Colonial Armidale by John Ferry

$30.00 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History

It is through the stories of townspeople and their aspirations, achievements and foibles that this vivid history unfolds. Unconventional as well as rigorously researched, this is an engrossing and dramatic narrative of the making of one town's prosperity. Armidale here provides a clear reflection of the growth of rural society in Australia's Victorian era. Its inhabitants, their sense of place and special affection for their town, the moral dimension of the day and the proscriptions of class and gender are all brilliantly rendered. The routines and work-a-day world of smalltown lives share the stage with the rich and powerful, avoiding any romanticised or heroic presentation of the past. In this animated panorama of humanity and history, the thrill of discovery could not be greater were this some ancient and exotic civilisation under scrutiny. ...Show more

Sydney Hobart Yacht Race: A Biography of a Sporting Icon (HB) by Rob Mundle

$49.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History | Reading Level: 6 Sport

The Sydney Hobart Yacht Race is the story of one of the world's greatest sporting challenges. In its 75th year, the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race has become an icon of Australia's summer sport, ranking in public interest with such national events as the Melbourne Cup, the Australian Open tennis an d the Boxing Day cricket test. No regular annual yachting event in the world attracts such huge media coverage as does the start on Sydney Harbour. The Sydney Hobart Yacht Race: A biography of a sporting icon is the story of one of the world's greatest sporting challenges, an event where men and women from all walks of life are inspired and challenged by the beauty and power of nature. The 628-nautical mile course is often described as the most gruelling long ocean race in the world, a challenge to everyone who takes part. A team effort as much as a personal challenge where one mistake can lead to defeat, while success can deliver national and international acclaim. Bestselling author Rob Mundle has competed in the race on three occasions and reported on it for both newspapers and television for more than fifty years. The pinnacle of his many writing achievements is the international bestselling book Fatal Storm, the powerful story of the tragic 1998 Sydney Hobart race. ...Show more

Tough Customer - Chasing a Better Deal for Battlers by Allan Fels

$34.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History

Allan Fels has never been one to shy away from a fight, especially when the big end of town is exploiting small businesses or consumers. During his twelve years as head of Australia's competition watchdog, he took on banks, airlines, supermarkets and big telcos to make sure Australians were getting a fa ir deal. Since leaving the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in 2003, he's continued to champion the underdog. From fighting for the rights of those with a mental health disability, to overseeing the payment of millions of dollars in wages to illegally underpaid 7-Eleven workers, Fels has used his wily political skills and media savvy to get the job done. Along the way, he's also helped radically transform Victoria's taxi industry and investigated grossly overpaid corporate executives. In this fascinating account of his post-ACCC life, Fels opens up about how his family has coped with daughter Isabella's schizophrenia, what it was like to be controversially sacked by 7-Eleven and what he's learned over his fifty years of dedicated public service. ...Show more

Your Own Kind of Girl by Clare Bowditch

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History | Reading Level: 3 Biography

ARIA Award-winning singer and actress Clare Bowditch confronts her inner critic in this no-holds-barred memoir. This is the story I promised myself, aged twenty-one, that I would one day be brave enough - and well enough - to write. Clare Bowditch has always had a knack for telling stories. Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That 'real life' only begins once you're thin or beautiful, that good things only happen to other people.YOUR OWN KIND OF GIRL reveals a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion, and tells how these forces shaped Clare's life for better and for worse. This is a heartbreaking, wise and at times playful memoir. Clare's own story told raw and as it happened. A reminder that even on the darkest of nights, victory is closer than it seems.With startling candour, Clare lays bare her truth in the hope that doing so will inspire anyone who's ever done battle with their inner critic. This is the work of a woman who has found her true power - and wants to pass it on. Happiness, we discover, is only possible when we take charge of the stories we tell ourselves. ...Show more

Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture by Bruce Pascoe

$19.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History

JOE SKYRNSKI, CO-FOUNDER CHAMP EQUITY: 'A must read for every Australian! Drawn from the diaries of European explorers, it comprehensively explodes the self-serving myth we perpetrated about Terra Nullius, that the first Australians were hunter-gatherer savages with no traits of civilisation. Pascoe cle arly documents extensive contemporary evidence to the contrary'  'Dark Emu injects a profound authenticity into the conversation about how we Australians understand our continent ... [It is] essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Australia once was, or what it might yet be if we heed the lessons of long and sophisticated human occupation.' Judges for 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating, and storing -- behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence in Dark Emu comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources. Bruce's comments on his book compared to Gammage's: " My book is about food production, housing construction and clothing, whereas Gammage was interested in the appearance of the country at contact. [Gammage] doesn't contest hunter gatherer labels either, whereas that is at the centre of my argument." ...Show more

Remembering Bob by Sue Pieters-Hawke (Editor); Louise Swinn (Editor)

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History | Reading Level: 3 Biography

Bob Hawke's death in May 2019 sparked national mourning across the country as we remembered just how important Bob had been in the shaping of modern Australia. In an age when political personas have become increasingly formulaic and predictable, Bob was a man of glorious contradictions. He was a Rhodes Scholar who also had a deep affinity and understanding for mainstream Australia. He was a passionate ACTU officer and president who also knew how to work with big business. He loved his sport, a drink and a bet, yet was also deeply intellectual in his approach to policy. In an age when our respect for politicians has never been lower, we respected Bob. The huge public outpouring of grief after his death showed that we loved him too. This book, instigated and edited by Bob's eldest daughter, Sue Pieters-Hawke, is a collection of stories and memories about Bob by his family, friends, colleagues, old political foes, and ordinary Australians whose paths crossed that of their everyman Prime Minister. Each of them brings a vivid and personal view of this extraordinary man, that taken together offer a true reflection of the person he was, and what he meant to us all.   ...Show more

