Showing titles in Australia, New Zealand & Oceania

Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, Work of State Significance and The University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award Shortlisted for the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Australian History Winner of the 2025 NSW History Award, Australian History Prize Winner of the 2025...

From the author of bestselling Sisters in Captivity, seven remarkable stories of men who served from WWI to Korea – their wartime exploits and achievements through aviation. Based on personal interviews conducted by the author over many years, Australia’s Aviation Heroes celebrates the...

Have you ever seen, heard or felt something that cannot be rationally explained? Australia is troubled by the departed spirits of convicts, bushrangers, drovers, nurses and miners. People have seen spectres in pubs, theatres, lighthouses, asylums and by lonely waterholes. There are locations in the bush that send a shiver down your spine, as well as some truly perplexing phenomena such as the Spirit Stones of Mayanup, Quinn's Light, the Guyra Ghost, the Humpty Doo haunting and the Min Min lights.

The story of Australia's last bushranging gang - the murderous Kenniffs. Easter Sunday, 1902, deep in the Carnarvon Ranges a police constable and station manager are slain then later incinerated, their remains stuffed into saddlebags. Accused of the ghoulish crime are two members of the...

Once the sacred guardian of New Zealand's native forests, the huia was a symbol of the land's unique beauty and spirituality. The rare bird's tragic extinction in the early 1900s represents a shot to the heart of Aotearoa and is a potent metaphor for a country's conflicted history. Using the story of the untimely extinction of the huia, J. Ruka offers a fresh perspective on the narrative of New Zealand: a tale of two cultures, warring worldviews, and the things we lost in translation.

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...

Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the 'hunter-gatherer' tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession. Accomplished author Bruce Pascoe provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that suggests that systems of food production and land management have been understated in modern retellings of Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required.

He Iti te Kupu contains nearly 500 sayings that draw a comparison between something (often the natural world) and people, events or contexts. Written in Māori and English, this accessible guide explains the use, meaning and context of a host of the principal figures of speech in te reo.

‘The Japanese attacked us, they mortared us, they shelled us...they did everything.' On 21 July 1942, a large Japanese reconnaissance mission landed along the north-eastern coastline of Papua. It would soon turn into an all-out attempt to capture Port Morseby. This is the powerful story of the...

When Ned Kelly and his band of young tearaways ambushed and killed three brave policemen in a remote mountain camp in 1878, they sparked the biggest and most expensive manhunt Australia had seen. The desperate search would end when Kelly and his gang, wearing suits of armour, tried to derail a train before waging their final bloody gun battle with police in the small Victorian town of Glenrowan.

Australian History For Dummies is your rough-and-ready tour guide through Australia's whirlwind past. We'll introduce you to the people and events that have shaped this "Land Down Under" (and why it's called that). You'll see how Indigenous Australians lived in Australia for over 65,000 years. You'll be there as British colonists explore Australia's harsh terrain. You'll delve into the recent past, giving you insight into modern-day Australia and what's next. This new edition fills in the last ten years of history and covers issues faced in the twenty-first century.

Girt Nation introduces Alfred Deakin, the Liberal necromancer whose dead advisors made Australia a better place to live, and Banjo Paterson, the jihadist who called on God and the Prophet to drive the Australian infidels from the Sudan ‘like sand before the gale’. And meet Catherine Helen Spence, the feminist polymath who envisaged a utopian future of free contraceptives, easy divorce and immigration restrictions to prevent the ‘Chinese coming to destroy all we have struggled for’!

Australia's Number 1 True Crime Writer on Australia's Greatest Gold Robbery. On 15 June 1862, a gang of bushrangers held up a gold escort at Eugowra, just east of Forbes, NSW. They escaped with a pile of cash and 77 kilograms of gold, worth about $10 million today. It remains the largest gold...

Brilliantly reconstructed from contemporary narratives, The Last Outlaws is both a gripping work of historical true crime and a richly revealing examination of our nation at its birth. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith meets Killing for Country. In the winter of 1900, Wiradjuri man Jimmy Governor...

A remarkable new account of Australia's colonial beginnings This fascinating book sets aside the cliches of Australian history and asks us to look again. What really happened when exiled criminals made a home in an occupied and defended country? How were they changed by this new world? What can...

A wildly funny and meticulously researched re-examination of the life of explorer Matthew Flinders, as Shaun Micallef charts the chaos, comedy and contradictions behind the founding of Australia. Who was Matthew Flinders? A pioneer who gave Australia its name but chose to name nothing after...

One of the most popular accounts by an Australian veteran of WWI - written entirely from the private soldier's point of view.

Bad Ground is the real story of Australian miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb and their deliverance from entombment in the depths of the Beaconsfield hard-rock mine.

A sweeping, scathing look at the last ten years of squandered opportunity in Australia, as politicians with vision and ideas for reform gave way to personality clashes, compromise and sloganeering - and what reforms are needed for a prosperous future, by two of Australia's eminent political and...

Longlisted for the 2022 Indie Book Awards. Longlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. Chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ in The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian Book Review. In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy...