Australasian and Pacific history Books

Chopsticks or Fork? is a collection of stories and recipes from Chinese restaurants in regional Australia, based on the six-part ABC series created by Lin Jie Kong and Jennifer Wong. The book lovingly captures the stories of ten very different families...

‘another a piece of the puzzle that is unearthing women’s stories from the past ... a beautifully told history’ – Books+PublishingA joyous look at the history of lesbian and bisexual women in Australia – from convict times, through suffrage and...

In Apollo and Thelma, broadcaster and lawyer Jon Faine shares a yarn that has enthralled him for forty years, taking him from Melbourne’s depression-era slums to the isolation of the outback.    Apollo and Thelma have been a...

‘What joy to be at sea again, adrift on the vast Pacific, in the clutches of a gifted storyteller. Harrison Christian and the mutineers of Men Without Country held me happily captive to the very last page.’ Dava Sobel, author of LongitudeA...

Loving Country is a powerful and essential guidebook that offers a new way to travel and discover Australia through an Indigenous narrative. In this beautifully designed and photographed edition, co-authors Bruce Pascoe and Vicky Shukuroglou, in...

Alexander Pearce and seven of his fellow convicts escaped from gaol in 1822 into one of the most unique and beautiful places on earth – the Tasmanian wilderness. This classic Australian story details the men’s attempt to free themselves from the most...

This collective memoir is for anyone who has ever wondered why Aboriginal people choose to live in remote communities in the heart of Australia. It is for all who want to truly understand why nyinanyi ngurangka – being on country – is not a “lifestyle...

The story of Australia’s Black convicts has been all but erased from our history. In recovering their lives, Santilla Chingaipe offers a fresh understanding of this fatal shore, showing how empire, slavery, race and memory have shaped our nation.On the...

For the first time, the First Nations story of Cook’s arrival, and what blackfellas want everyone to know about the coming of Europeans.Both 250 years late and extremely timely, this is an account of what First Nations people saw and felt when James Cook...

From Simpson’s donkey and the Emu War to Vietnam and Ben Roberts-Smith, Australian military history is full of events that didn’t happen the way most people think they did. In his inimitable style, award-winning author Mark Dapin sets the record straight...

The first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.Winner of the 2024 ACT Literary Awards, Non-Fiction Shortlisted...

The harrowing story of the Allied airmen who experienced the true horrors of Nazism firsthand.It was the summer of 1944 as liberating Allied forces surged towards Paris following the D-Day landings. For a large group of downed airmen being held in that...

‘A damn hilarious read.’ Nazeem Hussain‘A true barbarian.’ Andrew BoltOur world is in chaos lol. And no, Australian Millennials, it’s not your imagination: things are especially f**ked for us.Millions of Baby Boomers got beach houses, free education,...

This updated edition of the best-selling Crimes that Shocked Australia, is a true anthology of shocking proportions. Learn more about these gruesome crimes that will send shivers down your spine as the most memorable moments in Australia’s crime...

A truly comprehensive account of 617 Squadron, RAF, ​who carried out one of the most dangerous and audacious aerial bombing raids of World War II. It was the evening of 16 May 1943. Nineteen modified Lancaster bombers from 617 Squadron RAF, under the...

During the 1940s and ‘50s in Australia there rose to prominence many icons of Aboriginal descent, representative of the culture of the day and of their own people. Some permanently influenced the minds of Australians and remain famous to this day. Others...

One of the most shocking murder trials in Australia's legal history, and the tribulations of the prosecutor who conducted it.In 1838, eleven convicts and former convicts were put on trial for the brutal murder of 28 Aboriginal men, women and children at...

Gadigal Country, Woolloomooloo Farm, Riley Estate, Burdekin's paddock, Burlington Picture Palace, First Church of Christ Scientist, party mansion, Yirranma Place.The many transformations of 262 Liverpool Street, lying at the corner of Forbes Street in...

Take a trip down memory lane with Bob Byrne ...Remember loading up the back of the car and heading away with the family over the summer holidays? Being part of Beatlemania when the group toured in '64? Watching Dennis Lillee deliver a stinging bouncer in...

What does Australia's military history reveal about us?In Beyond The Broken Years fifty years after The Broken Years, Bill Gammage's classic on World War One soldiers, was published provocative military historian Peter Stanley argues why it's vital for...

Bonzer. Arvo. Tucker. Sickie. Pash. Illywhacker.There are plenty of words to choose from to tell the story of Australia from iconic Australianisms like mateship, fair dinkum, and bogan to drop bears, budgie smugglers, and bin chickens.And while you...

A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk.A century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across...

HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. In the midst of this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus. They negotiated homophobia and complex family dynamics...

With appeal to more than just punk history obsessives, Orstralia offers an unprecedented snapshot of an underacknowledged segment of Australian life and history.Far from punk's more modish North Atlantic core in the late 1970s, discontented youth in...

