Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in History

From Charles Kingsford Smith to Joan Sutherland, Rupert Murdoch to Mary MacKillop, Ben Pobjie takes an intimate look at the Australians who helped make our nation great - as well as the ones who stopped us from being as great as we could have been but who have ended up with their own Wikipedia pages anyway....

This is the truly remarkable life story of the notorious Ethel Livesey, a serial fraudster and confidence trickster who became a media sensation after she ran out on her society wedding in 1945 and later was arrested for obtaining goods by false pretences. With a prologue by Ethel Livesey's granddaughter, this extraordinary tale of Australia's greatest fraudster is told for the first time in rich and fascinating detail.

London, 1991: Alex Johns, trainee art intern at the Courtauld, believes a hidden secret lies within Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas—one of the most written about paintings of all time. Her own mother died in mysterious circumstances while trying to uncover its secrets and Alex is troubled by memories of her own encounter as a child with the girl in the painting—the Infanta Margarita—who continues to haunt her. Alex must take up her mother's work and find evidence to uncover the truths within the canvas

No one ever expected Catriona Menzies-Pike to run a marathon. She hated running and was a hopeless athlete. But a decade after her parents died suddenly, she started running and found that her grief started to move, too. Until very recently it was frowned upon for women to run long distances. Running was deemed unladylike - and probably dangerous.

In January 1993, the Australian government sent just under one thousand young men and women to serve under American command in a violent, impoverished, starving society. Most males over the age of twelve either carried or had access to a gun, and most Somali men had been fighting a vicious civil war for years. Australian soldiers and their teams had to gain control of the streets of Baidoa and surrounding towns. This contest was not ‘find, fight and kill' warfare. There was no decisive victory or defeat.

Forty-one Australian soldiers died in action over 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan; in that time more than 1400 veterans have taken their own lives. Veterans today are chronically over-represented when it comes to PTSD, depression, homelessness and suicide. Australians rightfully pause on Anzac Day each year to solemnly remember fallen soldiers, but are we forgetting our returned veterans whose personal battles continue every single day, and how did we get to this point?

If you think Australia’s history is straightforward, you’re dead wrong. This is a land of the strange, the spooky and the unexplained. From the eerie ball of light that stalked a terrified family across the Nullabor, to the whereabouts of Victoria’s parliamentary mace, to the unidentified body found propped up on an Adelaide beach, and, yes, to the whereabouts of Ned Kelly’s skull, you’ll find our history has plenty of mysterious twists and unanswered questions.

In the history of Australian diplomacy, the Jakarta post between 2004 and 2007 looms larger than any other. In the span of just a few years, a terrorist bomb attack partially destroyed the Embassy compound, killing eleven; the Boxing Day tsunami wreaked havoc on an almost incomprehensible scale; a bombing in Bali killed twenty, including four Australians; Schapelle Corby divided public opinion; members of the Bali Nine were executed; and a Garuda flight crashed and exploded in Yogyakarta, killing twenty, including members of the Australian diplomatic corps.

History is always written by the winners and about the winners. But what about the poor souls lurking in the shadows of history, the ones who were just as remarkable but perhaps didn’t stick their chests out as they crossed the line? In Second Best, Australia’s foremost historian and comedian Ben Pobjie celebrates the nobility and altogether more fascinating stories of the silver-medal getters.