Scribe Publications, 2017. — 288 p. In 1942, on the recommendation of 26-year-old Bob Santamaria, Australia's Catholic bishops created a clandestine church organisation to smash the Communist Party's massive trade union base. Soon, The Movement, working closely with ASIO, became a sophisticated intelligence agency that would influence every corner of politics. Santamaria based...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. — 272 p. Illuminating the experiences of immigrants to Australia in the late twentieth century, this book uses oral history to explore how identity and belonging are shaped through migration. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, many inhabitants from the small Greek island of Limnos travelled to Australia to flee post-war devastation and economic disaster....
Melbourne University Publishing, 2021. — 320 p. An exploration of Islam in Australia that examines the diverse ways Muslims engage with religion locally. Islam has long been a part of the multicultural landscape of major urban centres in Australia and encompasses a great diversity of theological, jurisprudential and cultural practices. Despite this, in popular discourse, media...
Peter Lang, 2021. — 290 p. This book explains how and why, Australian governments shifted from their historical relationship with Britain to the beginning of a primary reliance on the United States between 1942 and 1957. It shows that, while the Curtin and Chifley ALP governments sought to maintain and strengthen Australia’s links with Britain, the Menzies administration took...
Springer International Publishing, 2017. — 254 p. This book contributes to the global turn in First World War studies by exploring Australians' engagements with the conflict across varied boundaries and by situating Australian voices and perspectives within broader, more complex contexts. This diverse and multifaceted collection includes chapters on the composition and...
Third Edition. — Allen and Unwin, 2008. — 517 p. First published in 1988 and now in its fourth updated edition, What Happened When will continue to settle arguments, refresh memories, furnish some surprises, and answer a lot of questions. In Australia in 1932, some of the many events which occurred included, the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the death of Phar Lap, the...
Constable and Robinson, 2014. — 448 p. Intended as a diversion from the Somme, Fromelles was was the worst-ever military disaster in Australian military history, and is recognised as one of the bloodiest and most useless battles of the First World War. With the recent discovery of a mass grave and the disinterment of many diggers, it has now entered national consciousness in...
National Library of Australia, 1985. — 414 p. An arrangement of Bates historical and ethnographic manuscripts originally prepared during work for the Western Australian Government (1904-1912) for a proposed book of the same title; includes detailed editorial commentary concerning arrangement, deletion and sources and an introductory biography and background to the work; covers...
Allen Unwin, 1995. — 234 p. Australia's War, 1914-1918 explores Australia's involvement in the First World War and the effect this had on the nation' s society. In this very accessible book, Joan Beaumont, Pam Maclean, Marnie Haig-Muir and David Lowe focus on: where Australians fought and why; the tensions and realignments within Australian politics in the period of 1914-18;...
Routledge, 1997. — 255 p. The Second World War was a dominant experience in Australian history. For the first time the country faced the threat of invasion. The economy and society were mobilised to an unprecedented degree, with 550 000 men and women, or one in twelve of a population of over 7 million, serving in the armed forces overseas. Social patterns and family life were...
Penguin Random House Australia, 2015. — 400 p. The vast, ancient land of Australia was settled in two main streams, far apart in time and origin. The first stream of immigrants came ashore some 50,000 years ago when the islands of Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea were one. The second began to arrive from Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Each had to come to terms...
Barajima Books, 2020. — 190 p. Turning the Tide, first published in 1944 as The Jap was Thrashed: An Official Story of the Australian Soldier – First Victor of the “Invincible Jap”, is a World War II account of the Australian Army's battle and eventual defeat of Japanese forces in portions of New Guinea (Milne Bay, the Owen-Stanleys, Buna, Gona, and Sanananda) in 1942-1943. The...
Black Inc., 2017. — 493 p. It was the era of Hawke and Keating, Kylie and INXS, the America’s Cup and the Bicentenary. It was perhaps the most controversial decade in Australian history, with high-flying entrepreneurs booming and busting, torrid debates over land rights and immigration, the advent of AIDS, a harsh recession and the rise of the New Right. It was a time when...
Black Inc., 2015. — 386 p. Cross-dressing convicts, effeminate bushrangers and women-shortage woes - here is the first ever history of sex in Australia, from Botany Bay to the present-day. In this fascinating social history, Frank Bongiorno uses striking examples to chart the changing sex lives of Australians. Tracing the story up to the present, Bongiorno shows how the quest...
Black Inc., 2013. — 256 p. In 1835, a flood of settlers began spreading out across the Australian continent. in three years more land and more people were conquered than in the preceding fifty.In 1835 James Boyce brings this pivotal moment to life. He traces the power plays in Hobart, Sydney and London, and describes the key personalities of Melbourne's early days. He conjures...
Hardie Grant, 2017. — 352 p. Suppressed for nearly two centuries, The Vandemonian [Van Diemonian] War was a far-reaching conflict in the 1820s and 1830s between British colonists and British military, and the indigenous tribespeople of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania). The British formally colonised Van Diemen’s Land at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Small convict...
