Australian History

Australian History For Dummies is your rough-and-ready tour guide through Australia's whirlwind past. We'll introduce you to the people and events that have shaped this "Land Down Under" (and why it's called that). You'll see how Indigenous Australians lived in Australia for over 65,000 years. You'll be there as British colonists explore Australia's harsh terrain. You'll delve into the recent past, giving you insight into modern-day Australia and what's next. This new edition fills in the last ten years of history and covers issues faced in the twenty-first century.

Havoc-06 is the call sign of former Australian Combat Controller Troy Knight. As a Royal Australian Air Force Airfield Defence Guard, Troy had not found the military adventure he sought: combat operations. His thirst for overseas deployment saw him privately contract his services in Iraq and South East Asia, but when he got whiff that the Australian Defence Force was raising a new defence capability, he couldn’t help but want to be part of it.

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.

According to the Australian government’s website, at the time of first contact with Europeans, there were some 500 distinct Indigenous nations, speaking different languages and following their own religious and cultural practices. As with all human societies, that of the Indigenous Australians is abounding in stories. Stories of how the world came to be the way it is, stories of heroism and perfidy, stories about animals and birds, and stories about love and hate all have parts to play in the wide array of myths, legends, and tales created by Indigenous Australians.  

Criminality, some say, is part of Australia's national identity, and in Great Australian Rascals, Rogues and Ratbags Jim Haynes profiles 15 larger-than-life Aussie rogues. These stories uncover the truth and expose the myths about characters ranging from the most despicable examples of humanity, to those whose courage has to be admired and whose so-called 'crimes' were unjustly punished. Told with Haynes's inimitable combination of history and humour, Great Australian Rascals, Rogues and Ratbags is packed with murders, mystery and miscreants.

The incredible true story of one of the most extraordinary and inspirational prison breaks in history. Boston, 1869. Members of the Clan na Gael - agitators for an Irish republic - hatch a daring plan to free six Irish political prisoners from the most remote gaol on earth, Fremantle Prison in Western Australia. Under the guise of a whale hunt, Captain Anthony sets sail on the Catalpa, risking his life to rescue the men from the prison, known among the inmates as 'a living tomb'.

Dive deep into the mystical world of Aboriginal culture with Charles William Peck's landmark work, Australian Legends. As one of the earliest compilations, this book intricately narrates tales steeped in Dreamtime mythology, helping you explore the indigenous culture's understanding of the cosmos, morality, and the natural world. Peck's storytelling draws you into an ancestral past that resonates profoundly with modern listeners.

This documentary series, first presented in 1985 by acclaimed producer and presenter Tim Bowden, is a harrowing account of the ordeals faced by Australian POWs in Japanese camps, at the height of World War II. Told through the first-hand accounts of survivors from the war, this series has been remastered and serves as an indispensable insight into the realities of the war in the Pacific.

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. 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.

A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. However, the first human footprints on this vast territory were felt 70,000 years earlier. The history of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia is a complex. For generations after the arrival of whites in Australia, the Aboriginal people were disregarded and marginalized, largely because they offered little in the way of a labor resource, and they occupied land required for European settlement.

On 31st October 1917, as the day's light faded, the Australian Light Horse charged against their enemy. Eight hundred men and horses galloped four miles across open country, towards the artillery, rifles and machine guns of the Turks occupying the seemingly unassailable town of Beersheba. What happened in the next hour changed the course of history. This brave battle and the extraordinary adventures that led to it are brought vividly to life by Australia's greatest storyteller, Peter FitzSimons.

Easter Sunday, 1902, deep in the Carnarvon Ranges a police constable and station manager are slain then later incinerated, their remains stuffed into saddlebags. Accused of the ghoulish crime are two members of the bushranging Kenniff gang, fast gaining notoriety as Queensland's equivalent of the Kelly gang. Yet the murders are a bold escalation from the petty fraud, horse stealing and cattle duffing the gang is known for. Starving and exhausted after three long months on the run, the brothers are finally captured, and so the wheels of justice start to turn.

Always Greener is an exquisite portrait of Kate Grenville's complex, conflicted grandmother, who she feared as a child and only in adulthood came to understand. Born in rural Australia, Dolly Russell becomes a successful businessperson, mother and troubled wife. Then came the depression, bankruptcy and World War I. Yet, in a way, those disasters freed her. They allowed her to use her intelligence and ambition to make a space for herself in a man’s world.

It was the afternoon of 18 August 1966, hot, humid with grey monsoonal skies. D Company, 6RAR were four kilometres east of their Nui Dat base, on patrol in a rubber plantation not far from the abandoned village of Long Tan. A day after their base had suffered a mortar strike, they were looking for Viet Cong soldiers. Then—just when they were least expecting—they found them. Under withering fire, some Diggers perished, some were grievously wounded, the rest fought on, as they remained under sustained attack. For hours these men fought for their lives against the enemy onslaught. 

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous "escape-proof" wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape from the massive floodlit stronghold, by any means necessary.  

The incredible account of Sister Betty Jeffrey OAM and the Australian war nurses who survived the bombing of evacuation ship SS Vyner Brooke in February 1942, and subsequently spent three years in Japanese prison camps in Sumatra. During those perilous years surviving in squalid conditions, Sister Jeffrey kept a secret diary of day-to-day events which, after the war, was turned into a hugely successful book and radio serial: White Coolies. Sisters in Captivity builds on those diaries.

Think of a platypus: they lay eggs (that hatch into so-called platypups), they produce milk without nipples and venom without fangs and they can detect electricity. Or a wombat: their teeth never stop growing, they poo cubes and they defend themselves with reinforced rears. Platypuses, possums, wombats, echidnas, devils, kangaroos, quolls, dibblers, dunnarts, kowaris: Australia has some truly astonishing mammals with incredible, unfamiliar features. But how does the world regard these creatures? And what does that mean for their conservation?

Miss Arabella Braithewaite of Switherby knows there is no future for the 10 orphans - a remarkable mix of genteel and working-class children - she has gathered together in these years of England’s grim factory growth in the early 1820s. Her plan, quite outrageous in the eyes of most, is to take the children to Australia to take up a land grant. Thus, one day the townsfolk gather to watch a line of departing “pilgrims” led by the fearless “Missabella”.

A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained almost entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. From there, however, the subjugation of Australia would take place rapidly. Within 20 years of the first British settlements being established, the British presence in Terra Australis was secure, and no other major power was likely to mount a challenge. In 1815, Napoleon would be defeated at Waterloo, and soon afterwards would be standing on the barren cliffs of Saint Helena.

The Best Australian Yarns is a substantial and definitive work collected from memory, mates, word of mouth and decades of researching popular Aussie culture and history.

Including oft-told legendary yarns, reminiscences from the shearing shed, tall stories from the bush, sporting yarns, railway yarns, stories from the world of show business, digger yarns from both world wars, convict and bushranger yarns and anecdotes from the colonial days, yarns from shanties and gold rushes, ghost stories, bunyips and yowies, hauntings, and weird happenings.