Did you know that Australia was once thought of as an undesirable place to live?
Long before Australia started to be considered one of the best places in the world to live, it was thought to be completely unlivable. In the 15th century, the European race to claim land began. Despite the fact that Australia was a large landmass, no nation believed it was worth colonizing. The land was claimed by the Netherlands. However, little exploration happened there.
Many countries actually believed it to be uninhabitable. However, the Aboriginal populations had already been thriving on the land for millennia. This allowed the Australian Aborigines the opportunity to truly develop their unique and complex cultures and systems. Nearly one hundred years after the Dutch-named the landmass New Holland, James Cook, a British captain, charted the eastern coast. He suggested it should be revisited.
In this book, you will learn about:
- Where Australia’s first people came from
- The diet, lifestyles, and beliefs of Australia’s Aborigines
- How the first European contact with the Aboriginals actually went
- The exciting discoveries of the British voyages to Australia
- How well did the Aborigines and the European settlers get along?
- All the political, social, and judiciary developments in the settlements
- The Australian gold rushes and how they impacted the region and beyond
- Australia’s development into a unique nation, one separate from England
- How big of a role did Australia play during World War I and World War II?
- What is Australia up to today?
Scroll up and click the “add to cart” button to learn more about this interesting and diverse continent!
The remarkable true story of Eugene Fluckey, the US Navy's most innovative-and aggressive-submarine commander of World War II
Over the course of five combat patrols during the Pacific War, Commander Fluckey reinvented submarine warfare, pioneering audacious strategies to hunt and sink Japanese warships and merchant vessels. At the helm of the USS Barb, he directed his boat to attack warship convoys-never mind the lop-sided odds-and to slip into heavily defended enemy harbors to launch torpedoes at unsuspecting targets. "Lucky" Fluckey's submariners often attacked from the surface, brazenly sinking the enemy with the Barb's deck guns. Once, he even sent sailors ashore on one Japanese island on a perilous mission to blow up a Japanese train. Fluckey and his crew sent an astounding seventeen enemy ships, including an aircraft carrier, to the bottom of the sea.
In Torpedo Run, acclaimed naval historian Don Keith dives into the most thrilling and dangerous tales of Fluckey's war, as he guides his gallant crew against the Japanese fleet. For his heroism and intrepidity, Fluckey earned four Navy Crosses and the Medal of Honor, and showed what a submarine-and he-was capable of.
Tall tales of bushmen, bulldozers and back-country blokes
'It was the mid-1970s and I was about eight, I thought it was completely normal for your old man to pull out a high-powered deer-hunting rifle and fire it through the kitchen door from the breakfast table...'
In the 1970s and 80s, Barry Bellamy was a fair old bushman, traversing the back-country from Hawke's Bay to the far north in a blue ex-airforce Land Rover. His son Mike would join him as he took up work, wherever he could get it. Tough Country is Mike's story, about a bygone era of bushmen, scrub-cutters, hunters and shepherds. Later, Mike forged his own life working on the land, and his stories of the characters of the 1980s and 90s, from tradies to digger-drivers, are as hilarious as they are quintessentially Kiwi.
The extraordinary story of a headmaster turned cryptographer, and our top-secret war with the Kaiser's Reich.
On 11 August 1914, just days after war had been declared, Australian Captain J.T. Richardson boarded a German merchant vessel fleeing Melbourne's Port Phillip and audaciously seized a top-secret naval codebook. The fledgling Australian Navy had an opportunity to immediately change the course of the war. But what exactly had they found? Enter the Australian code breakers ...
Recruited by savvy top brass, maths whizz and German speaker Frederick Wheatley worked night and day to fathom the basic principles of the code and start tracking the German Navy's powerful East Asia Squadron, led by the brilliant Maximilian von Spee. Soon Melbourne was a hub of international Allied intelligence.
This is the untold story of how a former Australian headmaster and his mostly female team cracked one of Germany's most complex codes, paving the way for the greatest Allied naval victory of World War I.
In 1897, as a white oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the US Senate.
This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture.
With all the skills of the master storyteller that he is, Jim Haynes exposes some of the great myths of Australian history.
Did you know that Portuguese and Spanish explorers probably found the east coast of Australia before Captain Cook, and that the Rum Rebellion was not caused by rum? And what about Banjo Patterson writing 'Waltzing Matilda'? As for Ned Kelly being a brave freedom-fighting rebel, in truth he was a thief, a thug and a murderer. The Ashes have nothing to do with cricket, the Ghan is not named after Afghan cameleers and Hargraves lied about discovering gold in NSW.
Surprising, confounding, revealing and fun, Jim Haynes takes us on another great journey through Australian history and folklore.
