Australian History

On August 25, 1895, Ernest Alfred Hall was born into a pioneering Australian family that lived on a 313-acre property called "Cloverdale" near the hamlet of Beech Forest, south of the Otway Ranges, some 200 kilometres south west of Melbourne, Victoria. As a child, it seemed he would be destined for the life of a farmer in a country that was just realising its independence through Federation, yet his path was to be diverted by the cataclysmic events that befell Europe and the British Empire.

Hailed as "a fearless exposer of folly, vice and crime" when it first hit the streets in the 1890s, Truth was later condemned by a High Court Judge as "a wretched little paper, reeking of filth, injurious to the health of house servants and young girls". Much later it earned the nickname "The Old Whore of La Trobe Street". Truth was called many things but it was never boring.

The story of how gold miners rebelled against British authority, beginning a process that would ultimately lead to democracy in Australia. The Eureka Stockade. It's one of Australia's foundation legends - yet the story has always been told as if half the participants weren't there. But what if the hot-tempered, free-spirited gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? What if there were women and children right there beside them, inside the stockade, when the bullets started to fly?

After a daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in occupied Yugoslavia, John Denvir reached the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, where he joined a partisan band as a machine-gunner. Believed shot and killed by New Zealand forces and his family in New Zealand, from January 1942 until the end of 1943, Denvir led brave and heroic attacks on German and Italian soldiers from behind enemy lines. He was wounded four times, received the Soviet Medal for Valour and was eventually appointed brigade commander.

The greatest escape story of Australian colonial history by the son of Australia's best-loved storyteller. In 1823, cockney sailor and chancer James Porter was convicted of stealing a stack of beaver furs and transported halfway around the world to Van Diemen's Land, before being sent to Sarah Island. Many had tried to escape Sarah Island; few had succeeded. But when Governor George Arthur announced that the place would be closed and its prisoners moved to the new penal station of Port Arthur, Porter, along with a motley crew of other prisoners, pulled off an audacious escape.

Centred on the inter-war years - within the ivy clad walls of Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory, amid the windswept valleys of north Wales, and in the industrial heartland of Birmingham - The Basis of Everything is the story of the coming of the atomic bomb, and how the unlikely union of two scientists - Ernest Rutherford, the son of a New Zealand farmer, and Mark Oliphant, a peace-loving vegetarian from a tiny Australian hills village - would change the world.

Aage Krarup Nielsen tager på en sydhavsfærd til de vidunderlige stillehavsøer. Seks dage efter skibet har forladt San Fransisco spejder de øen Oahus mørke, takkede bjergtoppe i horisonten. Senere når ekspeditionen blandt andet til Tahiti, besøger kannibaler og beundrer vidunderlige koralrev. Undervejs fortæller Aage Krarup Nielsen om egnenes skikke og historie, om polynesiernes imponerende kanoer, der for tusindvis af år siden fik dem hele vejen til Hawaii.

In these frustrating days of diesel and electric trains it is hard to remember the smell of coal smoke, the hiss of steam, and the sting of cinders flying into your eyes. With his passion for the olden days and his famous ear for a good yarn, Bill ‘Swampy’ Marsh has brought together another enthralling collection of funny, dramatic and hilarious stories from drivers and gangers, firemen and guards, their families and everyone in between.

Untouched for thousands of years, Australia continues to host some of the oldest and most captivating cultures on our planet to this very day: those of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. By the close of the 18th century and within a mere few decades, colonization abruptly terminates a way of life as ancient as the world itself, rupturing traditions and propelling entire communities into warfare, decline, and hopelessness. However, to the south of the expansive Australian continent, a vast and isolated island endures an even more dreadful fate: the utter vanishing of its ...

Facing not onlt the astounding courage they displayed amid death and chaos but also on the triumphs and pain of their personal lives, Susanna reveals how these 11 Australian women were as influential and heroic in civil life as they were in war.

Easter Sunday, 1902, deep in the Carnarvon Ranges a police constable and station manager are slain then later incinerated, their remains stuffed into saddlebags. Accused of the ghoulish crime are two members of the bushranging Kenniff gang, fast gaining notoriety as Queensland's equivalent of the Kelly gang. Yet the murders are a bold escalation from the petty fraud, horse stealing and cattle duffing the gang is known for.

Son of the renowned Sydney obstetrician, Dr William McBride raised the alarm on the anti-nausea drug thalidomide in the 1960s and was later struck off the medical register for falsifying research results in a bid to challenge the safety of another drug. David chose to study Law, firstly at Sydney University and then at Oxford. There he met some British army officers and decided that soldiering was his calling, going on to train at Sandhurst.

Ask google Who discovered gold in Australia? and you'll promptly get 'Edward Hammond Hargraves'. Hargraves has for decades (and decades) received the fame, fortune and adulation from all corners of the country, but did he earn it? What about the two diggers he met on the Californian goldfields who told him where to look when he returned home to Australia? What about the guys who led him to where they'd heard gold had been found before? What about the pioneers whose discoveries had been documented years earlier?

País que comprende un grupo de islas perteneciente al archipiélago de la Polinesia al sur del Pacífico, es un maravilloso ensueño de clima tropical de casi 200,000 habitantes con arena blanca y aguas azules que cada año reporta miles de turistas.

The Best Australian Yarns is a substantial and definitive work collected from memory, mates, word of mouth and decades of researching popular Aussie culture and history.

Including oft-told legendary yarns, reminiscences from the shearing shed, tall stories from the bush, sporting yarns, railway yarns, stories from the world of show business, digger yarns from both world wars, convict and bushranger yarns and anecdotes from the colonial days, yarns from shanties and gold rushes, ghost stories, bunyips and yowies, hauntings, and weird happenings.

The epic World War II story of Australia's 75 Squadron - and the 44 days when these brave and barely-trained pilots fought alone against the Japanese. In March and April 1942, RAAF 75 Squadron bravely defended Port Moresby for 44 days when Australia truly stood alone against the Japanese. This group of raw young recruits scrambled ceaselessly in their Kittyhawk fighters to an extraordinary and heroic battle, the story of which has been left largely untold.

Our struggles as women in the twenty-first century are not new. Some of our most interesting women artists had to eschew all accepted social norms in order to find a life of art. For some, it was catastrophic; for others, a liberation. But how did they view themselves through the prism of their art, and what do we, as modern women, take from their struggle? HER BODY, HER ART looks back to the lives and art of six European modernist women, who literally recast the ways in which women's art could be seen, and asks why they still matter.

In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence—from its beginnings in the first encounters of Black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy.

Award-winning journalist and author Andrew Rule distils the daring, the desperation and danger of the track into a bravura account of some of Australian racing's most famous and infamous moments, its celebrations and its secrets, the grittiness of the gambling life behind the glitz and glamour. With an ear for the colloquial, the humorous and the absurd, and an eye for physical bravery and financial folly, Rule shows how racing still defines part of the Australian character.

These and other true stories of courage and ingenuity remind us how the Australian character was forged - through encounters with the bush, desert and outback. The vision that appeared in the shooter’s lamplight was a shock - a man soaking wet, with torn clothing, covered in cuts, bruises and blood. ‘I’ve found that missing aeroplane,’ O’Reilly gasped, ‘and there are two men still alive.’ The men and women you’ll meet in this fascinating audiobook come in all shapes and sizes, from convicts and engineers to cattleduffers and anthropologists.