Australasian and Pacific history

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...

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...

Why does a highly skilled and highly trained sculptor, the master of every style and technique, insist on working in the style of the Italian Renaissance? The answer is that to Dabro, every sculpture must speak to humanity, which means that it must be an...

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...

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...

Emu Field is overshadowed by Maralinga, the larger and much more prominent British atomic test site about 193 kilometres to the south. But Emu Field has its own secrets, and the fact that it was largely forgotten makes it more intriguing. Only at Emu...

**Winner, Queensland Literary Awards 2022, Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance**Like many Australians, I looked on with horror as images of a million dead fish swamped the media and consumed the news cycle. I resolved to...

** Shortlisted, NSW Premier's History Awards 2022, NSW Regional and Community History Prize **** Shortlisted, Les Carlyon Literary Prize 2022 **'In May 1824, what can only be described as a period of all-out, total gudyarra ('war' in the Wiradyuri...

Australia and the Suez Crisis 19501957 focuses on the evolution of Australian policy before, during and after the Suez Crisis. The central theme of the volume is how, in the development of the Australian policy response to that crisis, questions of...

*Winner of the Australian History Prize in the NSW Premier's History Awards 2020**Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards Non-Fiction Book Award**Shortlisted for the 2020 Ernest Scott Prize for History**Shortlisted for the Australian Historical...

This graphic book brings to life the struggles of daily life on the goldfields and the powerful events of the Eureka stockade.The extraordinary story of Eureka is one that Australians have revisited since it happened in 1854. Why did British Army Red...

The years 19972001 were eventful ones for the Howard Government. This second volume of the Howard Government series explores these tumultuous years.In Back from the Brink politicians, commentators and scholars including Michael Wesley, Hugh White, Peter...

After decades of silence, Serving Our Country is the first comprehensive history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's participation in the Australian defence forces.While Indigenous Australians have enlisted in the defence forces since the...

In Australia's rush to commemorate allthings Anzac, have we lost our ability to look beyond war as the central pillarof Australia's history and identity?Thepassionate historians of the Honest History group argue that while war has beenimportant to...

Contrary to what you may think, local Aboriginal people did not lose their culture and die out within decades of Governor Phillip's arrival in Sydney in 1788.Aboriginal people are prominent in accounts of early colonial Sydney, yet we seem to skip a...

Helping neighbours and partners stabilise their political systems and work towards peace and security is a core activity for the modern Australian Defence Force.The Long Road analyses the successes and failures of ADF's 'train, advise, assist'...

Niel Black, a Scot from Argyllshire, arrived in Melbourne in September intending to make his fortune. Ambitious and determined, Black became one of the most successful and energetic squatters in the Western District of Victoria a livestock breeder and a...

A history that populates the streets of colonial Sydney with entrepreneurial businesswomen earning their living in a variety of small and sometimes surprising enterprises.There are few memorials to colonial businesswomen, but if you know where to look...

The history of Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land is long. The first Tasmanians lived in isolation for as many as 300 generations after the flooding of Bass Strait. Their struggle against almost insurmountable odds is one worthy of respect and admiration,...

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 Hudson bomber the A16-97 carrying ten people,...

In this timely and controversial treatment of the Australian labour movement, Humphrys examines the role of the Labour Party and trade unions in constructing neoliberalism in Australia.Why do we always assume it was the New Right that was at the centre...

This edited collection investigates New Zealand's history as an imperial power, and its evolving place within the British Empire. It revises and expands the history of empire within, to and from New Zealand by looking at the country's spheres of internal...

In this compelling new book, distinguished historian and writer Cassandra Pybus reveals that black convicts were among our first fleet settlers a fact which profoundly complicates our understanding of race relations in early colonial Australia. Most of...

'If only', 'what if' and 'why didn't we' are phrases that often come to mind when we look back to the past. This exciting and stimulating book looks backat turning points and crucial moments in Australian history. Rather than arguing that there have been...

This landmark volume will be created to coincide with the 20th InternationalCongress of Historical Sciences which the University of New South Wales inSydney will be hosting in 2005. Sponsored by the Australian HistoricalAssociation, the book will...

The publication of this book in 1981 profoundly changed the way in which we understand the history of relations between indigenous Australians and European settlers. It has since become a classic of Australian history. Drawing from documentary and oral...

Bulldog and Musquito, Aboriginal warriors from the Hawkesbury, were captured and sent to Norfolk Island following frontier skirmishes in New South Wales. Eventually, Bulldog seems to have made it home. Musquito was transported to Van Diemen's Land, where...

A Single Tree assembles the raw material underpinning Don Watson’s award-winning The Bush. These diverse and haunting voices span the four centuries since Europeans first set eyes on the continent. Each of these varied contributors – settlers,...