Australia Oceania category: 2401 books

The third edition of the dMAC Digest contains information on the First Fleet which was the first step in the colonization of the continent, later named Australia. It arrived on 20 January 1788 and consisted of 1,044 persons, of which 696 were convicts, in nine ships. Two French ships commanded by...

To Hell and High Water tells the story of the quest of two brothers to conquer the extreme conditions of outback Australia, recreating the Bourke to Hungerford tramp that influenced some of Australian literary legend Henry Lawsons greatest works. The book is part autobiography and part biography. It...

Nearly one million Australians out of a total population of just seven million people joined the armed forces in World War II. They made an enormous contribution to the allied war effort; they inflicted the first land defeat of the Japanese at Milne Bay in New Guinea during that war and played a crucial...

A wonderfully witty and entertaining retelling of a little-known yet very important period of Australia’s history, this is a fictionalized account of acclaimed Australian writer Elizabeth Stead’s experiences in a 1940s postwar housing commission camp. It’s November 1948, and the widowed Hanora...

Nearly a century before Tasmanian Mary Donaldson became Princess Mary of Denmark, the beautiful and talented Sydney-born Elsie Caroline Thompson - a singer, actress, dancer and comedienne - became the first Australian to marry overseas royalty - an Indian maharaja. This is an epic historical...

The remarkable wartime experiences of Kit McNaughton Kitty’s War is based upon the previously unpublished war diaries of Great War army nurse Sister Kit McNaughton. Kit and historian Janet Butler grew up in the same Victorian district of drystone walls, wheatfields and meandering creeks, except...

A two part story portraying the ancestry of one man, whose heritage evolved from two different cultures. His eclectic Great Grandfathers, Henry and Philemon, were boatsmen who surrendered their rudderless and carefree ways, never again returning to the Swedish seas and the canals of British Birmingham....

In Australian Battalion Commanders in the Second World War, Garth Pratten explores, for the first time, the background, role and conduct of the commanding officers of Australian infantry battalions in World War II. Despite their vital role as the lynchpins of the battlefield, uniting the senior officers...

This story is a blueprint – a written documentary and tangible map of a grassroots activist community initiative of people versus the machine. In their own words, residents of a historical inner city suburb in Queensland describe their protracted and bitter battle with the Brisbane City Council,...

A rollicking tale of chain-smoking newspapermen, union leaders, revolutionaries, crooked cops, corrupt politicians, spies, dictators, and ordinary working people, this is the memoir of political journalist Alex Mitchell, who worked on several newspapers around Australia before landing in Fleet Street...

An Aboriginal insider's view into Australia's Hindmarsh Island Affair, this remarkable record tells the personal narrative of key Ngarrindjeri spokeswoman, the late Doreen Kartinyeri. Chronicling her victorious battle for the protection of Aboriginal women's sites, this witty memoir reveals Doreen's...

In Rage, Rebellion - A volume comprising three feature pieces: Backstage at the Revolution While the African National Congress was a banned organization in South Africa, and the white minority ruled with gunfire, the ANC theatre troupe Amandla toured the world. Amandla is Power. Every performer...

John Murphy’s Evatt: A life is a biography of Australian parliamentarian and jurist HV Evatt. Remembered as the first foreign minister to argue for an independent Australian policy in the 1940s and for his central role in the formation of the UN, Evatt went on to be the leader of the Labor party...

In 1857 all of the Arts students at the University of Sydney could fit into a single photograph. Now there are more than one million university students in Australia. After World War II, Australian universities became less elite but more important, growing from six small institutions educating less...