Red Lead: The Legendary Australian Ship's Cat Who Survived the Sinking of HMAS Perth and the Thai-Burma Railway by Roland Perry

$29.99 AUD

Category: History

The legendary Australian ship's cat who survived the sinking of HMAS Perth and the Thai-Burma Railway. Just after midnight on the 1st March 1942, Australia's most celebrated cruiser, HMAS Perth, was sunk by Japanese naval forces in the Sunda Strait off the coast of Java. Of the 681 men aboard, 328 survived the sinking and made it to shore - and one cat. Her name was Red Lead, and she was the ship's cat, beloved by the crew and by HMAS Perth's legendary captain Hec Waller. But surviving shell fire, torpedoes and the fierce currents of the Sunda Strait was only the start of the terrible trials Red Lead and the surviving crew were to face over the next three and a half years. From Java to Changi and then on the Thai-Burma Railway, Red Lead was to act as a companion, mascot and occasional hunter of food for a small group of sailors who made it their mission to keep her alive in some of the most hellish prison camps on earth.Red Lead's extraordinary story is one of courage, loyalty and love amidst battle, imprisonment and death, brought vividly to life by bestselling author Roland Perry.   ...Show more

Moonlite: The Tragic Love Story of Captain Moonlite and the Bloody End of the Bushrangers by Garry Linnell

$34.99 AUD

Category: History

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 N ew 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 brilliant 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. ...Show more

The Golden Maze: a Biography of Prague (HB) by Richard Fidler

$39.99 AUD

Category: History

ABC broadcaster and bestselling author of Ghost Empire and Saga Land, Richard Fidler is back with a personally curated history of the magical city that is Prague. In 1989, Richard Fidler was living in London as part of the provocative Australian comedy trio The Doug Anthony All Stars when revolution broke out across Europe. Excited by this galvanising historic, human, moment, he travelled to Prague, where a decrepit police state was being overthrown by crowds of ecstatic citizens. His experience of the Velvet Revolution never let go of him. Thirty years later Fidler returns to Prague to uncover the glorious and grotesque history of Europe's most instagrammed and uncanny city: a jumble of gothic towers, baroque palaces and zig-zag lanes that has survived plagues, pogroms, Nazi terror and Soviet tanks. Founded in the ninth Century, Prague gave the world the golem, the robot, and the world's biggest statue of Stalin, a behemoth that killed almost everyone who touched it. Fidler tells the story of the reclusive emperor who brought the world's most brilliant minds to Prague Castle to uncover the occult secrets of the universe. He explores the Black Palace, the wartime headquarters of the Nazi SS, and he meets victims of the communist secret police. Reaching back into Prague's mythic past, he finds the city's founder, the pagan priestess Libussa who prophesised: I see a city whose glory will touch the stars. Following the story of Prague from its origins in medieval darkness to its uncertain present, Fidler does what he does so well - curates an absolutely engaging and compelling history of a place. You will learn things you never knew, with a tour guide who is erudite, inquisitive, and the best storyteller you could have as your companion.  ...Show more

Stalin's Wine Cellar by John Baker

$34.99 AUD

Category: History

In the late 1990s, John Baker was known as a purveyor of quality rare and old wines. Always entrepreneurial and up for adventure, John was the perfect person for an occasional business partner, Andrew Simon, to approach with a mysterious wine list that was foreign to anything John, or his second-in-comm and, Kevin Hopko, had ever come across. The list was discovered to be a comprehensive catalogue of the wine collection of Nicholas II, the last Czar of Russia. The wine had become the property of the state after the Russian Revolution of 1918, during which Nicholas and his entire family were executed. Now owned by Stalin, the wine was discretely removed to a remote Georgian winery when Stalin was concerned the advancing Nazi army might overrun Russia, and inevitably loot artefacts and treasures. Half a century later, the wine was rumoured to be hidden underground and off any known map. John and Kevin embarked on an audacious, colourful and potentially dangerous journey to Georgia to discover if the wines actually existed; if the bottles were authentic and whether the entire collection could be bought and transported to a major London auction house for sale. Stalin's Wine Cellar is a wild, sometimes rough ride in the glamorous world of high end wine. The cast of characters include Stalin, Hitler, Czar Nicholas II and a motley bunch of Georgian businessmen/cowboys toting handguns, in the early days of Russian business development that led to the world of Putin and oligarchs. ...Show more

Second Best by Ben Pobjie

$32.99 AUD

Category: History

   History is always written by the winners and about the winners. But what about the men and women of the past who reached for gold but grasped only morale-sapping silver? Australia’s second-best comedy historian Ben Pobjie celebrates the fascinating stories of those pipped at the post of greatness – from Buzz Aldrin following footsteps on the moon, to the woman not credited with discovering DNA because she had two X chromosomes, and Australia’s second Prime Minister whose name everyone keeps forgetting. Second Best shines a light on those plucky men and women who, through no fault of their own – or at least only a little bit of fault of their own – didn’t quite get there before everyone else, but did get there before almost everyone else. ...Show more

The Flying Kangaroo by Qantas

$49.99 AUD

Category: History

No symbol better conveys the intrepid spirit of Australia than the flying kangaroo. Whether it's glimpsed on a red-eye flight to an interstate business meeting, before leaving for adventure or holidays, or when longing to return home, that sweep of red defines air travel in Australia. Qantas has always been about connection. It began by connecting Australians across western Queensland's unforgiving terrain, and before long was connecting Australia with the world. Qantas's history is entwined with Australian identity, launching in the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish Flu, and soaring to match Australian ambitions in the one hundred years since. Its centenary year has been the most turbulent year yet, with a pandemic grounding virtually the entire fleet and Qantas coming to the rescue of Australians stranded overseas. Like Australia, Qantas will soar again. The Flying Kangaroo features never-before-seen photographs and historical detail from Qantas's archives, celebrating a century of Australian aviation and a nation that always reaches for the sky. ...Show more

Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber Intelligence Agency by Ferris, John

$34.99 AUD

Category: History

You know about MI5. You know about MI6. Now uncover the story behind Britain's most secretive intelligence agency in the first-ever authorised history of GCHQ. Coming October 2020.  

