Australian Studies

ISBN: 9781743791608
Title: 1787 : THE LOST CHAPTERS OF AUSTRALIAS BEGINNINGS
Author: BRODIE NICK
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

For over 200 years Australia’s official history has focused on English colonisation and ‘discovery’, with tales of British explorers and first generation white Australians navigating the vast and unfriendly land. But what of the millennia before the English claimed Australia as their own and wrote the history books. 1787 traces the journey of Australia before the infamous 1788 date, to explore just how ‘discovered’ the southern continent was by not only the Indigenous Australians who had lived and prospered for thousands of years, but also the sailors, traders, fishermen and many others who had visited our shores.

This is not about voyages of ‘discovery’, cartography, geography, or hero-captains and their sailing ship adventures. This is a bigger history—of the rise and fall of empires, the shifts in global economies, and their impact on Australia. By charting the encounters with Australia and its original people by several major groups of visitors, primarily the Portuguese, Dutch, Malay, French, and British from the late Middle Ages, 1787 reveals the stories of first encounters between Indigenous Australians and foreigners, placing Indigenous Australians back into our known history rather than a timeless pre-historical one. It’s a fascinating story that shifts focus away from post-colonial history and engages the reader in the eventful and lively stories of Australia as a vast and active land participating in a global history.

Imprint: Hardie Grant Books
RRP: $29.99

ISBN: 9781760528218
Title: ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS : A History since 1788
Author: BROOME RICHARD
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: BACK IN STOCK SOON

'In this book Richard Broome has managed an enviable achievement. The vast sweeping story of Aboriginal Australia from 1788 is told in his typical lucid and imaginative style . This is an important work of great scholarship, passion and imagination.' - Professor Lynette Russell, Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University

In the creation of any new society, there are winners and losers. So it was with Australia as it grew from a colonial outpost to an affluent society.

Richard Broome tells the history of Australia from the standpoint of the original Australians: those who lost most in the early colonial struggle for power. Surveying over two centuries of Aboriginal-European encounters, he shows how white settlers steadily supplanted the original inhabitants, from the shining coasts to inland deserts, by sheer force of numbers, disease, technology and violence. He also tells the story of Aboriginal survival through resistance and accommodation, and traces the continuing Aboriginal struggle to move from the margins of a settler society to a more central place in modern Australia.

Broome's Aboriginal Australians has long been regarded as the most authoritative account of black-white relations in Australia. This fifth edition continues the story, covering the impact of the Northern Territory Intervention, the mining boom in remote Australia, the Uluru Statement, the resurgence of interest in traditional Aboriginal knowledge and culture, and the new generation of Aboriginal leaders.

Imprint: Allen and Unwin Publishers
RRP: $39.99

ISBN: 9781742232621
Title: ADELAIDE
Author: GOLDSWORTHY KERRYN
Format: HARD COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

A painting, a frog cake, a landmark, a statue, a haunting newspaper photograph, a bucket of peaches, pink shorts in parliament, concert tickets, tourist maps.

Kerryn Goldsworthy's Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of iconic objects. Adelaide navigates her southern home, discovering its identifying curios and passing them to the reader to touch, inspect and marvel at. These objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark and contradictory history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the homey friendliness. They all paint a lively portrait of her home city as remembered, lived in, thought about, missed, loved, hated, laughed at, travelled to and from, seen from afar and close up by assorted writers, citizens and visitors but mainly as it exists in her memory and imagination.

Imprint: Newsouth Books
RRP: $29.99

ISBN: 9781863957380
Title: AFTER THE BLAST : AN AUSTRALIAN OFFICER IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN
Author: CALLENDER GARTH
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

A very Australian story of heroism and healing.

In 2004 Garth Callender, a junior cavalry officer, was deployed to Iraq. He quickly found his feet leading convoys of armoured vehicles through the streets of Baghdad and into the desert beyond. But one morning his crew was targeted in a roadside bomb attack. Garth became Australia's first serious casualty in the war.

After recovering from his injuries, Garth returned to Iraq in 2006 as second-in-command of the Australian Army's security detachment in Baghdad. He found a city in the grip of a rising insurgency. His unit had to contend with missile attacks, suicide bombers and the death by misadventure of one of their own, Private Jake Kovco.

Determined to prevent the kinds of bomb attacks that left him scarred, Garth volunteered once more in 2009 – to lead a weapons intelligence team in Afghanistan. He was helicoptered to blast zones in the aftermath of attacks, and worked to identify the insurgent bomb-makers responsible.