Hardie Grant Publishing, 2020. — 304 p. This is a history of Australia, measured by the gun. From bushrangers and soldiers to the many farmers and recreational shooters shooting animals and each other, the firearm is an inescapable part of Australia’s story and its characters. But just as guns have been a part of Australia’s modern identity, so too has gun control. After the...
Charles River Editors Press, 2018. — 56 p. A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained almost entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. From there, however, the subjugation of Australia would take place rapidly. Within 20 years of the first British settlements being...
Charles River Editors Press, 2020. — 52 p. Although Australia was actually colonized by the forced dispossession of the indigenous Aboriginals, the Commonwealth of Australia came about by the free federation of six self-governing British colonies in 1901, which makes it one of just a handful of nations that can proudly claim this. Thus, Australia is often imagined as a nation...
New South, 2013. — 320 p. Australian history has changed drastically over the last fifty years and has found itself at the centre of heated and consuming public debates. Australian History Now is an engaging and often surprising introduction to the ways we understand and write our history in academic, popular and school books, argue about it in the media, present it in museums...
Melbourne University Publishing, 1977. — 850 p. A History of Australia: From Earliest Times to 1838, deals with the pre-white settlement era and the earliest years of European colonisation through to the establishment of an increasingly settled society and the expeditions of the great inland explorers. This is not a general Australian history-it does not attempt to cover all...
Melbourne University Publishing, 1977. — 932 p. Melbourne University Press is proud to present Manning Clark's six-volume series, A History of Australia, published here for the first time in three paperback volumes. Today the six-volume history is one of the masterpieces of Australian writing. It is also one of the most passionately debated visions of Australian history, in...
Melbourne University Press, 2006. — 614 p. Colonial Ambition tells the story of the politicians and would-be politicians of Sydney, who were driven by a determination to lift themselves and their new colony to a higher level. They wanted parliamentary liberty, though they were sharply divided over the form it might take and these divisions, centred in Sydney, were unremitting....
Text Publishing Company, 2019. — 272 p. The preparation for a coming war and ultimately the commitment to that war was driven by White Australia's sense of vulnerability in the Pacific, by various nightmare scenarios in which Australia could be left to fend for itself, unaided by Britain, and by the determination to have racial purity at almost any cost. When the war came,...
UNSW Press, 2002. — 336 p. From the Swan River to the Hawkesbury, and from the sticky Arnhem Land mangrove to the soft green hills of Tasmania, this book describes the major conflicts fought on the Australian frontier to 1838. Based on extensive research and using overseas frontier wars to add perspective to the Australian experience, 'The Australian Frontier Wars 1788 - 1838'...
Pen and Sword Aviation, 2014. — 528 p. The Japanese air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942 are well-known to most Australians, although not perhaps to the rest of the world. What happened afterwards, however, remains unknown to many. This publication attempts to illuminate this little-known period of war history, charting the exploits, losses and successes of the RAF’s No 1...
ABC Books, 2018. — 323 p. The greatest escape story of Australian colonial history by the son of Australia's best-loved storyteller In 1828, James Porter, sailor, chancer, illywhacker, found himself on a ship bound for Van Diemen's Land, having been convicted of stealing a stack of beaver furs. After several escape attempts from the notorious penal colony, Porter, who told...
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021. — 312 p. The Australian nation has reached an impasse in Indigenous policy and practice and fresh strategies and perspectives are required. Trapped by History highlights a fundamental issue that the Australian nation must confront to develop a genuine relationship with Indigenous Australians. The existing relationship between Indigenous...
Woodslane Press, 2020. — 400 p. Professor John Croucher gives an account of the first and continuing history of the first peoples to live in the region now known as New South Wales, as well as its history from the days of British settlement and its more recent history, of the waves of other immigrants who have made New South Wales their home. Each section in the book focuses on...
Cambridge University Press, 2011. — 174 p. John Curtin remains a venerated leader. His role as Labor's wartime supremo is etched deep into the national psyche: the man who put Australia first, locked horns with Churchill, forged the alliance with the United States and became the saviour of the nation in its darkest hour. Drawing on new archival material including sensitive and...
Cambridge University Press, 2018. — 448 p. At last a history that explains how indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian democracy. The legacy of seizing a continent and alternately destroying and governing its original people shaped how white Australians came to see themselves as independent citizens. It also shows how shifting wider...
University of New South Wales Press, 2016. — 512 p. I became an urban historian because I believed that our cities deserved more of our curiosity and idealism. City Dreamers restores Australian cities, and those who created them, to their rightful place in the national imagination. Building on a lifetime's work, Graeme Davison views Australian history, from 1788 to the present...
Edinburgh University Press, 2021. — 304 p. This book creatively explores the gold rushes in the Tasman World through an examination of the Otago gold rushes, revealing how transnational connections and local social and natural environments shaped colonial identities. The first monograph-length study on the Otago gold rushes and their place in the histories of British and Irish...
Scarecrow Press, 2009. — 371 p. — (The A to Z Guide Series). This engaging reference examines the history of, the search for, and the discovery of Australia, taking full account of the evidence for and the speculation surrounding possible earlier contacts by the Ancient Egyptians, Arabs, and Chinese seamen. Day brings the expeditions to life, expressing the desires that drove...
