Showing titles in Australia, New Zealand & Oceania

It was 1786 when Arthur Phillip, an ambitious captain in the Royal Navy, was assigned the formidable task of organizing an expedition to Australia in order to establish a penal colony. With the authority of a renowned historian and the narrative grace of a brilliant novelist, Thomas Keneally offers an insider's perspective into the dramatic saga of the birth of a vibrant society in an unfamiliar land.

Late in the night of April 14, 1912, the mighty Titanic, a passenger liner traveling from Southampton, England, to New York City, struck an iceberg four hundred miles south of Newfoundland. Its sinking over the next two and a half hours brought the ship—mythological in name and size—100 years of infamy.

In May 1942, Admiral Jack Fletcher's Task Force 17 closed in for the war's first major clash with the Japanese Navy. The Neosho, a vitally important tanker, was escorted by a destroyer, the Sims. The ships were attacked by Japanese dive bombers, and when the smoke cleared, the Sims had slipped beneath the waves. Scores of sailors were killed or wounded while hundreds bobbed in shark-infested waters.

Spanning several centuries of history in the Pacific, The Legends and Myths of Hawaiʻi: Fables and Folk-Lore of a Strange People is a collection of Hawaiian stories that were preserved through the ages by oral tradition and documented for posterity by King David Kalākaua in 1887. This massive tome recalls the tales of chiefs and kings, explorers and pirates, prophets, sorceresses, and renegades. This is the first in a series of 22 parts.

One American soldier called it "a green hell on Earth". Monsoon-soaked wilderness, debilitating heat, impassable mountains, torrential rivers, and disease-infested swamps - New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the empire's strategy to knock Australia out of the war.

History of Australia Australia is one of those countries that are known for the fauna – but not always for their remarkable past. Starting with the history of the aboriginal roots and going for its evolution into the present day, Australia was not an easy continent to live in. There used to be bloodshed, conflict, and a lot of negativity at every step. However, while it may feature a dark past marked by battles, massacres, and conflicts between the aboriginal folk and the people, it is these events that turned Australia into what it is today. Each event brought with it a lesson – one ...

Girt. No word could better capture the essence of Australia.... In this hilarious history, David Hunt reveals the truth of Australia's past, from megafauna to Macquarie - the cock-ups and curiosities, the forgotten eccentrics and Eureka moments that have made us who we are. Girt introduces forgotten heroes like Mary McLoghlin, transported for the crime of "felony of sock", and Trim the cat, who beat a French monkey to become the first animal to circumnavigate Australia.

From the author of Pacific Payback comes the gripping true story of the Cactus Air Force and how this rugged crew of dive bombers helped save Guadalcanal and won the war. November 1942: Japanese and American forces have been fighting for control of Guadalcanal, a small but pivotal island in Japan's expansion through the South Pacific.

The Dogs That Made Australia pays tribute to the dogs that gave their all for our prosperity: the fearless hounds that saved fledgling colonies from famine; the courageous heelers and tireless collies that powered the rise of beef and wool; the tough little home-grown terriers that protected the homestead and garden; and the extraordinary police dogs, ahead of their time, loved by the nation. The selfless exploits of our heroic dogs are writ indelibly in our nation's heritage and identity.

When my full-blooded Hawaiian mother was a very young girl, she was hanai adopted by her Aunty Ida. Being a personal friend of Queen Emma, Anty Ida lived in her summer palace in Nu'uanu. It was there that my mother lived and played. Many years later, my brother and I went to visit Queen Emma's summer palace with my mother. The palace was now a museum. I did not understand my mother's subdued spirit and silence. As we walked the palace, I could clearly see emotions welling up within her and then being suppressed.

The harrowing, dramatic and profoundly moving story of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War. Now a major six-part television series. By the end of the Great War, 45 Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over 200 had been decorated. These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them.

Established after World War I by the Royal Australian Navy, the Coast Watchers were a loose organisation of several hundred European settlers, missionaries, patrol officers and planters living in British and Australian Pacific Island territories whose job it was to observe and report on the enemy. They were mostly all unpaid volunteers whose job it was simply to observe and report on foreign shipping and aeroplane movements. It was never envisaged that the Coast Watchers would do any fighting, nor operate inside enemy-occupied territory.

While doing fieldwork on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, anthropologist Gregory Forth came across people talking about half-apelike, half-humanlike creatures that once lived in a cave on the slopes of a nearby volcano. Over the years he continued to record what locals had to say about these mystery hominoids while searching for ways to explain them as imaginary symbols of the wild or other cultural representations. We follow Forth on the trail of this mystery hominoid, and the space they occupy in islanders' culture as both natural creatures and as supernatural beings.

In the 1930s, Jill Ker's parents bought a sheep farm on the western plains of New South Wales. In 1944, they lost nearly everything when a drought hit. Forced to leave Coorain, 11-year-old Jill and her mother settled in Sydney where Jill struggled to find a place for herself among Sydney's elite. Her story, both a chronicle of life in the Australian outback and the odyssey of a brilliant woman fighting the constraints of her time, offers a loving view of Australia.

The New World of the 18th century was dotted with failed colonies, and New South Wales nearly joined them. The motley crew of unruly marines and bedraggled convicts who arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 in leaky boats nearly starved to death. They could easily have been murdered by hostile locals, been overwhelmed by an attack from French or Spanish expeditions or been brought undone by the Castle Hill uprising of 1804. Yet through fortunate decisions, a few remarkably good leaders and, most of all, good luck, Sydney survived and thrived.

Most of us today rarely see a dead body. In 19th-century Sydney, when health was precarious and workplaces and the busy city streets were often dangerous, witnessing a death was rather common. And any death that was sudden or suspicious would be investigated by the coroner. Henry Shiell was the Sydney city coroner from 1866 to 1889. In the course of his unusually long career, he delved into the lives, loves, crimes, homes, and workplaces of colonial Sydneysiders.

In this now classic text, Martha Beckwith skillfully navigated an expansive collection of books, articles, and manuscripts to compile the definitive collection of mythological narratives of the native Hawaiian peoples. In addition to its importance for Hawaiian folklore and ethnology proper, Beckwith situates these stories within their broader regional context, offering comparisons to the traditions of Tahiti, Tonga, Samoa and other island nations.

Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti - war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.

Most Australians have heard of the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 and of Harry 'Breaker' Morant, a figure who rivals Ned Kelly as an archetypal Australian folk hero. Born in England and emigrating to Queensland in 1883 in his early 20s, Morant was a charming but reckless man who established a reputation as a rider, polo player and writer. He submitted ballads to The Bulletin that were published under the name 'The Breaker' and counted Banjo Paterson as a friend.

It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's flagship, was loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the company's fleet, a tangible symbol of the world's richest and most powerful commercial monopoly. She set sail with great fanfare, but the Batavia and her gold would never reach Java.