I’ve now written four books, of which three are Australian history. My first two books were World War 2 military history. My publishers persist in calling each book a best-seller, and who am I to disagree? I live in France and my third book A Good Place To Hide is about a French community that rescued Jews from the Nazis. My fourth book Ten Rogues took me back to Australian history, telling the story of a bunch of ten convicts who in 1834 nicked a brig and sailed it from Tasmania to Chile without a map or a compass.
This really is quite an extraordinary book, published on 1 January 1999. Alice Thomson is a British journalist who came to Australia to write a history of the overland telegraph line connecting Darwin to Adelaide. The line was built by her great-grandfather Charles Todd, a young English engineer. It is partly a touching love story, part a great historical narrative, and part a fascinating travel book. To do her research, Alice Thomson and her husband came to Australia and drove the length of the old telegraph line, picking up anecdotes and atmosphere along the way. As an aside, I mention that a seamless line of women in Alice Thomson’s family have borne the name Alice. Alice Springs was named after Charles Todd’s young wife Alice. The dry river that runs through Alice Springs is called the Todd River.
This work charts the author's journey in the footsteps of her great-great grandfather, Charles Heavitree Todd, the man who strung the telegraph across Australia. It brings together a mix of family history and exploration with a young couple's trek, as they follow the same line 150 years later.
I’m a professional history nerd who is perennially interested in both sides of the history coin: What happened? How do we know? I’ve got a PhD in sixteenth-century European history, have written articles that cover things from antiquity to Vikings in America, and have written several history books about Australia and its region. I like history that is robust, so I’m always looking for books that make clever use of sources. And I love stories that disrupt preconceptions, so I enjoy researching and writing and reading histories that make you think.
If the British empire’s first historians had a knack for anything it was omitting to mention what some of what their predecessors did for the sake of empire. Aboriginal Convicts is one of those books that really challenges us to rethink the stories we have received about British colonization. By tracing the lives of Indigenous people in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand who were sentenced to transportation as convicts this groundbreaking book turns the table on the way we see Britain’s empire in the nineteenth century.
When most of us imagine an Australian convict we see an Englishman or an Irish lass transported for stealing a loaf of bread or a scrap of cloth. Contrary to this popular image, however, Australian penal settlements were actually far more ethnically diverse, comprising individuals transported from British colonies throughout the world.
As Kristyn Harman shows in Aboriginal Convicts, there were also a surprising number of indigenous convicts transported from different British settlements, including ninety Aboriginal convicts from all over Australia, thirty-four Khoisan from the Cape Colony (South Africa) and six Maori from New Zealand.
This book is so timely. In Australia, we’ve just had
a referendum on including an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the
Constitution. It failed because most Australians didn’t know enough about our
history to see that we need to listen attentively to First Nations people.
What David Marr has given us in Killing for Country is a grim, long,
cinematic account of frontier violence. Marr is well known in Australia as a
trenchant journalist, writer, and broadcaster. Recently, he learned that two
ancestors were among the Native Police forces who committed massacres.
He
presents this terrible family history with a sense of responsibility. It is
based on exhaustive research and is written in spare, compelling prose.
A gripping reckoning with the bloody history of Australia's frontier wars
David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result - a soul-searching Australian history. This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world - of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country - a war still unresolved in today's Australia. "This book is more than a personal reckoning with Marr's forebears…
I have always loved reading and its ability to take you far away to a distant time and place and lift you up. As a kid, I never left the house without a book, and the ones that made me laugh were my go-to's. I believe the ability to make people laugh is a truly special talent, especially while making the text relatable, so the reader’s always asking, wow, what would I do in that situation? My readers often tell me that my writing sounds just like me, which is wonderful because there’s no need to pretend. You will always know what you’ll get with me!
A heart-warming and hilarious novel about the highs and lows of marriage, fraud, and goat’s cheese.
Libby Popovic is a country girl who’s now living a golden life in Bondi with her confident financier husband Ludo, and their two children. When Ludo is jailed for financial fraud, and Libby’s friends and family lose tens of thousands of dollars as a result, she feels agonisingly complicit.