Dominion - The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland

$24.99 AUD

Category: History

Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Even the increasing number in the West today who have abandoned the faith of their forebears, and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition , remain recognisably its heirs. Seen close-up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable. Widen the focus, though, and Christianity's enduring impact upon the West can be seen in the emergence of much that has traditionally been cast as its nemesis: in science, in secularism, and yes, even in atheism. That is why Dominion will place the story of how we came to be what we are, and how we think the way that we do, in the broadest historical context. Ranging in time from the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC to the on-going migration crisis in Europe today, and from Nebuchadnezzar to the Beatles, it will explore just what it was that made Christianity so revolutionary and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mind-set of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that has become increasingly doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain irredeemably Christian. The aim is twofold: to make the reader appreciate just how novel and uncanny were Christian teachings when they first appeared in the world; and to make ourselves, and all that we take for granted, appear similarly strange in consequence. We stand at the end-point of an extraordinary transformation in the understanding of what it is to be human: one that can only be fully appreciated by tracing the arc of its parabola over millennia. ...Show more

Great Expectations: Emigrant Governesses in Colonial Australia by Patricia Clarke

$29.99 AUD

Category: History

People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia by Grace Karskens

$39.99 AUD

Category: History

A landmark history of Australia's first successful settler farming area, which was on the Hawkesbury-Nepean River. Award-winning historian Grace Karskens uncovers the everyday lives of ordinary people in the early colony, both Aboriginal and British.  

Chastise (The Dambusters Story 1943) by Max Hastings

$24.99 AUD

Category: History

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A masterly history of the Dambusters raid from bestselling and critically acclaimed Max Hastings. Operation Chastise, the overnight destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams in north-west Germany by the RAF's 617 Squadron, was an epic that has passed into Britain's nation al legend. Max Hastings grew up embracing the story, the classic 1955 movie and the memory of Guy Gibson, the 24-year-old wing-commander who won the VC leading the raid. In the 21st Century, however, Hastings urges that we should review the Dambusters in much more complex shades. The aircrew's heroism was wholly authentic, as was the brilliance of Barnes Wallis, who invented the 'bouncing bombs'. But commanders who promised their young fliers that success could shorten the war fantasised wildly. What Germans call the Möhnekatastrophe imposed on the Nazi war machine temporary disruption, rather than a crippling blow. Hastings vividly describes the evolution of Wallis' bomb, and of the squadron which broke the dams at the cost of devastating losses. But he also portrays in harrowing detail those swept away by the torrents. Some 1,400 civilians perished in the biblical floods that swept through the Möhne valley, more than half of them Russian and Polish women, slave labourers under Hitler. Ironically, Air Marshal Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris gained much of the credit, though he opposed Chastise as a distraction from his city-burning blitz. He also made what the author describes as the operation's biggest mistake - the failure to launch a conventional attack on the Nazis' huge post-raid repair operation, which could have transformed the impact of the dam breaches upon Ruhr industry. Chastise offers a fascinating retake on legend by a master of the art. Hastings sets the dams raid in the big picture of the bomber offensive and of the Second World War, with moving portraits of the young airmen, so many of whom died; of Barnes Wallis; the monstrous Harris; the tragic Guy Gibson, together with superb narrative of the action of one of the most extraordinary episodes in British history. ...Show more

The Good Germans by Catrine Clay

$32.99 AUD

Category: History

After 1933, as the brutal terror regime took hold, most of the two-thirds of Germans who had never voted for the Nazis - some 40 million people - tried to keep their heads down and protect their families. They moved to the country, or pretended to support the regime to avoid being denounced by neighbour s, and tried to work out what was really happening in the Reich, surrounded as they were by Nazi propaganda and fake news. They lived in fear. Might they lose their jobs? Their homes? Their freedom? What would we have done in their place? Many ordinary Germans found the courage to resist, in the full knowledge that they could be sentenced to indefinite incarceration, torture or outright execution. Catrine Clay argues that it was a much greater number than was ever formally recorded: teachers, lawyers, factory and dock workers, housewives, shopkeepers, church members, trade unionists, army officers, aristocrats, Social Democrats, Socialists and Communists. Catrine Clay's ground-breaking book focuses on six very different characters: Irma, the young daughter of Ernst Thalmann, leader of the German Communists; Fritzi von der Schulenburg, a Prussian aristocrat; Rudolf Ditzen, the already famous author Hans Fallada, best known for his novel Alone in Berlin; Bernt Engelmann, a schoolboy living in the suburbs of Dusseldorf; Julius Leber, a charismatic leader of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag; and Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a law student in Berlin. The six are not seen in isolation but as part of their families: a brother and sister; a wife; a father with three children; an only son; the parents of a Communist pioneer daughter. Each experiences the momentous events of Nazi history as they unfold in their own small lives - Good Germans all.   ...Show more