The Birdsville Track runs through three deserts, from Marree in northern South Australia, to Birdsville in outback Queensland. This legendary, dirt road has a rich folk history, intriguing culture and unique ecosystems. But it doesn't give up its secrets easily, unless you have the Birdsville Track Audio Tour of course! *'Congratulations on an excellent sound track! I was enthralled by the stories. a very informative and entertaining CD.*' Mark Christie, Maryborough, VIC *Absolutely loved your audio tour of the Birdsville Track. it really made our trip into a more special event. Loved the information on the early explorers and details of the locations as we travelled. This really added a lot to our trip. Very well done. Everything was perfect. Thanks heaps.'* Phil Talbot, Falcon, WA The Birdsville Track Audio Tour has 45 tracks and 138 minutes of professional-quality audio. The tracks are designed to be played at set points along the Birdsville Track, as shown on the map. The Birdsville Track Audio Tour's sound effects and soundscapes aim to recreate the experience of travelling the Birdsville Trackgreat for armchair travellers and gifts! For those who prefer reading to listening, the Birdsville Track Audio Tour is also available in text, as the Birdsville Track Audio Tour eBook
This is not a fairy tale, not a love story, but bound into the truths of everyday deeds, in a world that doesn't exist today.
Once upon a time, near a century younger, lives so fresh, every experience cherished by a thought and a nation on the brink.
From the honesty of memory, we live for the moment, because our next might be our last, in a war to end all wars.
Hear from the lips of those that lived... those that felt... those that dreamed, and those that didn't make it.
This is their story, told from a small city called Perth.
(included... Eye witness accounts: picking up of German Raider 'Kormoran' survivors, after she had sunk HMAS Sydney...
Thousands of American sailors hitting the streets of Perth, Western Australia, after their base in Surabaya, Java, was over run by the Japanese in WW2.
Joyce, one of four teenage girls, about to meet another nations servicemen for the first time.)
A deeply personal exploration of Australia's colonisation past, present and future by one of Australia's finest contemporary authors.
This is a difficult piece to write. It cuts closer to the bone than most of what I have written; closer to my bones, through my blood and flesh to the bones of truth and country; there is truth here, not disguised but in the open and that truth hurts.
In Lies, Damned Lies acclaimed author Claire G. Coleman, a proud Noongar woman, takes the listener on a journey through the past, present and future of Australia, lensed through her own experience. Beautifully written, this literary work blends the personal with the political, offering listeners an insight into the stark reality of the ongoing trauma of Australia's violent colonisation.
Colonisation in Australia is not over. Colonisation is a process, not an event - and the after-effects will continue while there are still people to remember it.
'An urgent examination of oneself and one's country. Written with a booming cadence that demands to be read aloud, again and again' Tara June Winch, Miles Franklin Award-winning author of THE YIELD
'You may think you're woke, but Coleman never sleeps' Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, bestselling author of SAND TALK
He was a murderer, swindler, bigamist and suspect in the Jack the Ripper killings.
Frederick Deeming was also the most hated man in the world.
Claiming to be haunted by the ghost of his dead mother, Deeming had spent years roaming the planet under various aliases, preying on the innocent, the gullible and the desperate.
But the discovery by Australian police in 1892 of the body of one of his wives in a shallow concrete grave triggered one of the greatest manhunts in history and exposed a further series of grisly murders - those of his first wife and four children - that stunned the Victorian era.
The Devil's Work is a gothic journey into the twisted mind of a serial killer, set in the dying years of the 19th century when science and religion had collided and some of the world's most powerful and influential people believed in spirits and an afterlife.
It reveals Deeming's crime spree across three continents, raising fresh questions about his role in the Jack the Ripper killings and culminating in his sensational trial where he was defended by a future Australian Prime Minister who believed he could also speak to the dead.
Born bad or simply mad? It's time to meet Frederick Deeming, the man known and reviled throughout the United States, England and Australia as the Criminal of the Century.
What role did the queen play in governor-general Sir John Kerr's plans to dismiss prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, unleashing one of the most divisive episodes in Australia's political history? And why weren't we told?
Under the cover of being designated as private correspondence, the letters between the queen and the governor-general about the dismissal have been locked away for decades in the National Archives of Australia, and embargoed by the queen-potentially forever. This ruse has furthered the fiction that the queen and the Palace had no warning of or role in Kerr's actions.
In the face of this, Professor Jenny Hocking embarked on a four-year legal battle to force the Archives to release the letters. In 2015, she mounted a crowd-funded campaign, securing a stellar pro bono team that took her case all the way to the High Court of Australia.
Now, drawing on never-before-published material from Kerr's archives and her submissions to the court, Hocking traces the collusion and deception behind the dismissal, and charts the secret role of High Court judges; the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser; and the Queen's private secretary in fostering and supporting Kerr's actions.
Hocking also reveals the obstruction, intrigue, and duplicity she faced, raising disturbing questions about the role of the National Archives in preventing access to its own historical material and in enforcing royal secrecy over its documents.
P.L.O.T Past Lives Olden Times is a fascinating look into the lives of a few who are buried in Waikumete Cemetery, Auckland New Zealand. These accounts range from a scandalous tale of star-crossed lovers, to the story of an old boarding house in West Auckland.
Included in the book are recipes and poem readings for the listener to enjoy.