Cambridge University Press, 2012. — 275 p. In 1942, the shadow of modern war reached Australia's shores for the first time. In this compelling volume, leading historians explore why 1942 was such a pivotal year in Australia's history, and explain how the nation confronted some of its greatest challenges. This broad ranging study covers key issues from political, economic and...
Routledge, 2020. — 280 p. ‘I pray that words spoken at this conference may carry beyond walls and reach thousands of ears hitherto deaf to warnings of the final catastrophe.’ So said Patrick White in June 1983 at an important symposium organised by the Australian National University to examine the whole issue of nuclear war and its implications for Australia. Many prominent...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. — 302 p. This book brings together long-obscured histories to discuss Australia’s cultural, social, and political diversity in depth. The history of Australia’s migrant and minority print media reveals extensive evidence for the nation’s global connectedness, from the colonial era to today. A fascinating and complex picture of Australia’s long-term...
Scarecrow Press, 2007. — 434 p. The last continent to be claimed by Europeans, Australia began to be settled by the British in 1788 in the form of a jail for its convicts. While British culture has had the largest influence on the country and its presence can be seen everywhere, the British were not Australia's original populace. The first inhabitants of Australia, the Aborigines,...
Allen and Unwin, 2020. — 320 p. As you climbed the rickety stairs of an old woolshed at Sydney harbor in 1944, you could hear rows of men and women in uniforms and headsets tapping away vigorously at small machines, under the careful watch of their young female trainers. Presiding over the cacophony was a tiny woman, known to everyone as "Mrs Mac," one of Australia's wartime...
Melbourne University Publishing, 2017. — 290 p. In this new history of the Australian Workers' Union, prominent author Nick Dyrenfurth traces the fortunes of the nation's oldest continuously operating trade union from its origins in the shearing sheds of the late nineteenth century through to it present-day representation of modern Australia's diverse workforce. The...
Penguin Random House, 2020. — 559 p. John Curtin became Australia’s Prime Minister eight weeks before Japan launched war in the Pacific. Curtin’s struggle for power against Joe Lyons and Bob Menzies, his dramatic use of it when he took office in October 1941, and his determination to be heard in Washington and London as Japan advanced, is a political epic unmatched in...
Penguin Random House, 2020. — 559 p. The first volume of John Curtin’s War was recognized as ‘a landmark in Australian political biography’ (The Australian) and ‘remarkable’ (AFR). That book ends with the fall of Singapore and a fundamental realignment of Australia’s place in the world: ‘The Americans were coming. So were the Japanese.’ This second volume, ‘Triumph and...
University of New South Wales Press, 2014. — 304 p. The Vietnam War was Australia's longest and most controversial military commitment of the twentieth century, ending in humiliation for the United States and its allies with the downfall of South Vietnam. The war provoked deep divisions in Australian society and politics, particularly since for the first time young men were...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. — 239 p. This book examines Australian colonial and foreign aid policy towards Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia in the age of international development (1945–1975). During this period, the academic and political understandings of development consolidated and informed Australian attempts to provide economic assistance to the poorer regions to its...
Brill, 2016. — 911 p. — (International Humanitarian Law Series 48). This unique volume provides a detailed analysis of Australia's 300 war crimes trials of principally Japanese accused conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This magnificent study of Australia's prosecution, from 1945 to 1951, of 800 Japanese, Formosan and Korean individuals accused of war...
Routledge, 2021. — 384 p. Over 20,000 ethnic Russians migrated to Australia after World War II – yet we know very little about their experiences. Some came via China, others from refugee camps in Europe. Many preferred to keep a low profile in Australia, and some attempted to ‘pass’ as Polish, West Ukrainian or Yugoslavian. They had good reason to do so: to the Soviet Union,...
Pan Macmillan Australia, 2016. — 421 p. In this interesting and engaging book, author Justine Ford provides a detailed history of Ron Iddles’ long and distinguished career in the police force, working mostly as a homicide investigator. She outlines the many reasons why he has always been considered by most people to be ‘a good cop’. She tells Ron’s story in a way that enables...
ANU Press, 2022. — 297 p. The first detailed history of imperial and national honours in Australia, Honouring a Nation tells the story of the honours system’s transformation from instrument of imperial unity to national institution. From the extension of British honours to colonial Australasia in the nineteenth century, through to Tony Abbott’s revival of knighthoods in the...
Heart Space Publications, 2018. — 200 p. For three hundred years the Chinese have influenced Australia - in a million ways and it continues to today. It is a fascinating story of a race transference and heritage from China to Australia. The book covers the following: Early migration to Australia of Chinese people, including their life and hardships on the goldfields....
Allen and Unwin, 2021. — 592 p. The bombing of Darwin by the Japanese on 19 February 1942 was the first wartime assault on Australian soil. The Japanese dropped more bombs on Darwin, killed more civilians in Darwin and sank more ships in Darwin than Pearl Harbor. Three months later, on 31 May 1942, three Japanese midget submarines crept into Sydney Harbour and caused an...