Australasian History

"The locked room mystery to end all locked room mysteries!" - Sophia Bennett. Provocative, gripping historical fiction, inspired by an incredible true story of female convicts London, 1841. The Rajah...

In the wake of the Second World War and the realisation that the Soviet Union had set up extensive espionage networks around the world, Australia responded by establishing its own...

Australians' understanding of Aboriginal society prior to the British invasion from 1788 has been transformed since the publication of Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu in 2014. It argued that classical Aboriginal...

From award-winning author and historian Janet McCalman, the engrossing tale of Tasmanian convict settlers in colonial Victoria It was meant to be 'Victoria the Free', uncontaminated by the Convict Stain....

In 1908 English gentleman, Ernest Westlake, packed a tent, a bicycle and forty tins of food and sailed to Tasmania. On mountains, beaches and in sheep paddocks he collected over...

The award-winning bestseller that put Australian birds on the world map - nature and science writing at their best. Renowned for its unusual mammals, Australia is a land of birds...

Featuring plant and bird directories illustrated with superb colour photographs and line drawings, as well as comprehensive planting tables and expert advice, this book has all you need to create...

Menzies impact on Australian policy revolution Was Menzies's unprecedented electoral success merely a matter of luck, or did he make fortune bend to his will? On 30 November 1954, Robert...

Yarra Birrarung- Artists, Writers and the River is an illustrated history of life on the Yarra. Yarra Birrarung- Artists, Writers and the River is an illustrated history of life on...

OVER HALF A MILLION COPIES SOLD The most comprehensive one-volume book of identification that shows all Australian bird species, perfect for birders of all levels of expertise. Since its first...

A new path for Australia, as laid out by eminent economist and author of the bestselling Superpower Could Australia become a full-employment, renewable-energy superpower? Ross Garnaut says yes, and it...

An immersive journey through the tumultuous past and fascinating present of Australia's nearest neighbours "We are the original people of the region ... This is a black region, it's not...

The gripping story of Australia's first female crime writer and her career-criminal son When Mary Fortune arrived in Melbourne with her infant son in 1855, she was determined to reinvent...

A must-read biography of an enigmatic personality who helped shape early Melbourne Madame Brussels, the most legendary brothel keeper in nineteenth-century Melbourne, is still remembered and celebrated today. But until...

A curated collection of essays that shaped Australia's culture and society Since the 1940s, Meanjin essays have set the national cultural agenda. Arthur Phillips' idea of 'cultural cringe' has become...

How are we to live well with others? How can we sustain abundant environments and nourishing cultures? How might connections to place and generations past strengthen our cultural, political and...

Compelling, groundbreaking and brilliantly readable, The Story of Australia's People- The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia is the first instalment of an ambitious two-part work, and the culmination of...

The much-anticipated second instalment of Geoffrey Blainey's history of Australia's people - his most ambitious work to date - that completes Australia's story from the Gold Rush to the present...

A riveting expose of the global oil industry's multi-decade conspiracy to muddy the waters around the science of climate change and use the Australian government to undermine worldwide efforts to...

A striking and compelling book reclaiming history by a renowned Indigenous visual artist. In this groundbreaking work of Indigenous scholarship, nationally renowned visual artist Fiona Foley addresses the inherent silences,...

An evocative narrative of the many tragedies that fell upon those who were forced to serve time in Port Arthur, one of the most remote and feared convict locations in...

Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 until his death, aged ninety-nine, in 1963, was a towering figure in Melbourne's Catholic community. But his political interventions had a profound effect...

Childhood stories of family, country and belonging What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences...

A broad, concise and inclusive vision of Australia and Australians by one our most renowned historians A broad, concise and inclusive vision of Australia and Australians by one our most...

Growing up in suburban Perth in the 1920s, the two Durack girls were fascinated by tales of the pioneering past of their father and grandfather overlanding from Queensland in the...

A milestone work of memoir, travel writing and history, The Bush by Don Watson takes us on a profoundly revelatory and entertaining journey through the Australian landscape and character. While...

The Birth of Sydney tells the story of the founding of one of the world's greatest cities. Tim Flannery's brilliant anthology reveals Sydney's strange and secret life from its unruly...

Bill Bryson's travels in a sunburned country- Australia will never look the same again. It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited...

An extraordinary narrative history of the First Fleet, by the bestselling author of The Forgotten Children. Never before or since has there been an experiment quite as bold as this....

History comes to life with Peter FitzSimons THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER Love him or loathe him, Ned Kelly has been at the heart of Australian culture and identity since he and...

A magical, substantially true narrative of piracy, zoology, anthropology, danger and adventure in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, Pacific and East Indies The first great English-language travel book, A New Voyage Round...

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER 'Fascinatingly imaginative popular history.' Sydney Morning Herald On 25 April 1915, Allied forces landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in present-day Turkey to secure the sea route between...

In the Trenches of Hell. The story of the first major action of the AIF on the Western Front. THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER On 19 July 1916, 7000 Australian soldiers -...

'This country leans in on you. Like family. To my way of thinking, it is family.' The natural world, in Tim Winton's novels, is as much a living presence as...

The Tall Man is the story of Palm Island, the tropical paradise where one morning Cameron Doomadgee swore at a policeman and forty minutes later lay dead in a watch-house...

The fever that forever changed Australia The fever that forever changed Australia. David Hill relates the extraordinary people and staggering events of Australia's great gold-rush years. From the mid- to...

This is the story of how a struggling convict settlement grew into six dynamic colonies and then the remarkable nation of Australia. Told through the key figures who helped build...

An extraordinary piece of history - the Scottish Highlanders on the frontier of Australia - with introduction from Inga Clendinnen. An extraordinary piece of history - the Scottish Highlanders on...

B-format of one of 2007's Australian non-fiction bestsellers. In 1959 David Hill's mother - a poor single parent living in England - reluctantly decided to send her sons to Fairbridge...

Will keeping the Japanese, Korean and Italian POWs of the Second World War alive in Australia keep Australian POWs alive and well wherever they are? Will keeping the Japanese, Korean...

A brilliant recreation of the first four years of white settlement in Australia by Booker Prize-winning author Tom Keneally. A brilliant recreation of the first four years of white settlement...

A compelling account of Australia's bloodiest and most significant battle of the Vietnam War, in time for the battle's 50th anniversary, by critically-acclaimed war writer David Cameron. On the afternoon...

A poetic, practical, raw and almost miraculously detailed picture of an ancient way of life struggling to survive and to be reborn - New Statesman As a boy, James Rebanks's...

A beautiful foiled collector's edition to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Alison Lester's classic and bestselling picture book about a family's road trip around Australia. CHILDREN'S BOOK COUNCIL 2005 PICTURE...

Wongutha Tales is inspired by May O'Brien's passion for helping children understand the past through the magic of storytelling. Wongutha Tales represents stories of May's childhood - from traditional teaching...

A special Vintage Classics edition of the beloved Australian bestseller In 1902, newly-married Jeannie Gunn (Mrs Aeneas Gunn) left the security and comfort of her Melbourne home to travel to...

Fifty years after its first publication, Robin Boyd's bestselling The Australian Ugliness remains the definitive statement on how we live and think in the environments we create for ourselves. In...

First published in two-volumes in 1814, this is the enthralling account of the circumnavigation of Australia, by the man who gave our country its name. Edited and introduced by Tim...