Showing results by narrator "John Derum" in All Categories

On a blistering hot day in 1850, George and Richard Ross take their first steps on Australian soil after three long months at sea. All they have is each other and a quarterly remittance from their irate father who has banished them to the Colonies. A decade on, and the brothers are the owners of successful vineyard, Araluen, nestled in a beautiful green valley not far from Adelaide. Now a successful businessman, George has laid down the roots of his own Ross dynasty, born of the New World.

In a time when desperate people were seizing with both hands the chance for freedom, refugees from more than 70 nations gathered beneath the Southern Cross to forge a new national identity. They came from all over war-torn Europe to the mountains of Australia to help realise one man's dream: the mighty Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th century. People of all races and creeds tunnelled through a mountain range to turn the course of a majestic river, trying to put to rest ghosts from the inferno of history: buried memories, unimaginable pain and deadly secrets.

A stunning portrait of love, hope and survival on an isolated island off Western Australia. In Judy Nunn's latest compelling novel, compassion meets bigotry, hatred meets love, and ultimately despair meets hope on the windswept shores of Australia. On a barren island off the coast of Western Australia, a rickety wooden dinghy runs aground. Aboard are nine people who have no idea where they are. Strangers before the violent storm that tore their vessel apart, the instinct to survive has seen them bond.

Just after Christmas 1803, convict William Buckley fled an embryonic settlement in the land of the Kulin nation (now the Port Phillip area), to take his chances in the wilderness. A few months later, the local Aboriginal people found the six-foot-five former soldier near death. Believing he was a lost kinsman returned from the dead, they took him in, and for 32 years Buckley lived as a Wadawurrung man, learning his adopted tribe's language, skills and methods to survive.

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

It's March 1942. Singapore has fallen. Darwin has been bombed. Australia is on the brink of being invaded by the Imperial Japanese Forces. And Val Callahan, publican of The Brown's Hotel in Townsville, could not be happier as she contemplates the fortune she's making from lonely, thirsty soldiers. Overnight the small Queensland city is transformed into the transport hub for 70,000 American and Australian soldiers destined for combat in the South Pacific. 

The first biography to focus exclusively on Angus Young - from his remarkable rise from working-class Glasgow and Sydney to the biggest stages in the world. Angus Young, the cofounder and the last remaining original member of AC/DC, has for more than 40 years been the face, the sound and sometimes the exposed backside of the trailblazing rock band.

In the second half of the 19th century, Melbourne is a veritable boom town, as hopefuls from every corner of the globe flock to the gold fields of Victoria. And where people crave gold, they also crave entertainment....

Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles – from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In The Great World, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But The Great World is more than a novel of war. Ranging over 70 years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.

A first-rate thriller about an American millionaire who owns the House of Cain, a haven for murderers wanted by the law. Austilene Thorpe is accused of murder but then disappears from gaol. Her fiance, Martin Sherwood, goes blind from shock. His famous adventuring brother Monty learns that Austilene is in a refuge for murderers in the far north-east corner of South Australia, and together the Sherwoods set out to find her and bring her back to Melbourne....

The war on drugs has been official American policy since the 1970s, with the UK, Europe, and much of the world following suit. It is at best a failed policy, according to best-selling author Antony Loewenstein. Its direct results have included mass incarceration in the US, extreme violence in different parts of the world, the backing of dictatorships, and surging drug addiction globally. And now the Trump administration is unleashing diplomatic and military forces against any softening of the conflict. 

During a state visit to Australia in 1928, Her Royal Highness Princess Natalie, heiress to the throne of Rolandia, is abducted from the transcontinental train at Cook on the Nullarbor Plain by a gang led by two brilliant Americans, Earle Lawrence and Van Horton. They hide her in caves near Eucla on the Great Australian Bight, until the search is called off and a ransom is arranged....

Forensic psychiatrist Donald Grant asks, what is it about murder that fascinates us? Is it the chill whisper of fear reminding us we too can kill? Grant describes 10 true murder cases, each with unique triggers. For most of us, murder is an arm's length experience, close enough to frighten and fascinate yet far enough not to traumatise. For those directly affected, murder can be scarring. Our restless chatter about murder, our state of heightened alert, our endless appetite for news, may all just be play therapy, reassuring us that our own killer instincts are under control.

A powerful story of Australia's great sheep farms from one of our greatest writers. Gripped by Drought is a story of a man's battle not only with the elements of nature which threatened the ruin of his huge Australian sheep-farm, but also with a loveless and unhappy marriage. For Frank Mayne, master of well-nigh a million-acre sheep station, life assumed its most dreary aspect. No rain for his farm, a wife who involved him in an orgy of spending and entertainment and with disaster just round the corner, there seemed little prospect of happiness.

 The Sentimental Bloke tells the story of Bill, a member of a larrikin push (or gang) in Melbourne's Little Lonsdale red-light district, who encounters Doreen, a young woman "of some social aspiration", in a local market. Narrated by Bill, the poems chronicle their courtship and marriage, detailing his transformation from a violence-prone gang member to a contented husband and father.  

Into the hard-living world of travelling shearers in the Australian outback comes internationally acclaimed writer Roger McDonald, driving an old truck rattling with cooking gear. He has abandoned writing for a time and found work as a cook for a team of New Zealand shearers working through New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. Written with an insider's affection and familiarity sharpened by an outsider's perception, this moving account of working life in a classic Australian industry gives a new twist to a long tradition of outback travel writing.

Alcohol, usually beer, is an integral part of Australian culture. Australian writers from Henry Lawson onwards praise, blame and generally celebrate the demon drink. It can develop or ruin friendships, create farcical situations, breed or shatter illusions. Broadcaster and writer Jim Haynes has collected short stories and verse from well-known Australians that place that pint of beer at the centre of things.

 The Glugs of Gosh is a book of satirical verse written by Australian author C. J. Dennis, published by Angus & Robertson in 1917. The book's 13 poems are vignettes of life in a fictional kingdom called Gosh, inhabited by an arboreal race (that is to say, climbers) known as Glugs. Dennis describes the Glugs as a "stupid race of docile folk". 

James Moody of the 2/1st Machine Gun Battalion found an Egyptian dog in 1940, who became Horrie, the Battalion's mascot. He wrote it first as a simple tale, augmented by his own photographs of Horrie and his mates in action in Greece, Crete and Palestine. This was sent to Ion Idriess, who developed the book with a series of questions, to finally develop the classic tale of man's best friend: Horrie the Wog Dog. 

Originally released as a B-side in 1980, 'Down Under' made Men at Work the biggest band on the planet. The song became an alternative Australian anthem and its video (recorded on the sand dunes of Cronulla) became an image of Australia recognised the world over. Even when Men at Work suddenly disappeared, 'Down Under' remained in the national psyche.