Revealing, moving, funny and full of drama, Garth Callender's story is one of a kind.

Imprint: BLACK INC
RRP: $29.99

ISBN: 9781760899455
Title: AGAINST ALL ODDS
Author: HARRIS RICHARD
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: August 2020 New Release

'I just want to warn you. You're going to dive to the end of the cave. You're going to see these kids. They're all looking healthy and happy and smiley. Then, you're going to swim away, and they're probably all going to die.'

In June 2018, for seventeen days, the world watched and held its breath as the Wild Boars soccer team were trapped deep in a cave in Thailand. Marooned beyond flooded cave passages after unexpected rains, they were finally rescued, one-by-one, against almost impossible odds, by an international cave-diving team which included Australians Dr Richard Harris and Dr Craig Challen.

These two men were chosen for their medical expertise and cave diving knowledge, but this dangerous rescue asked so much more of them. They had to remain calm under extreme pressure and intense scrutiny, adapt to constantly changing circumstances and importantly, build trust among the rescue team and with the young boys and their coach, whose lives were in their hands.
Here is the story of these two Australian men who became international heroes - it is a story of determination, cunning and triumph that will long be remembered.

Imprint: Penguin Books
RRP: $24.99

ISBN: 9781760890957
Title: AGAINST ALL ODDS : The inside account of the Thai cave rescue, and the courageous Australians at the heart of it
Author: CHALLEN CRAIG / HARRIS RICHARD
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

'I just want to warn you. You're going to dive to the end of the cave. You're going to see these kids. They're all looking healthy and happy and smiley. Then, you're going to swim away, and they're probably all going to die.'

In June 2018, for seventeen days, the world watched and held its breath as the Wild Boar soccer team were trapped deep in a cave in Thailand. Marooned beyond flooded cave passages after unexpected rains, they were finally rescued, one-by-one, against almost impossible odds, by an international cave-diving team which included Australians Dr Richard Harris and Dr Craig Challen.

These two men were chosen for their medical expertise and cave diving knowledge, but this dangerous rescue asked so much more of them. They had to remain calm under extreme pressure and intense scrutiny, adapt to constantly changing circumstances and importantly, build trust among the rescue team and with the young boys and their coach, whose lives were in their hands.
Here is the story of these two Australian men who became international heroes - it is a story of determination, cunning and triumph that will long be remembered.

Imprint: Viking Books
RRP: $34.99

ISBN: 9781743054826
Title: ASHTONS HOTEL : The Journal of William Baker Ashton First Governor of the Adelaide Gaol
Author: HARRIS RHONDDA
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

South Australia was meant to be the perfect colony: free settlers, no crime, and no mental illness. But good intentions go awry. Within three years plans for a permanent gaol were well established, along with a governor to oversee it: William Baker Ashton. This is the first published edition of his journal.

Imprint: WAKEFIELD
RRP: $39.95

ISBN: 9781742234281
Title: ATOMIC THUNDER : THE MARALINGA STORY
Author: TYNAN ELIZABETH
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

In September 2016 it will be 60 years since the first British mushroom cloud rose above the plain at Maralinga in South Australia. The atomic weapons test series wreaked havoc on Indigenous communities and turned the land into a radioactive wasteland.

In 1950 Australian prime minister Robert Menzies blithely agreed to atomic tests that offered no benefit to Australia and relinquished control over them – and left the public completely in the dark. This book reveals the devastating consequences of that decision. After earlier tests at Monte Bello and Emu Field, in 1956 Australia dutifully provided 3200 square kilometres of South Australian desert to the British Government, along with logistics and personnel.

How could a democracy such as Australia host another country’s nuclear program in the midst of the Cold War? In this meticulously researched and shocking work, journalist and academic Elizabeth Tynan reveals how Australia allowed itself to be duped. Maralinga was born in secret atomic business, and has continued to be shrouded in mystery decades after the atomic thunder stopped rolling across the South Australian test site. This book is the most comprehensive account of the whole saga, from the time that the explosive potential of splitting uranium atoms was discovered, to the uncovering of the extensive secrecy around the British tests in Australia many years after the British had departed, leaving an unholy mess behind.

