In the summer of 1839, 26-year-old Louisa Anne Meredith, in the company of her husband, Charles Meredith, sailed from England to the British colony of New South Wales, in what was then New Holland.
Four years later, she published a detailed account of theyears since she had left England. A fascinating window into the past, Louisa's impressions and experiences cover the four-month ocean voyage; life within the fledgling city of Sydney; travels across the Blue Mountains to Bathurst; and eventual settlement at Homebush in Sydney's west. Vivid observations of Sydney as it was in the 1840s combine with descriptions of flora, fauna and the general way of life in the colony, all told through the eyes of a well-educated, articulate and well-to-do woman who had come from a very different climate and upbringing to that she found in Australia.
Louisa was a naturalist, author and illustrator and her eye for detail provides a historically significant document giving a unique window into early Australian settlement. From descriptions of polite society, to hardships of drought and overland travel; from architecture to politics, convicts to aboriginal customs, Louisa's keen wit and clever insight provide a fascinating account of life in colonial Australia.
In cemeteries throughout Australia, gravestones hint at our history – tales of true crime, early settlement, mystery, tragedy, health epidemics, unsolved murders, love lost and sacrifice. The 'Grave Tales' series reveals more than the headstone can ever tell. Written by journalists Helen Goltz and Chris Adams, these stories feature people who willingly or unwillingly were participants in events that made headlines. The series offers individual short stories of heroes, victims, trailblazers and patriots, encapsulating the journeys that lead to their resting places.
Who stole the priceless Picasso from the NGV?
Was Errol Flynn a Nazi spy? Did an Australian kill
the infamous Red Baron?
If you think Australia's history is straightforward,
you're dead wrong. This is a land of the strange,
the spooky and the unexplained. From the eerie
ball of light that stalked a terrified family across
the Nullabor, to the whereabouts of Victoria's
parliamentary mace, to the unidentified body
found propped up on an Adelaide beach, and,
yes, to the whereabouts of Ned Kelly's skull,
you'll find our history has plenty of mysterious
twists and unanswered questions.
With his signature wit, Eamon Evans investigates
Australia's most curious mysteries, digs up the
evidence and lays it out for the court of public
opinion to decide. What Ever Happened to Ned
Kelly's Head? will have you scratching your head
and wondering long after the last page.
Sex, drugs, rock and roll, Absinthe, splatter, death, internet dating and MUCH MORE. The story of an innocent Sydney boys journey from slum to splendour along the explosive rock and roll highways of the 70's, through heartbreak and happiness.
Having made and lost fortunes, 4 wives and adventures all around the world. Julius Grafton is a writer, former rock and roll roadie, and entrepreneur doing business in the music, events and media industries.
This fast moving story gathers some unbelievable chapters in a colourful life lived hard. You meet plenty of interesting people: Bruce Jackson, Eric Robinson, Garry Glitter, Roger Davies, A. J. Maddah and Tom Misner all get a chapter.
In Down South, writer Bruce Ansley goes on a journey back to his beloved South Island.
From Curio Bay to Golden Bay, in Down South writer Bruce Ansley sets off on a vast expedition across the South Island, Te Waipounamu, visiting the places and people who hold clues to the south's famous character. Not so very long ago, the South Island had most of New Zealand's people and just about all of the money. Gold miners found fortunes in the hills and rivers, sheep barons straddled mountains, valleys and plains. Wealthy southerners ruled the government. Where now lies the South Island's golden fleece? And what is its future?
In Down South, writer Bruce Ansley goes on a journey back to his beloved South Island.
From Curio Bay to Golden Bay, in Down South writer Bruce Ansley sets off on a vast expedition across the South Island, Te Waipounamu, visiting the places and people who hold clues to the south's famous character. Not so very long ago, the South Island had most of New Zealand's people and just about all of the money. Gold miners found fortunes in the hills and rivers, sheep barons straddled mountains, valleys and plains. Wealthy southerners ruled the government. Where now lies the South Island's golden fleece? And what is its future?
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.
As an American graduate student studying history in Australia, Thompson traveled to New Zealand and met a Maori known as 'Seven.' Their relationship is one of opposites: he is a tradesman, she is an intellectual; he comes from a background of rural poverty, she from one of middleclass privilege; he is a 'native,' she descends directly from 'colonizers.' Nevertheless, they shared a similar sense of adventure and a willingness to depart from the customs of their families and forge a life together on their own.
In this book, which grows out of decades of reading and research, Thompson explores cultural displacement through the ages and the fascinating history of Europeans in the South Pacific, beginning with Abel Tasman's discovery of New Zealand in 1642 and Cook's circumnavigation of 1770.
Charismatic, intelligent and handsome, George Scott is unlike any other
bushranger. Born into a privileged life in famine-wracked Ireland,
Scott's family loses its fortune and is forced to flee to New Zealand.
There, Scott joins the local militia and fights as a soldier against
the Maori in the brutal New Zealand wars.
After recovering from a series of serious gunshot wounds, he sails to
Australia and becomes a Lay Preacher, captivating churchgoers with his
fiery and inspiring sermons.