Matters go from atrocious to worse when her possessions and home are repossessed, Libby is sacked, and a priceless family heirloom is wrecked. While camping out at the family goat farm, Libby must re-evaluate her life choices. How will she crawl out of financial ruin? Can she make amends? And can she save her family from falling apart?
Bacon is a writer in love with language. Her prose is fluid, spontaneous, and consistently engaging, and she sparks characterisation in deft, painterly strokes. Serengotti is a literary crime novel, although it’s much more than that.
It examines culture and displacement, what happens when things turn sour, and how to right yourself. It’s a story of truth and consequences, a puzzle enough to puzzle yet not to confuse. Here, Bacon mines her African-Australian heritage and finds a rich seam. The work is infused with details that push the story forward, enhance the text, and create an environment of understanding.
Whilst much of her work is speculative, this is not the case here, but it matters not. Bacon shows us that magic can exist in the every day without embellishment. Serengotti awaits your exploration.
In the one tumultuous day, Ch’anzu loses hir job and finds wife Scarlet in bed with a stranger. As life unexpectedly spirals out of control, Ch’anzu turns to hir charismatic Aunt Maé for comfort and wisdom, and makes the bold move to work on a project in Serengotti, a migrant African outpost in rural Australia. In a novel haunted by the strangeness and yearnings of a displaced community – both beautiful and fractured – Ch’anzu is forced to confront hir many demons. Back in the city, brother Tex has gone missing. In Serengotti violence and infidelity simmer. This is a…
I am a Research Professor in history at UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy. I now mostly write on the military history of British India history but for 27 years I worked at the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s national military museum, where I became Principal Historian. Much of my career was devoted to Australian military history and more than half of my 40 or so books are in that field. That puts me in a good position to comment upon what I think are the five best books in the field of Australian military history (my own excepted, of course).
My late colleague at UNSW Canberra, Jeff Grey, wrote this important book at the age of just 31. The product of a military family, Jeff blossomed from a specialist in Commonwealth operations in the Korean war into the author of a confident, opinionated (but impressively well researched) general history that went through three editions before Jeff’s untimely death in 2016. Jeff deserves credit for seeing that despite the resurgence in interest in Australia’s military history over the 1980s, no one had spotted the need for a comprehensive book that showed us how the bits went together. Thirty years on, no one has bettered it.
A Military History of Australia provides a detailed chronological narrative of Australia's wars across more than two hundred years, set in the contexts of defence and strategic policy, the development of society and the impact of war and military service on Australia and Australians. It discusses the development of the armed forces as institutions and examines the relationship between governments and military policy. This book is a revised and updated edition of one of the most acclaimed overviews of Australian military history available. It is the only comprehensive, single-volume treatment of the role and development of Australia's military and their…
Look, it’s simple really. Peter Pan visited me when I was young, abducted me, and showed me that remaining a big kid is much more beneficial than becoming a boring adult with too many responsibilities. I’ve published multiple MG books and prefer this genre’s colourful, exciting stories. I’m also Australian, and we have a weird sense of humour, so I’m not sure if that classifies as expertise on this particular subject, but let’s go with that.
A blast from the past. I feel this book never got the attention it truly deserved. From a sassy, headstrong lead, to a fashionable neighbour akin to Moira Rose, this immersive story is about friendship, determination, and a mystery here and there. I adored this character who was ahead of her time and always wished we had a little more Hazel Green in our lives!
Each year, on Frogg Day, a parade fills the streets and children are not allowed to take part,but it hasn't always been that way and it certainly doesn't seem fair to Hazel Green. So she decides to rally the children of the Moody Building to build a float for the parade. But things go awry when she is accused of stealing a recipe from her favorite baker and giving it to his rival. At the same time, the children ban her from participating in the parade because she tried to convince them that their float would topple. But with the…
I am an African Australian author of several novels and fiction collections, and a finalist in the 2022 World Fantasy Award. I was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. I have a master's degree with distinction in distributed computer systems, a master's degree in creative writing, and a PhD in creative writing. The short story is my sweetest spot. I have a deep passion for the literary speculative, and I write across genres and forms, with award-winning genre-bending works. I am especially curious about stories of culture, diversity, climate change, writing the other and betwixt.
