Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in History

March 1945. A handful of very young Allied operatives are parachuted into the remote jungled heart of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, east of Singapore, there to recruit the island's Indigenous Dayak peoples to fight the Japanese. Yet most speak next to no Borneo languages and know little about Dayaks, other than that they were once headhunters who might kill them on arrival. For their part, some Dayaks have never before seen a white face.

In 1768 Captain James Cook and his crew set out on a small British naval vessel in search of a missing continent. 2020 marks the 250th anniversary of that voyage, and Cook's 'discovery' of Australia. Captain Cook's Epic Voyage reveals the hardships and adventure of this remarkable quest, and the euphoria of discovering new lands.

On a pitch-black night in September 1943, a daring Australian commando unit launches a covert raid on Singapore Harbour, sinking and damaging numerous Japanese ships. Operation Jaywick - an epic that passed into Australia's national legend - sets in motion a brutal crackdown by Japan's dreaded military police, the Kempei Tai. Tasked with finding the culprits of the attack, Major Sumida Haruzo intensifies his hunt for the saboteurs, weaving a deadly web that ensnares dozens of British internees in Changi Jail and countless Chinese Singaporeans.

Detailing the development of the prison and its outlying stations, including its dreaded coal mines and providing an account of the changing views to convict rehabilitation, Convict-era Port Arthur focuses in on a number of individuals, telling the story through their eyes. Charles O'Hara Booth, a significant commandant of Port Arthur; Mark Jeffrey, a convict who became the grave digger on the Island of the Dead and William Thompson, who arrived just as the new probation system started and who was forced to work in the treacherous coal mines.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the American experiment is failing. Division, mistrust and misinformation are now its defining characteristics. The storming of the Capitol, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the increasing spotlight on Second Amendment rights raise the spectre of further political violence, and even the possibility of a second civil war.

The Forgotten Children was David Hill's heartbreaking account of the abuse that he and other 'orphans of empire' survived at the Fairbridge Farm School in New South Wales. Part memoir, part oral history, the book became a best seller. It was also the catalyst in a subsequent battle for justice. In Reckoning, David recounts stories of the shocking systemic abuse at Fairbridge and how he led the fight against the powerful people and organisations.

Submariners are a special breed. Not for them a life on the ocean wave, the fresh air and sunshine of other naval sailors. With stealth and daring they go deep and dark, alone and unseen, in often dangerous waters. They sometimes call themselves the Silent Service, with good reason. Submarines and the sailors who serve in them have been and remain the tip of the spear of Australia's defences. For the first time, this is their unique story.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the British asked Australia for help. With some misgivings, the Australian government sent five destroyers to beef up the British Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. HMAS Vendetta, Vampire, Voyager, Stuart and Waterhen were old ships, small with worn-out engines. Their crews used to joke they were held together by string and chewing gum; when the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels heard of them, he sneered that they were a load of scrap iron.

Filled with love for land, history, and people, it is more than anything else—a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.

Australians will gamble on anything, from two flies crawling up a wall to less important things like federal elections. Thanks to the internet, mobile phones and gambling-tax loving federal and state governments, Australians can indulge their love of a punt no matter what they're doing. Aussies can be at the birth of a child, performing open heart surgery or handling heavy machinery and still put a bet on.

In the late 1990s, John Baker was known as a purveyor of quality rare and old wines. Always entrepreneurial and up for adventure, he was the perfect person for an occasional business partner to approach with a mysterious wine list that was foreign to anything John, or his second-in-command, Kevin Hopko, had ever come across. The list was discovered to be a comprehensive catalogue of the wine collection of Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia.

Soon after the declaration of war on Japan, a secret military reconnaissance unit was established, based on the British Special Operations Executive (known as SOE) and called the Inter-allied Services Department. The unit was tasked with the role to "obtain and report information of the enemy...weaken the enemy by sabotage and destruction of morale and to lend aid and assistance to local efforts to the same end in enemy occupied territories."

Told at a cracking pace and based on many of the extensive letters Scott wrote from his death cell, Moonlite is set amid the violent and sexually repressed era of Australia in the second half of the 19th century. With a cast of remarkable characters, it weaves together the extraordinary lives of our bushrangers and the desperation of a young nation eager to remove the stains of its convict past. But most of all, Moonlite is a tragic love story.

The presidency of Donald Trump is commonly seen as an historical accident. Nick Bryant argues that by 2016 it had become almost historically inescapable. In this highly personal account, drawing on decades of covering Washington for the BBC, Bryant shows how the billionaire capitalised on the mistakes of his five predecessors, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

A few years ago Anna Clark saw a series of paintings on a sandstone cliff face in the Northern Territory. There were characteristic crosshatched images of fat barramundi and turtles, as well as sprayed handprints and several human figures with spears. Next to them was a long gun, painted with white ochre, an unmistakable image of the colonisers. Was this an Indigenous rendering of contact? A work of history?

In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Poland, a Jewish child was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That child was Karen Kirsten's mother, but she knew nothing about this extraordinary event until one day a letter arrived from a stranger. After eventually discovering the grandparents she loved dearly were in fact not her biological grandparents, Karen travelled the globe to uncover her family's past and to find the answers to some baffling questions. Irena's Gift weaves together a mystery, history and memoir to tell the story of a family torn apart by war.

Bangka Strait, Indonesia, 1942. Allied ships are evacuating thousands in flight from Singapore, the island having fallen to Japanese Imperial forces. Facing terrifying assaults by fighter planes, one ship, the Vyner Brooke, is badly bombed and sinks. Its survivors swim or paddle for hours to the nearest land, a beach on Bangka Island, parched, many dreadfully injured One of the survivors is Australian Army nurse Dorothy 'Bud' Elmes, the great-aunt of Georgina Banks. Bud makes it to the island, where she, colleagues and a matron tend to the wounded as a plan is formulated.

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.

Blazing her trail at the dawn of the 20th century, Vida Goldstein remains Australia's most celebrated suffragette and social reformer. Her life - as a campaigner for women's rights and suffrage in Australia, Britain and America, an advocate for peace, a fighter for social equality for all and a shrewd political commentator - marks her as one of Australia's foremost women of courage and principle. In 1903 she became the first woman in Australia to stand for the Senate and the the first woman in the Western world to stand for a national Parliament.

When Sue Smethurst first sat down with her grandmother-in-law and asked how she survived the Holocaust, she was shooed away. By that time Mindla was in a Melbourne Jewish nursing home with other survivors, her body ageing but mind still razor sharp. 'Vhy do you vant to know?' she'd ask. 'My story is nothing special.' As death began approaching, Sue became a little more pushy. She knew Mindla's life had to be recorded, and they were running out of time.