Australasian and Pacific history Books

**2021 National Biography Award, highly commended****2020 NSW Premier's History Awards, shortlisted**A new edition of this acclaimed biography of an unsung literary talent.Australian poet and journalist Zora Cross caused a sensation in 1917 with...

When Jewish survivors of the Holocaust arrived in Australia after World War II, they were filled with hope that they could build a new life. These survivors found themselves in a country not only blessedly far from the chaos of post-war Europe but also...

My father, political activist Samuel Mark Goldbloom, was my hero and my nemesis all the days of his life.Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo grew up in thrall to her father, a prominent socialist and covert member of the Communist Party. From an early age, she...

In 1946 Aboriginal people walked off pastoral stations in Western Australia's Pilbara region, withdrawing their labour from the economically important wool industry to demand improvements in wages and conditions. Their strike lasted three years. On Red...

Tarenootairer (c.180658) was still a child when a band of white sealers bound her and forced her onto a boat. From there unfolded a life of immense cruelty inflicted by her colonial captors. As with so many Indigenous women of her time, even today the...

How much do you know about the history of Australia's oldest political party, the Australian Labor Party? You know the big names: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. But what about the names behind the big names? The unsung and overlooked True...

As the many nations of the Pacific deal with the threat of climate change, including rising sea levels and lessening access to fresh water, they are also suffering from some of the slowest rates of development of any region on earth. Now more than ever,...

Fatal Contact explores the devastating infectious diseases introduced into the Indigenous populations of Australia after the arrival of the British colonists in 1788. Epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, measles and sexually transmitted...

1860. An Aboriginal labourer named Jim Crow is led to the scaffold of the Maitland Gaol in colonial New South Wales. Among the onlookers is the Scotsman AS Hamilton, who will take bizarre steps in the aftermath of the execution to exhume this young man's...

This book tells the history of adoption in Australia from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to its decline at the beginning of the twenty-first. The authors find that a market in babies has long existed. In the early years supply outstripped...

Yuupurnju: A Warlpiri song cycle documents a ceremonial song cycle situated within the traditional kurdiji "shield" ceremony, as sung by Warlpiri Elder Henry Cooke Anderson Jakamarra at Lajamanu, Northern Territory, in 2013.The song cycle relates to a...

Warlpiri songs hold together the ceremonies that structure and bind social relationships, and encode detailed information about Warlpiri country, cosmology and kinship. Today, only a small group of the oldest generations has full knowledge of ceremonial...

This revised and updated edition of Dr Neville Ritchie's 1986 PhD dissertation explores the history and archaeology of the 19th century Chinese mining community of Arrowtown, New Zealand. Lavishly illustrated with black-and-white line drawings of Chinese...

During the 1850s and 1860s, Chinese immigrants played a major role in the development of the fishing industries in Australia. Prior to their involvement, the industry was hampered by the problems posed by the transportation of fish to market. It was...

The Enchantment of English is a study of the teaching of English in Australian universities, from its beginnings in the second half of the 19th century through to the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which universities proliferated and diversified. Written...

The Search for Security in the Pacific 1901-1914 is the first volume in a pioneering two-volume history of Australia's relations with the world, from the founding of the Commonwealth to the Great War and its immediate aftermath. The outbreak of the...

The contributors to this book reveal different approaches to creating a colony. Using the rich collections of the Mitchell Library, the authors go beyond the traditional sources of history, highlighting the personal stories revealed through family...

Charles Dickens is little celebrated as a journalist, yet his career spanned nearly 40 years. Starting as a court reporter, parliamentary newspaper columnist and theatre critic, he developed an instinct for injustice, humbug and charade. For 20 years he...

**Winner, 2024 Chief Minister's NT History Book Award**Fully illustrated, Jakarda Wuka (Too Many Stories) draws on a combined 70+ years of collaborative research involving Yanyuwa Elders, anthropologists, and an archaeologist to tell a unique...

Music, Dance and the Archive interrogates historical access and responses to archives by showing how Indigenous performing artists and community members, and academic researchers (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) are collaborating to bring life to objects...

In the Pacific, Australia entered the multi-lateral ANZUS treaty, consolidatingthe nation's independence of Britain; Communist China pressed its claims toreplace Taiwan on the Security Council; Queen Elizabeth II began her longreign; and adventurism by...

The Gurindji people of the Northern Territory are perhaps best-known for their walk-off of Wave Hill Station in 1966, protesting against mistreatment by the station managers. The strike would become the first major victory of the Indigenous land rights...

The natural resources of New Guinea and nearby islands have attracted outsiders for at least 5000 years: spices, aromatic woods and barks, resins, plumes, sea slugs, shells and pearls all brought traders from distant markets. Among the most sought-after...

