is the...

Fifty years after Keith Murdoch's death, his career and influence remain the measure of the man. Founder of the Murdoch media empire, Keith Murdoch came from humble beginnings as the son of a Scottish minister. He began his journalistic career on a...

From multi-award-winning writer Helen Ennis comes the first ever biography of the photographer Max Dupain, the most influential Australian photographer of the 20th century and creator of many iconic images that have passed into our national imagination...

Haunting true crime stories of the supernatural and paranormal The most haunted home that world-famous ghost hunter Lorraine Warren ever stepped foot in was a three-bedroom brick home in suburban Sydney.FORGET THE HORRORS OF AMITYVILLE AND DELVE INTO...

'Pentridge was a place of murder and mayhem. A bluestone hell. The worst prison Australia has ever seen.' Andrew Kirby, former inmate Welcome to Pentridge, Australia's most infamous prison.In the long-awaited return to his bestselling true crime series...

There have been histories of Australian football before. There has not been one like Carn. Carn tells the story of the Victorian Football League and its successor, the Australian Football League, from 1897 to the present day, by focusing on 50 of the...

A captivating true story that will speak to generations of Australians, from the author of Mezza Italiana.  'Nonno Anni gives me a nudge. "You know, when I first came to Australia, I knew that my life would change forever."' Leaving the small...

The definitive account of when Australia's famed Rats of Tobruk they took on General Erwin Rommel, The Desert Fox. The classic story of 1941's Battle of Tobruk, in which more than 15,000 Australian troops - backed by British artillery - fought in...

Yarns and memories that capture the experience of policing in the bush, gathered by the inimitable Bill 'Swampy' Marsh, bestselling author of GREAT AUSTRALIAN FLYING DOCTOR STORIES and GREAT AUSTRALIAN CWA STORIES.  'I tell you, you meet some...

the true story of the greatest pastoral landholder in modern history As a barely literate youth of thirteen, Sidney Kidman ran away from home and worked as an odd-job boy in a grog shanty in outback Australia. He went on to become the greatest pastoral...

When Gough Whitlam moves into her street in Cabramatta in 1957, eight-year-old Christine has little idea how her new neighbour, one of the most visionary and polarising political leaders of Australia, would shape the direction of her life. Born to...

The Power and the Passion highlights the urgent need for the repatriation of ancestral remains, and for the return of all precious cultural material to its rightful owners. Taking the 1985 landmark reburial of ancestral remains in Melbourne's Kings...

The modernist RSL club, the Art Deco cinema, the stilted Queenslander or the elaborate Edwardian. The iconography of Australia's regional towns is familiar to many of us, whether we live, work and play in these places, or just journey through. A...

Country women and the colour bar is a timely corrective to established ideas about race relations in rural New South Wales by revealing the untold story of grassroots efforts by Aboriginal and white women, working together.In the 1950s and 1960s, in...

Bone and tooth tools and ornaments have been made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for at least 46,000 years some of the oldest organic technologies in the world. Despite their beauty, sophistication, and ubiquity, archaeologists and...

Brian Butler's grandmother was taken from her family in 1910. She was 12 years old. Twenty years later her daughter, Brian's mother, was taken.Thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, like Brian Butler's, have been coping with the...

By the late 1960s, Indigenous education in Australia was in crisis. When Whitlam swept to power in 1972, his Labor government reached out to Indigenous people to guide change at a national level. The National Aboriginal Education Committee was the result...

Within its busy urban presence, Melbourne has a rich and complex Aboriginal heritage. Amongst the city landscape lie layers of a turbulent history and an ongoing vibrant culture. But you need to know where to look. Melbourne...

The battle for Coranderrk was one of the first sustained campaignsfor justice, land rights and self-determination. Proud of their culture, theircommunity and their award-winning farm, the Kulin people (led by William Barak)lobbied against the Aboriginal...

Our stories are our survival centres on the continuity of Wiradjuri culture. It is a celebration of storytelling and the joys of life within an Aboriginal Australian community. Our stories offers an alternative to the commonly told stories of Aboriginal...

We come from the desert is the story of Minyjun (Monty Hale), a senior Ngulipartu man from the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Written in his own language and in English, Minyjun shares with us his extraordinary life, from his family's migration...

Matutjara woman, Jessie Lennon, was born on a sheep station near Kingoonya in the 1920s. Aged six, she accompanied her father on a ceremonial journey with the Old People, as far west as Ooldea, in the time of Daisy Bates, and north to Coober Pedy, then a...

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Indigenous responses to colonisation. It deals with Torres Strait Islanders' 160-year continuing struggle against outsider intervention. The author focuses on the Torres Strait Islander peoples'...

On 27 May 1967 an overwhelming majority of electors voted in a national referendum to amend clauses of the Australian Constitution concerning Aboriginal people. 27 May 2007 is the 40th anniversary of this landmark event. The referendum is commonly...

In 1964, a group of 20 Aboriginal women and children in the Western Desert made their first contact with European Australians - patrol officers from theWoomera Rocket Range, clearing an area into which rockets were to be fired. They had been pursued by...

What is the place of Australia's colonial memorials in today's society? Do we remove, destroy or amend? Monumental Disruptions investigates how these memorials have been viewed, and are viewed, by First Nations people to find a way forward.In June 2020,...

'For various reasons, this story cannot be proven. But that does not matter to me because in my Aboriginal way of being and knowing, stories like my uncle's do not need modern scientific proof to have validity - the role of story in Indigenous...

David Walker is a distinguished Australian social historian whose eyesight deteriorated suddenly at the end of 2004 as a result of macular degeneration. His blindness caused him to reconsider his own relation to the past, and the history of his family,...

Asbestos in Australia presents for the first time a multi-dimensional view ofAustralia's asbestos story featuring contributions from experts in thedisciplines of history, journalism, medicine, law and public health. It alsoincludes first-hand accounts of...

'When scholars of such rigorous and refined erudition engage with a topic of such critical importance it is a cause for celebration, as are the lives themselves, painstakingly recorded so movingly herein. And all of it comes into the world not a moment...

This is the rollicking tale of Australia's first true adventure playground, when children were allowed to use a patch of public land as their own backyard, to play in freely as they wished, not as adults directed them. They chased their dreams and...