Slipstream fiction doesn’t get more uncanny than this collection of short stories featuring dead children and sometimes parents behind those deaths.The Forest of Dead Children is a startling book, absolutely alarming, in its suspense and incongruity pertaining to matters of little ones, especially if you’re a parent. The allure of European slipstream author Andrew Hook’s collection is in its darkness and revelation of the potency and frailty of parenthood, right there on the balance, and what, what, could possibly go wrong? Wholly unconventional and disturbingly captivating.
Black Shuck Shadows presents a collectable series of micro-collections, intended as a sampler to introduce readers to the best in classic and modern horror. In The Forest of Dead Children, Hook offers five tales of children in peril.
I’m an Australian zoologist, botanist, and best-selling prize-winning writer. An earlier book of mine, Feral Future, inspired the formation of the Invasive Species Council, an Australian conservation lobby group. My Where Song Began, was a best-seller that became the first nature book to win the Australian Book Industry Award for best General Non Fiction. It was republished in the US. I have co-edited Wildlife Australia magazine and written for many magazines and newspapers, including nature columns as well as features. As a teenager I discovered new lizard species, one of which was named after me.
English naturalist John Gould is recognised as the father of bird study in Australia.
During 19 months in 1838-1840 he travelled in NSW, South Australia, and Tasmania, seeing the birds and landscapes before they had been affected much by Europeans, and leaving insightful descriptions that provide a unique window into a past when, for example, regent honeyeaters, endangered today, flitted about in the middle of Adelaide city.
Gould introduced the budgerigar to Europe, was the first to describe the bowers of bowerbirds, and the first in so many ways. His book appeared in 1865 but remains relevant today. I quoted him many times in my bird book for his unique insights and observations. But the common names he used can be difficult to swallow. He praised the regent honeyeater as ‘one of the most beautiful birds inhabiting Australia’ but called it the ‘warty-faced honeyeater’.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank…
I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
This was the book that convinced me that it is worthwhile exploring the past so as to rediscover and rethink works of art made by indigenous people living under imperial conditions.
I love its movement around the world, the close readings of works that no other scholars had ever considered, and the moral urgency that underpins every one of its lines.
It is often assumed that the verbal and visual languages of Indigenous people had little influence upon the classification of scientific, legal, and artistic objects in the metropolises and museums of nineteenth-century colonial powers. However colonized locals did more than merely collect material for interested colonizers. In developing the concept of anachronism for the analysis of colonial material this book writes the complex biographies for five key objects that exemplify, embody, and refract the tensions of nineteenth-century history. Through an analysis of particular language notations and drawings hidden in colonial documents and a reexamination of cross-cultural communication, the book writes…
A century of prejudice is laid bare in these books, but within their pages are countless subtle and overt ways that gay Australian men have given homophobes the big middle finger. We may not always have thrived, but through resistance, migration, verbal agility, notoriety, and sheer resilience, collectively we have conquered. I stand on enormous shoulders at a time when queer writing is proliferating on an inevitable tide of equality that has risen across my lifetime in this country. My selections encompass first nations and migrant stories, some of the pioneers of our gay literature, and ‘outside’ voices bravely looking in to discern us with dignity.
This is a searing memoir about siblings—Annabet and Anders—who grew up in an abusive household in a privileged Sydney suburb; but it is also the author’s search for the reasons behind her gay brother’s suicide. Anders Ousback became an accomplished restaurateur and potter, yet Annabet explores how despite this success, he never really outran his demons. She courageously searches for their source, using his surviving journal as clues, and what she finds throws up an incomplete and terrifying picture of a young gay Australian boy faced with the ‘rules’ of gender and sexual politics in postwar Sydney, where gay men were expected to pretend to survive. The real red herring in this story is unforgettable.
Annabet and her younger brother Anders grew up in idyllic surrounds on the lower north shore of Sydney in the 1950s. They lived in the original boatshed on Balmoral Beach and had an Australian mother and an imposing Swedish Naval captain for a father. However, nothing was as it seemed and Annabet and Anders were exposed to harsh, often irrational and frequently violent discipline from both parents, which left them emotionally unbalanced and starved of affection. In a time where domestic violence was never discussed within the family let alone outside it, Annabet and Anders struggled to keep their spirits…