The Pacific: in the Wake of Captain Cook, with Sam Neill (PB) by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History

A rich, complex and engaging account of Cook's voyages across the Pacific, from actor and raconteur Sam Neill. Captain James Cook first set sail to the Pacific in 1768, just over 250 years ago. These vast waters, one third of the earth's surface, were uncharted but not unknown. A rich diversity of peop le and cultures navigated, traded, lived and fought here for thousands of years. Before Cook, the Pacific was disconnected from the power and ideas of Europe, Asia and America. In the wake of Cook, everything changed. The Pacific with Sam Neill is the companion book to the Foxtel documentary series of the same name, in which actor and raconteur Sam Neill takes a deeply personal, present-day voyage to map his own understanding of James Cook, Europe's greatest navigator, and the immense Pacific Ocean itself. Voyaging on a wide variety on vessels, from container ships to fishing trawlers and sailing boats, Sam crosses the length and breadth of the largest ocean in the world to experience for himself a contemporary journey in Cook's footsteps, engaging the past and present in both modern and ancient cultural practice and peoples. Fascinating, engaging, fresh and vital - this is history ... but not as you know it. ...Show more

Fighting for Hakeem by Craig Foster; Alexandra Engel (As told to)

$34.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History

Football is the world game. It unites. At a grassroots level it creates communities and, in 2019, those communities helped save the life of one of its own. In 2012, Hakeem al-Araibi was a promising young player on Bahrain's national football team when he was arrested for attacking a police station durin g the Arab Spring, despite television footage showing him playing soccer at the time of the alleged attack. After three months of torture and wrongful imprisonment, Hakeem was released. He fled the country and made his way to Australia, where he was granted refugee status. Hakeem made a life here and was playing for the suburban Pascoe Vale Football Club, in Melbourne. He thought he was safe. But, in November 2018, on a holiday to Thailand with his wife, Hakeem was again arrested. The Bahraini government wanted to extradite him to face a ten-year jail sentence, or worse. What happened next shows the best of what soccer can do, and the worst the governing body of FIFA brings. If it wasn't for the Australian soccer community and former Socceroo Craig Foster, Hakeem may never have been freed. This powerful memoir reveals how a local soccer legend fought tirelessly to help bring home a man he'd never met. From Pascoe Vale to Switzerland, Canberra to Thailand, Foster raised his voice and tens of thousands of Australians were galvanised to #FreeHakeem. Foster lobbied FIFA and the United Nations and worked with human rights organisations worldwide to enable Hakeem's safe return to his wife in Australia. Despite being from different backgrounds, religions and generations, Craig Foster and Hakeem al-Araibi are united forever through their love of the world game and their fight for freedom. ...Show more

Macquarie (HB) by Grantlee Kieza

$39.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History | Reading Level: 3 Biography

A lively and engaging portrait of a towering and complex figure of Australian colonial history. Lachlan Macquarie is credited with shaping Australia's destiny, transforming the harsh, foreboding penal colony of New Holland into an agricultural powerhouse and ultimately a prosperous society. He also help ed shape Australia's national character. An egalitarian at heart, Macquarie saw boundless potential in Britain's refuse, and under his rule many former convicts went on to become successful administrators, land owners and business people. However, the governor's ambitions for the colony (which he lobbied to have renamed 'Australia') brought him into conflict with the continent's original landowners, and he was responsible for the deaths of Aboriginal men, women and children, brutally killed in a military operation intended to create terror among local Indigenous people. So, was Macquarie the man who sowed the seeds of a great nation, or a tyrant who destroyed Aboriginal resistance? In this, the most comprehensive biography yet of this fascinating colonial governor, acclaimed biographer Grantlee Kieza draws on Macquarie's rich and detailed journals. He chronicles the life and times of a poor Scottish farm boy who joined the British army to make his fortune, saw wars on five continents and clawed his way to the top. Ultimately, Macquarie laid the foundations for a new nation, but, in the process, he played a part in the dispossession of the continent's original people. Lover, fighter, egalitarian, autocrat - Lachlan Macquarie is a complex and engaging character who first envisaged the nation we call Australia.   ...Show more

Caroline's Diary

$34.95 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History

Bushranger Tracks Discover The Historic Sites Of Our Wild Colonial Past by Powell Greg

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History

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Welcome to Country (Youth Edition) An Introduction to our First Peoples for Young Australians by Marcia Langton

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australian Stories People History | Reading Level: 8.5 Kids Non Fiction

Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country schools edition is essential reading for any Australian high school student who wants to learn more about the culture that has thrived here for over 50,000 years. In this schools edition, author Professor Marcia Langton expands on the educational information from the f irst edition. Part One of the original book has been reworked, including topics/chapters on Indigenous prehistory, cultures and languages, kinship, art and performance, storytelling, native title, the Stolen Generations and NAIDOC week. The book also includes a wealth of completely new content: New chapter on Indigenous knowledge, covering everything from bush medicine to astrology. Extended chapter on Indigenous art, including key copyright legal cases. New chapter on looking to the future for Indigenous Australia, including the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Cultural awareness chapter refocused from the original book's travel angle. ...Show more