Imprint: NEW SOUTH
RRP: $34.99

ISBN: 9781921867606
Title: AUSTRALIA : A Cultural History
Author: RICKARD JOHN
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: NOVEMBER 2017 NEW RELEASE

John Rickard’s Australia: A Cultural History, first published in 1988, is still the only short history of Australia from a cultural perspective. It has also acquired a reputation as an introduction to the development of Australian society and was listed by the historian and public intellectual John Hirst in his ‘First XI: The best Australian history books’.

Although arranged chronologically, this book is not a chronicle, still less a laborious detailing of governors and governments: rather, it focuses on the transmission of values, beliefs, and customs amongst the diverse mix of peoples who are today’s Australians. The story begins with sixty thousand years of Aboriginal presence and their continuing material and spiritual relationship with the land, and takes the reader through the turbulent years of British colonisation and the emergence, through prosperity, war, and depression, of the cultural accommodations which have been distinctively Australian. This third edition concludes with a critical review of the challenges facing contemporary Australia and warns readers that ‘we may get the future we deserve’.

Imprint: MONASH UNIVERSITY PRESS
RRP: $39.95

ISBN: 9781743534823
Title: AUSTRALIA REIMAGINED : Towards a More Compassionate, Less Anxious Society
Author: MACKAY HUGH
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

A courageous and passionately argued treatise on how we harness the power of the new era to create a stronger, fairer society.

Australia's unprecedented run of economic growth has failed to deliver a more stable or harmonious society. Individualism is rampant. Income inequality is growing. Public education is under-resourced. The gender revolution is stalling. We no longer trust our major institutions or our political leaders. We are more socially fragmented, more anxious, more depressed, more overweight, more medicated, deeper in debt and increasingly addicted - whether to our digital devices, drugs, pornography or 'stuff'.

Yet esteemed social researcher Hugh Mackay remains optimistic. Twenty-five years ago, he revolutionised Australian social analysis with the publication of Reinventing Australia. Now he takes another unflinching look at us and offers some compelling proposals for a more compassionate and socially cohesive Australia. You might not agree with everything he suggests, but you'll find it hard to get some of his ideas out of your head.

Argued with intelligence and passion, this book is essential reading for everyone who loves Australia enough to want to make it a better place for all of us.

Imprint: MACMILLAN
RRP: $32.99

ISBN: 9781486311934
Title: AUSTRALIAN BIRD GUIDE - Revised Edition
Author: MENKHORST PETER
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: BACK IN STOCK SOON

Winner of the 2018 ABIA Small Publisher's Adult Book of the Year Winner of the 2017 Whitley Medal Australia’s avifauna is large, diverse and spectacular, reflecting the continent’s impressive range of habitats and evolutionary history. With specially commissioned paintings of over 900 species, The Australian Bird Guide is the most comprehensive field guide to Australian birds ever seen. This Revised Edition includes updated maps, artwork and species accounts, reflecting current knowledge of the biology and distribution of Australia’s birds. It features around 4700 specially commissioned colour illustrations of over 900 species, with particular emphasis on providing the fine detail required to identify difficult groups and distinctive plumages. Comprehensive species accounts have been written by a dedicated team of ornithologists to ensure identification details, distribution and status are current and accurate. A new easier-to-use index is also included. The Australian Bird Guide sets a new standard in field guides, providing an indispensable reference for all birders and naturalists looking to explore Australia’s magnificent and unique birdlife.

Imprint: CSIRO PUBLICATIONS
RRP: $49.99

ISBN: 9781486311637
Title: AUSTRALIAN BIRD NAMES : Origins and Meanings
Author: FRASER IAN / GRAY JEANNIE
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK

This Second Edition of Australian Bird Names is a completely updated checklist of Australian birds and the meanings behind their common and scientific names, which may be useful, useless or downright misleading! For each species, the authors examine the many-and-varied common names and full scientific name, with derivation, translation and a guide to pronunciation. Stories behind the name are included, as well as relevant aspects of biology, conservation and history. Original descriptions, translated by the authors, have been sourced for many species.

As well as being a book about names, this is a book about the history of the ever-developing understanding of birds, about the people who contributed to this understanding and, most of all, about the birds themselves. This Second Edition has been revised to follow current taxonomy and understanding of the relationships between families, genera and species. It contains new taxa, updated text and new vagrants and will be interesting reading for anyone with a love of birds, words or the history of Australian biology and bird-watching.

Imprint: CSIRO PUBLICATIONS
RRP: $54.99