Item category 1: Countries: History & Geography

The true story of the discovery of gold in Australia and the shameless pretender who took the credit, from the popular author of Rum. Ask Google "Who discovered gold in Australia?" and you'll promptly get 'Edward Hammond Hargraves'. Hargraves has for decades received the fame, fortune and adulati...

For over twenty years, Ittay Flescher has worked as an educator, journalist and peacebuilder in Melbourne and Jerusalem. When he woke up on the morning of October 7, 2023 to the sounds of rocket sirens over Jerusalem and later saw the devastation of Gaza in response, the grief and sadness that en...

A gripping account of hidden identity, military courage, and an against-all-odds reunion. Four days after Germany's surrender in May 1945, a young British officer took a jeep and headed east into Germany. But this was no ordinary soldier. Manfred Gans was searching for his family. As a Jewish boy...

Is a River Alive? flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys: The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, ...

London is both a physical metropolis and a psychic encounter. Depraved depictions of the city in fiction, film, poetry, television and theatre have merged with its dark history, creating a phantasmagoria of murder, vice and the unnatural. In this panoptic look at England's capital at its most eer...

Stretching from Fiji in the east to New Guinea in the west, Melanesia is astonishingly diverse. Its islands are home to some 1200 language groups, many of them still isolated from the outside world. In Australia, this complex region tends to make the news only in times of crisis- military coups i...

In Nation, Memory, Myth, Steve Vizard brings an original perspective to the foundational myth of Gallipoli as a sacred bearer of Australian national values and identity. In this scrupulously researched close reading of the Gallipoli mythology, Vizard dissects the elements common to all national m...

Retro Melbourne is a pictorial feast of rare images of the city, suburbs and country centres taken by photographer Fred Mitchell in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. Melbourne street scenes, people heading off to work, trams and traffic and businesses and buildings now long gone are displayed in ...

The impact of World War I still ripples through time. In this moving and essential book, historian Patricia Skehan brings to light secret details of Anzac experiences on the Western Front. In the annals of human history, the stakes are highest in war. And in World War I, what was at stake was the...

From actor, comedian, writer, and host of the hit history podcast SNAFU, Ed Helms brings you an absurdly entertaining look at history's greatest screwups, complete with lively illustrations. History contains a plethora of insane screwups-otherwise known as SNAFUs. Coined during World War I, SNAFU...