Whether on the ground or in the mind gardens carry meaning. They reflect social and aesthetic values and may express hope, anticipation or grief. Throughout history they have provided a means of physical survival. In creating and maintaining gardens...

Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner is perhaps most well known for coining the phrase the 'great Australian silence', addressing the culture of denial or 'conscious forgetting' regarding the history Australia since European arrival.This reprint of On...

The essays in Australia and the Wider World bring together a lasting contribution to the story of Australia and the history of ideas in this country.Since the 1960s Neville Meaney has been asking probing questions about social change and the rise of...

'The studies range from the 19th century romantic getaways of picking flowers and picnicking to 21st century extreme sports such as canyoning and abseiling. Indigenous perspectives are included ... Helpfully many of the references are to unpublished...

Australia and the World celebrates the pioneering role of Neville Meaney in the formation and development of foreign relations history in Australia and his profound influence on its study, teaching and application. The contributors to the...

At the time of European colonisation of Australia, veterinary medicine was a young profession, and there was little money or time for it. Even by 1910, when the University of Sydney enrolled its first veterinary science undergraduates, there were only...

The Murujuga: Dynamics of the Dreaming Project (LP140100393) was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project between Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC), Rio Tinto and the Centre for Rock Art Research and Management (CRAR+M) at the University...

In 1826 the British set up a garrison on the edges of an Aboriginal world at King George's Sound, the site of present day Albany, Western Australia, with the aim of deterring the French from occupying the area. The British newcomers and the area's...

In A Story to Tell, artist Laurel Nannup brings to life her childhood in a large Aboriginal family.While her stories include a time spent at the Wandering Mission, their main focus is on memories of family life: picnics, roaming through the bush, sharing...

'Bessy Flowers is a hero of mine, and I'm very glad she's at the centre of a book that features her images and writing, along with the remarkable journey to situate her in family and Country' Kim ScottKia Kia, Noogiting Wirren, Minang...

Entrepreneur, aviator, publisher, publicist, propagandist, playwright, songwriter, motorist, land developer, dreamer: for five brief years it seemed like there was nothing Clement John DeGaris couldn't do. He'd inveigle your life...

'Mowed them down wholesale!'With these words, a judge summed up the last great punitive massacre of Aboriginal people in Australia.Coniston, Central Australia, 1928: the murder of an itinerant prospector at this isolated station by local Warlpiri...

Before the colonisation of Australia, Aboriginal Australians lived on a wonderful larder of fresh fruit,vegetables and lean meat, in a land largely free from disease, with more exercise, less stress andsupportive communities. Today, in Aboriginal...

That Was My Home explores the hidden histories of the Noongar camps aroundFremantle, Swanbourne and Shenton Park in the suburbs of Perth along the SwanRiver. The focus is the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, a time when many Noongarpeople lived with their...

A groundbreaking presentation, in a revised edition, of Indigenous Australian storytelling as it actually sounds; these stories provide a fascinating picture of the life of the people of the west Kimberley after colonisation. Paddy Roe was a legendary...

This is a pivotal story long overdue for the telling: how Aboriginal and European people interacted with each other following the British territorial invasion of 1826 for the next hundred years.There has always been a wealth of documentary and oral...

Warren Braedon, named by his adoptive parents Louis St John Johnson, was taken from his mother in Alice Springs at just three months old. Told he had been abandoned, Louis's adoptive parents, Bill and Pauline Johnson raised him in a loving family in...

These women are twice convicted, and among them are no doubt some of the most depraved of their sex. -- James Backhouse.Hannah Rigby was a poor Liverpool seamstress, a prisoner and a serial thief. Exiled from her homeland, oppressed by poverty and rigid...

Commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the Battles in New Guinea David W. Cameron one of Australia's leading military historians new Kokoda Campaign series will take you from the Battle for Isurava to Port Morseby and finally the retaking of Kokoda. ...

An amusing look at the alternative paths that Australian history might have taken.The What If histories of Australia imagines a very different history of Australia, where the unexpected happens in unexpected ways. Starting by defining the real histories,...

Australia is home to many distinctive species of birds, and Aboriginal peoples have developed close alliances with them over the millennia of their custodianship of this country. Aboriginal Peoples and Birds in Australia: Historical and Cultural...

The 30 stories in this book describe some of the most extraordinary events in New Zealand history. Who knew that a fire killed 39 people at Seacliff Mental Hospital in 1942? That 10 people died in a lahar on White Island in 1914? That a yacht race...

Trails to Freedom is the story of a solo hike across the Alps that brings to life the fascinating, largely unknown history of the Anzac POWs who escaped Fascist Italy to find safety in neutral Switzerland during WWII. In October 1943, four Australian...

‘A riveting account about Scott of Antarctica and the machinations of his demise. Of the food depots that were diminished and the rescue that never came.’ – Peter Hillary, mountaineer and explorerFor a long time it seemed Antarctica would remain the...