Showing titles in Australia, New Zealand & Oceania

After a lifetime of research and debate on Australian and international history, Geoffrey Blainey is well-placed to introduce us to the people who have played a part and to guide us through the events which have created the Australian identity: the mania for spectator sport, the suspicion of the tall poppy, the rivalries of Catholic and Protestant, Sydney and Melbourne, new and old homelands, the conflicts of war abroad and race at home, the importance of technology, the recognition of our Aboriginal past and Native Title.

An entertaining look at one of sport's greatest rivalries - The Ashes - by former England spin bowler Graeme Swann. Graeme Swann leads us on a compelling adventure through one of world sport's most engrossing rivalries. He knows as much as anybody about the heat of England v Australia battles...

This bestselling book, the triumphant fruit of careful research, wide reading and judicious assessment, is the unchallenged contemporary reference on the history of New Zealand. New Zealand was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind. It was also the first to...

The incredible true story of one of the most extraordinary and inspirational prison breaks in Australian history. New York, 1874. Members of the Clan-na-Gael - agitators for Irish freedom from the English yoke - hatch a daring plan to free six Irish political prisoners from the most remote...

Our heroes can come from the most ordinary of places. As a shy lad growing up in country Victoria, no one in the district had any idea the man Albert Jacka would become. Albert 'Bert' Jacka was 21 when Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914. Bert soon enlisted in the Australian Imperial...

"We are the people our parents warned us about" is the motto of the Bandidos, one of the world's most feared outlaw motorcycle gangs. For ten years, Steve Utah was a Bandidos insider. He arranged the security of their clubhouses. He 'cooked' ecstasy and ice for them. He was at meetings where interstate and overseas drug and weapons smuggling was planned. He saw stolen military weapons being sold. He witnessed vicious beatings, helped dump corpses.It all became too much and, in an attempt to regain control of his life, Utah resorted to the unthinkable....

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous ‘escape-proof’ wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to...

Brought to you by Penguin. **WINNER of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024** Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair...

The extraordinary story of the heroic doctor whose courage and leadership were a lifeline for thousands of Australian prisoners-of-war on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway of World War II - brilliantly told by Australia's favourite storyteller, Peter FitzSimons In September 1939, young Australian...

Bloomsbury presents Dark Waters, Starry Skies by Jeffrey Cox, read by John Chancer. Esteemed Pacific War historian Jeffrey Cox has produced a fast-paced and absorbing read of the crucial New Georgia phase of the Guadalcanal-Solomons Campaign during the Pacific War. Thousands of miles from...

An enthralling journey, showcasing Watson's trademark literary gift and sardonic wit, through the Australian landscape and character. While most Australians live in cities clinging to the coastal fringe, our sense of what an Australian is, or should be, is drawn from the vast and varied inland called the bush. But what do we mean by 'the bush', and how has it shaped us?

The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometer walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal families at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth. Here Aboriginal children were instructed in the ways of white society and forbidden to speak their native tongue.

For many, the colonial story of Australia starts with Captain Cook's discovery of the east coast in 1770, but it was some 164 years before his historic voyage that European mariners began their romance with the immensity of the Australian continent. Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who discovered and mapped the majority of the vast, unknown waters and land masses in the Indian and Southern Oceans.

Two husbands, four trials and one bloody execution: Winner of the 2015 Davitt Award for Best Crime Book (Non-fiction) -- the terrible true story of Louisa Collins. In January 1889, Louisa Collins, a 41-year-old mother of ten children, became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol and the...

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.

Girt. No word could better capture the essence of Australia.... In this hilarious history, David Hunt reveals the truth of Australia's past, from megafauna to Macquarie - the cock-ups and curiosities, the forgotten eccentrics and Eureka moments that have made us who we are. Girt introduces forgotten heroes like Mary McLoghlin, transported for the crime of "felony of sock", and Trim the cat, who beat a French monkey to become the first animal to circumnavigate Australia.

The story of the clipper ships, and the tens of thousands of migrants they brought to the Australian colony of the 19th century, is one of the world's great migration stories. For anyone who travelled to Australia before 1850, it was a long and arduous journey that could take as much as four months. With the arrival of the clipper ships and favourable winds, the journey from England could be done in a little over half this time.

In the first part of this audiobook, you will learn about extinct animals that used to call New Zealand home.

The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works?