Australian Studies

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

Land rights, welfare and culture have locked aborigines out of the good life. Land has become a burden, welfare has become disabling, bad behaviour is mistaken for culture. There is a way out. Aborigines must abide by the same rules as every other Australian -- seek out opportunities, study hard, and free themselves from a culture of bad behaviour.

This is in contrast to the white man’s dream of Aboriginal self-determination. This grand experiment has failed. Aborigines, especially those in remote Australia, need an exit strategy from the dream. The exit strategy outlined in this book destroys the rallying cry for culture. Instead, it shows that the way to self-determination is through individual dignity.

Imprint: CONNORCOURT
RRP: $29.99

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: NEW SOUTH
RRP: $29.99

A history of the Adelaide's grand scale, international industrial exhibition, celebrating the 50th anniversary of settlement, and honoured Queen Victoria's jubilee. A riot of patriotism/imperialism riddled its course with the pomp and jingoism of the period. The purpose-built building, the six-month exhibition, and the uses and fate of the building complete this collective memory of a now-absent building. Containing contributions by thirty-seven historians it looks at the exhibition and its impact on South Australia.

Imprint: DIRECT FROM SUPPLIER
RRP: $49.95

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

The gripping finale to Three Crooked Kings and Jacks and Jokers brings to a close Matthew Condon's best-selling true-crime trilogy.

In 1983, the soon-to-be-knighted Police Commissioner Terry Lewis continues to turn a blind eye to the operation of The Joke, a highly organised system of graft payments from illegal gambling, prostitution and illicit drugs. As the tentacles of this fraudulent vice network spread, the fabric holding together the police, judiciary and political system starts to unravel. All Fall Down offers an unprecedented insight into the Fitzgerald Inquiry and Lewis's subsequent years in prison, and explores the real story behind the dramatic exit of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Drawing from interviews with key players who have, until now, been afraid to speak publicly, All Fall Down celebrates the bravery of those unsung heroes who risked everything to expose the truth.

This epic trilogy provides the definitive account of an unforgettable period in Queensland's history. The devastating consequences of those decades of corruption still reverberate today.

Imprint: UNI OF QUEENSLAND PRESS
RRP: $32.99

Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent is a new history of an ancient geography. It reassesses the evidence for why Europeans believed a massive southern continent existed, and why they advocated for its discovery.

When ships were equal to ambitions, explorers set out to find and claim Terra Australis said to be as large, rich and varied as all the northern lands combined. Antipodes charts these voyages voyages both through the imagination and across the High Seas in pursuit of the mythical Terra Australis. In doing so, the question is asked: how could so many fail to see the realities they encountered? And how is it a mythical land held the gaze of an era famed for breaking free the shackles of superstition?

That Terra Australis did not exist that didn’t stop explorers pursuing the continent to its Antarctic obsolescence, unwilling to abandon the promise of such a rich and magnificent land till it was stripped of every ounce of value it had ever promised. In the process, the southern continent an imaginary land became one of the shaping forces of early modern history.

Imprint: MONASH UNIVERSITY PRESS
RRP: $39.95

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

Friedrich Gerstacker, the most illustrious and prolific of German travel writers, set foot in Australia in March 1851, having walked across the Andes, traipsed the goldfields of California, and sailed over the Pacific in search of new adventures. Gerstacker found adventures aplenty in Australia. He rowed and trekked down the Murray, absorbed the excitement triggered by the discovery of gold, visited his countrymen in South Australia, and trained his outsider's eyes on a colonial society gripped by profound change. In this translated edition of Gerstacker's book 'Australien', his lively travelogue is made available for the first time in English. Rarely has Australia's colonial past been presented with such insight, humour and entertainment.