But Scott is also prone to bursts of madness. The local villagers back
in Ireland often whispered that a 'wild drop' ran in the blood of the
Scott family. One night he dons a mask in a small country town, arms
himself with a gun and, dubbing himself Captain Moonlite, brazenly
robs a bank before staging one of the country's most audacious
jailbreaks.
After falling in love with fellow prisoner James Nesbitt, a boyish
petty criminal desperately searching for a father figure, Scott finds
himself unable to shrug off his criminal past.
Pursued and harassed by the police, he stages a dramatic siege and
prepares for a final showdown with the law - and a macabre executioner
without a nose.
Meticulously researched and drawing on previously unpublished
material, Moonlite is a work of non-fiction that reads like a novel.
Told at a cracking pace, and based on many of the extensive letters
Scott wrote from his death cell, Moonlite is set amid the violent and
sexually-repressed era of Australia in the second half of the 19th
century.
With a cast of remarkable characters, it weaves together the
extraordinary lives of our bushrangers and the desperation of a young
nation eager to remove the stains of its convict past.
But most of all, Moonlite is a tragic love story.
For these are the dying days of the bushrangers and Captain Moonlite
is about to make his last stand.
Mary Woodward, well-known West Auckland author of The Bethells of Te Henga, The Scent of Rosewater, Landscape of My Heart, The Piha Story, has now completed her memoir, Shimmersea. This limited edition is both compelling social history and a remarkable life story. Many New Zealanders will have similar memories of childhood holidays and wild adventures at the beach- in her case on the West Coast of Auckland. As a cash-strapped student recruited by the local Lions Club and lured by prize money of two hundred pounds, she ended up becoming Miss New Zealand 1949 - to her astonishment. She describes herself as 'short and with few pretensions to glamour'. Back then she was able to avoid those humiliating swimsuit episodes now associated with such events and was clearly chosen for her potential as an ambassador for New Zealand. Reading her descriptions of travelling to post-war Britain, we understand why she was the perfect choice. She was a breath of fresh air in gloomy times, intelligent, curious about the world, radiating charm and without pretension. They loved her. Shes so natural proclaimed the British media. But natural charm was no protection for later tragedies in her life, beautifully told yet inherently distressing. Her struggle to make sense of these terrible times, which enabled her to 'come to a place of acceptance of myself and my life, without bitterness or regret' is what makes this book truly remarkable.
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.
Australia's greatest escape stories from two world wars
Australia's Greatest Escapes is a collection of stories about the most hazardous aspect of the prisoner of war experience - escape. Here is all the adventure, suspense and courage of ordinary Australians who defied their captors; men who tunnelled to freedom, crawled through stinking drains, or clawed a passage beneath barbed wire in a desperate attempt to flee captivity.
They were willing to risk the odds and even death in the loneliest war of all - the fight to be free. Each possessed in spades the noble qualities of boldness, resourcefulness, cunning, determination and mateship we have come to admire about our Australian service men and women under adversity.
Featuring stories of Australian POWs from all theatres of war, including one who fled a German work camp during World War I, another involved in a mass tunnel escape from a notorious Italian camp, and an airman who brazenly attempted to steal a German fighter and fly it back to England. We also re-live the tragic saga of the Sandakan death marches in which six Australian escapers became the only survivors from 2000 POWs, and follow the perilous journeys to freedom undertaken by Australian infantrymen following the appalling massacre of their fellow soldiers
on the Japanese-held island of Ambon.
Although Australia was actually colonized by the forced dispossession of the indigenous Aboriginals, the Commonwealth of Australia came about by the free federation of six self-governing British colonies in 1901, which makes it one of just a handful of nations that can proudly claim this.[1] Thus, Australia is often imagined as a nation untouched by the pains that have accompanied the births of most other nations.
While it is certainly true that the founding fathers of the Australian federation discussed the future of their nation without the fear of war, it is equally true that Australia’s history was shaped by violence. Along with the forced dispossession of indigenous populations across the continent, there were occasional uprisings among the transported convict population in early colonial times, notably the Castle Hill Convict Rebellion of 1804. In that conflict, 233 Irish convicts faced 97 British soldiers, resulting in the deaths of 15 prisoners. Then there was the so-called Rum Rebellion in 1808, when the New South Wales Corps led by Major George Johnston and the pastoralist John Macarthur deposed the Governor of New South Wales, William Bligh. This event was notable in being the only successful seizure of political power by force of arms in the history of colonial Australia.[2] To the list of politically violent deeds, many historians and commentators add the acts of some bushrangers, notably Ned Kelly (1854–1880), who is often regarded as a political revolutionary.[3]
In the relatively short history of colonial Australia, one event stands apart, both for its revolutionary spirit and its impact: the Eureka Rebellion of December 3, 1854. This was the only time in Australian history when a government was resisted by free subjects of the Crown in a violent conflict. It only took place in one colony, Victoria, but it was an important event in the evolution of the democratic government in Australia as a whole.