What the Colonists Never Knew paints a vivid picture of what it was like to grow up Aboriginal in Sydney, alongside the colonists, from 1788 to the present.Dennis, the grandson ofClarice Malinda Lougher, the last practising matriarch of the Gai-mariagal...

The Story of Cook and 1770 marks the first moment of British contact with the east coast of the continent we now know as Australia. It is one of our nation's origin stories, although remembered very differently by Anglo-Australians and by Indigenous...

The year 1913 was a fascinating and important time for Australians, although the events of the following year have tended to cast a retrospective shadow over it. In places as far apart as Antarctica, Papua and Great Britain, Australian ambitions were...

**Shortlisted, National Trust (NSW) Heritage Awards 2024, Resources and Publications**Growing up in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs in the 1980s and 90s, I remember the pull of Darlinghurst. As a teenager, I would catch the 380 bus, get off at Taylor Square and...

Crown Resorts, the Bond Group, James Hardie, HIH Insurance, Geoffrey Edelsten's Allied Medical Group, 7-Eleven and Rio Tinto, the list goes on...Australia has suffered from the continual sting of business scandals since corporate cowboys like Alan Bond...

The incredible story of an Australian hero who helped save the life of a future president.On a moonless night in August 1943, a US torpedo boat commanded by Lt John F Kennedy, on patrol in Solomon Islands, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Left...

**Highly Commended, 2024 Chief Minister's NT History Book Award****Shortlisted, 2024 ACT Book of the Year Award****Shortlisted, 2024 Ernest Scott Award**'I believe history is for healing. But you need to tell the whole story, the good and the bad...

Australians will soon be faced with an important choice. Will they vote Yes to change our nation's Constitution to introduce an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice? Or will they vote No and bring the recognition process to a halt and, along with...

Comprehensive and fully updated, Frommer's Hawaii covers all the major Hawaiian Islands, and takes you from world-famous beaches to secluded rain-forests to authentic luaus and everywhere in between.Frommer's only works with expert, seasoned journalists,...

**Longlisted, Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award 2024**In 1941, the paper emperors of the Australian newspaper industry helped bring down Robert Menzies. Over the next 30 years, they grew into media monsters.This book reveals the transformation...

For a long time, the Australian Signals intelligence (or Sigint) story has been kept secret. Until now...Why does Australia have a national signals intelligence agency? What does it do and why is it controversial? And how significant are its ties with...

In December 1943, five courageous correspondents join a British air raid on Berlin. They are Australians, Alf King from the Sydney Morning Herald and Norm Stockton from the Sydney Sun; Americans, Ed Murrow from CBS and Lowell Bennett from the...

The first volume in the landmark Official History of Australian Operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor, Born of Fire and Ash is an honest, challenging and compelling account of the 19992000 East Timor crisis and Australia's response to it...

The Lumen Seed sensitively depicts a cultural dialogue taking place before a backdrop of offenses against the Australian continent, as well as a history of systematic discrimination against indigenous peoples on the part of the country's white...

Sharing Stories in an Ancient Land: The Western Australian Museum has been published to coincide with the opening of the glorious WA Museum Boola Bardip. The original site of the Museum, established about 130 years ago, has been transformed by marrying...

Spanning 65,000 years, this book provides a history of food in Australia from its beginnings, with the arrival of the first peoples and their stewardship of the land, to a present where the production and consumption of food is fraught with anxieties and...

Sydney Harbour has been a defining feature for the people who have lived around it for millennia: a means of communication, a barrier, a resource to be exploited, a site of commerce and trade, and a place of beauty, spirit and meaning.In this sweeping...

The Japanese air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942 are well known to most Australians, but what happened afterwards?For almost two years the airspace over north-west Australia was routinely infiltrated by Japanese air raids, tallying about 70 in total...

**Shortlisted, Magarey Medal in Biography 2024**Bushrangers are Australian legends. Ned Kelly, Ben Hall, Captain Thunderbolt and their bushranging brothers are famous. They're remembered as folk heroes and celebrated for their bravery and their ridicule...

We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.On 26 May 2017, after a historic process of consultation, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was read...

In the early hours of 26 February 1918, the British hospital ship Glenart Castle steamed into the Bristol Channel, heading for France to pick up wounded men from the killing fields of the Western Front. On board was 32-year-old Australian nurse, Edith...

*Winner of the Nonfiction Award 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature**Winner of the 2019 NSW Premier's History Award: Australian History Prize**Winner of the 2019 Prime Minister's Australian History Prize**Winner of the 2019...

** Shortlisted, The 2023 Australian Political Book of the Year Award **Australia's relationship with China is one of the dominant geopolitical stories of our times. The need to understand the tectonic forces of history moving beneath the surface of these...

Australia is a land of symbols. The Southern Cross.The Sydney Opera House. The kangaroo. Vegemite.But what do they actually mean? Where do they come from?Why are some symbols so hotly contested?Does Australia have more than its fair share?Symbols of...