Imprint: WAKEFIELD
RRP: $34.99

ASIO has kept a file on Frank Moorhouse since he was 17. Frank has decided it is time to report on ASIO. In 2013 ASIO made new efforts to extend its surveillance powers to internet and mobile phone communication and some other extensions of its powers including the making the issuing of warrants easier. We are just beginning to evolve new attitudes and behaviour appropriate for a society in which nothing can be assumed to be private, especially at the governmental level. At the same time we are trying to discern what it is that constitutes, or not, an offence against national security. We are also facing the question of what degree of terrorist threat we are prepared to endure so as to retain freedoms of expression and what might be loosely called the 'traditional privacies'. The paradox is an old one: which of our rights do we temporarily (or forever) relinquish in order to prevent external threats to our society which is based on such rights? More than ever before, this future is unforeseeable and if in the unforeseeable we see a glimmer of dangerous things we should remember that positive things also can be unforeseeable. We need a renewal of the bargain between the citizen and the secret agencies, as unreliable as it may be, as we all go into the glare and the maze of controlled and uncontrollable data collection and its consequences. At least WikiLeaks and other socially-conscious hackers and whistleblowers will keep us in the picture. We should always offer them our protection. They are all we've got.

Imprint: VINTAGE
RRP: $32.99

Australia's avifauna is large, diverse and spectacular, reflecting the continents 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. The guide features close to 250 stunning colour plates, 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.

The Australian Bird Guide sets a new standard in field guides, providing an indispensable reference for all birders and naturalists looking to explore Australias magnificent and unique birdlife.

Imprint: CSIRO PUBLICATIONS
RRP: $49.95

In the summer of 1865, when a Confederate warship sailed into the port of Melbourne, 42 men secretly enlisted to fight for the South in the American Civil War.

On the notorious raider Shenandoah – scourge of the Yankee merchant fleet – they sailed off to adventure and controversy, and fired the last shot of the war.

When the Shenandoah - a sleek steamer/sailer and one of the fastest ships afloat - dropped anchor in Hobsons Bay, the fledgling colony of Victoria was taken by surprise, and the Confederates had no way of knowing whether they would be hailed as heroes or hanged as pirates.

To the rebels' surprise, Melbourne took them to its heart. Victorians came in their thousands to visit the ship, and its officers were feted as celebrities. They were wined and dined by the city's elite, attended a ball held in their honour , mixed it with Yankee sympathisers in a barroom brawl, and charmed the ladies of Melbourne and Ballarat with their grand Southern manners.

Meanwhile, in defiance of the law against foreign warships recruiting in a neutral port, 42 men were smuggled aboard in dead of night and, once at sea, signed up to join the Confederate Navy.
For Australia – not yet a nation – 1865 was a watershed year in an age of gold rushes, bushrangers, disputes between rival colonies, and fears of foreign invasion. For war-torn America, it was the turning point in the deadliest conflict in that nation's history. After the defeat at Gettysburg, the tide had turned against the Confederacy but the South was determined to fight on, and, in the war at sea, the Shenandoah was the last best hope.

The Shenandoah's mission was to damage the North's economy by attacking its commercial fleet, and, under the command of the enigmatic Captain James Waddell, the raider went on to wipe out almost the entire New England whaling fleet.

On learning that Robert E. Lee had surrendered, Waddell refused to believe the cause was lost. The Shenandoah continued harrying the Yankee fleet and fired the last shot of the war after capturing, burning and ransoming 38 Union ships and taking more than 1,000 prisoners. On accepting at last that the war had ended, the Confederates sailed around the world to England, pursued as pirates by Union warships, and surrendered to the neutral British.

Some 120 Australians are known to have fought in the American Civil War, on both sides. Looking back, it is an uncomfortable thought that Australians could sympathise with a society based on the obscenity of slavery, yet while officialdom in the colonies backed the Union and British neutrality, public opinion generally favoured the South. The gold rush era, during which the Shenandoah arrived, tended to glorify rebel causes, and the Southerners had no difficulty finding willing recruits.

Of the 42 men who signed on in Melbourne as petty officers, seamen and marines, some returned home, others dropped out of sight and one died aboard ship – the last man to die in the service of the Confederacy. This is their story.

Imprint: EBURY
RRP: $34.99