Australia Oceania category: 2401 books

On August 7th 1915, men of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade staged one of the most tragic, brave and futile charges of the First World War. Seeking to break out of the Anzac position at Gallipoli they attempted to storm an extraordinarily strong Turkish position, defended by artillery, machineguns and...

For centuries before the arrival in Australia of Captain Cook and the so-called First Fleet in 1788, intrepid seafaring explorers had been searching, with varied results, for the fabled “Great Southland.” In this enthralling history of early discovery, Graham Seal offers breathtaking tales of shipwrecks,...

A Journey through Colonial History with the Ancestors The author’s ancestors in Australia all came from the British Isles. Two came on the First Fleet in 1788 and none came later than the 1830s, or were less than great-great-grandparents. In the direct lines, the author has found nine convicts....

The leading Australian astronomer of his generation, John Bolton (1922–93), was born in Sheffield and educated at Cambridge University. After wartime service in the Royal Navy, he arrived in Sydney and joined the CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory. In the late 1940s he discovered and identified the first...

From the early invention of the boomerang as an effective hunting weapon to todays ground-breaking contributions to science and technology, Australians have always proven brilliantly adept at coming up with creative solutions to challenging problems. From manufacturing to agriculture, film to medicine,...

Bold and inspiring, this insider's story recalls the life of a stolen child who grew up to be an angry, addicted young man, only to eventually undergo a life-changing transformation into a compassionate pastor. Beaten, deprived of his freedom, and used as child labor, Bill Simon's abnormal childhood...

As Australia became a nation in 1901, no one anticipated that ‘Aboriginal affairs' would become an on-going national preoccupation. Not ‘dying out' as predicted, Aboriginal numbers recovered and – along with Torres Strait Islanders – they became an articulate presence, aggrieved at colonial...

The settlement of Australia and New Zealand were among the most ambitions experiments in social engineering ever attempted. But the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who made it happen are often absent from the standard histories. This is my case for including ordinary people in national...

Tooth and Nail is an indispensable history of how Europeans, through the introduction of a single species, changed Australia forever. Tooth and Nail is a beautifully written and wonderfully entertaining history about human reactions to the rabbit. A survivor of drought, fire, flood, diseases,...

Evangelical Christianity is one of the most formative and least acknowledged movements in Australian history. This book accords evangelicals their rightful place in the development of Australian identity and values. Evangelicalism focuses on the gospel, the God-given means not only of the salvation...

Winner of the 2009 Tasmania Book Prize Winner of the 2008 Colin Roderick Award Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen’s Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life. In this book, James Boyce shows...

In 2004 on Palm Island, an Aboriginal settlement in the "Deep North" of Australia, a thirty-six-year-old man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer. Forty minutes later he was dead in the jailhouse. The police claimed he'd tripped on a step, but his liver was ruptured....

When culture and faith collide . . . nothing is sacred. In the Aboriginal missions of far northern Australia, it was a battle between saving souls and saving traditional culture. Every Secret Thing is a rough, tough, hilarious portrayal of the Bush Mob and the Mission Mob, and the hapless clergy trying...

Abel Janszoon Tasman was a Dutch seafarer, explorer and merchant, best known for his voyages of 1642 and 1644 in the service of the VOC. He was the first known European explorer to reach the islands of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and New Zealand, and to sight the Fiji islands. His navigator François...