20th Century History

These were the halycon days, before television. For Australian people radio was a major source of entertainment and information, a link to worlds far beyond their own. This book evokes...

Between 1870 and 1940, tens of thousands of Australian women were drawn to London, their imperial metropolis and the center of the publishing, art, musical, theatrical, and educational worlds. Even...

John Olsen's atelier, The Bakery Art School, was a uniquely exciting arts institution that deserves to be better known. Established in an old bakery building in Sydney's Paddington in 1967,...

Rarely is the public taken deep into the inner sanctum of major news organisations. In this extraordinary book, award-winning journalist John Lyons goes to the heart of how the media...

In order to understand the massive social and cultural changes that took place in Australia since the end of World War II, Michelle Arrow examines popular culture through three main...

Popular imagination has made the pub an enduring cultural icon in Australian life. Since colonisation the pub has played a quintessential part in Australian life, both socially and economically. In...

With the granting of the vote to women in 1902 Australian suffragist Rose Scott told male politicians that their names would be remembered when the names of the suffragettes had...

And Bring the Darkness Home is a haunting exploration of how the mental scars of war destroyed an international cricket career, tore a family apart and left destitute a man...

Now a major documentary film starring Billy Bragg In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the British Government banished their political enemies - viewed with the same alarm as today's...

'I am sir [ sure ] you will act as human bean', wrote one distressed pensioner to Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1953, pleading for assistance. Robert Menzies received 22,000...

In this book, the residents of Prahran, past and present, tell something of their own stories. These are as diverse as Prahran itself. There are tales of wine and roses...

Between 1948 and 1971 ships and men of the Royal Australian Navy served with almost unnoticed distinction in defending the newly emerging nations of Malaya, Malaysia and Singapore. In this...

Fighting to the Finish tells the story of the Australian Army in Vietnam during the peak years of the Australian military commitment to Vietnam War. As the ninth and final...

The Australians were the first INTERFET troops to arrive in the violence that was East Timor in September 1999. Greatly outnumbered by the Indonesians and the militia, they found a...

In the early 1960s, Betty Friedan made a plea for women to grow up, to become - in her terms - fully developed persons. In doing so she placed the...

'Beautiful Lies' describes the forces that in less that four decades turned Australia from being dependent upon the United Kingdom to becoming an independent power, which, if it owes any...

The memoir of Australian former diplomat Richard Broinowski DRIVEN is a memoir by distinguished Australian former diplomat Richard Broinowski, with a particular focus on the cars he has loved and...

The lustre which drew mankind to gold in ancient times has made it the most prized commodity throughout time. Wars have been fought over it, and civilisations have been subjugated...

For decades schoolchildren have made the pilgrimage to the Museum of Victoria to see the final resting place of our greatest racing horse ever. No wonder Phar Lap holds a...

For the first time, Australia's leading trading partner is not a democracy. Rather, it is a powerful authoritarian state with a fast-growing economy, a rapidly modernising military and bold global...

This work is a history of Australian birding in the 20th century. The emu of the title comes from the 100-year journal of the Royal Australasian Ornithologist's Union, but the...

The QBE Insurance Group is Australia's largest general insurer and its growth, nationally and internationally since its small beginnings in 1886, is the story of an institution that has played...

When an unassuming young Melbourne woman bumped into a handsome naval lieutenant in a Colombo hotel swimming pool in 1926 she would never have dreamed of one day being the...

From the bestselling author of The Nurses' War comes this charming, funny, pointed look at the golden years of radio broadcasting in post-war Australia, celebrating the extraordinary unseen women who...

**Shortlisted for the 2021 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime** Shocking real-life stories of murderous women who used rat poison to rid themselves of husbands and other inconvenient family members....

John Curtin remains a venerated leader. His role as Labor's wartime supremo is etched deep into the national psyche: the man who put Australia first, locked horns with Churchill, forged...

On the 11th of November 1934 over 300,000 people gathered on the slopes of Melbourne's Domain to witness the dedication of the Shrine. It was the largest state war memorial...

Anzac and Empire is the remarkable story of George Foster Pearce - a carpenter who became one Australia's most influential politicians, and the man central to how Australia planned for,...

In her compelling memoir, The Girl with the Cardboard Port, Judith McNeil shared the incredible story of her life in the turbulent world of Singapore and Malaya during the 1960s....

What a glorious decade for beer - the 1980s. This book will release a wealth of memories for anyone who was there or would like to have been. This is...

Stolen, beaten, deprived of his liberty and used as child labour, Bill Simon's was not a normal childhood. He was told his mother didn't want him that he was 'the...

Souter describes in fascinating detail the years of rapid and dramatic change from federation in 1901 to the end of the Great War. A new cheaper edition published to coincide...

**Shortlisted for the 2021 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime** Shocking real-life stories of murderous women who used rat poison to rid themselves of husbands and other inconvenient family members....

In the 1950s and 1960s, Keith Smith interviewed a number of "old timers", people whose living memories then stretched as far back as the 1880s, the gold-rush days and the...

This is a fascinating and moving portrait of the people who are suffering in a more divided and less egalitarian Australian society. Based on the author's conversations with hundreds of...