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Girt nation (The Unauthorised History of Australia #3)
By David Hunt. 2021
David Hunt tramples the tall poppies of the past in charting Australia's transformation from aspiration to nation - an epic…
tale of charlatans and costermongers, of bush bards and bushier beards, of workers and women who weren't going to take it anymore. Girt Nation introduces Alfred Deakin, the Liberal necromancer whose dead advisors made Australia a better place to live, and Banjo Paterson, the jihadist who called on God and the Prophet to drive the Australian infidels from the Sudan 'like sand before the gale'. And meet Catherine Helen Spence, the feminist polymath who envisaged a utopian future of free contraceptives, easy divorce and immigration restrictions to prevent the 'Chinese coming to destroy all we have struggled for!' Thrill as Jandamarra leads the Bunuba against Western Australia, and Valentine Keating leads the Crutchy Push, an all-amputee street gang, against the conventionally limbed. Gasp as Essendon Football Club trainer Carl von Ledebur injects his charges with crushed dog and goat testicles. Weep as Scott Morrison's communist great-great-aunt Mary Gilmore holds a hose in New Australia. And marvel at how Labor, a political party that spent a quarter of a century infighting over how to spell its own name, ever rose to power.China panic: Australia's alternative to paranoia and pandering
By David Brophy. 2021
When he visited Australia in 2014, Chinese president Xi Jinping said there was an 'ocean of goodwill' between our country…
and his. Since then that ocean has shown dramatic signs of freezing over. Australia is in the grip of a China Panic. How did we get here and what's the way out? We hear, weekly, alarming stories of Chinese influence, interference or even espionage - in politics, on campus, in the media, in community organisations and elsewhere. The United States now sees China as a strategic rival, and pressure on Australia to 'get tough on China' will only intensify. While the xenophobic right hovers in the wings, some of the loudest voices decrying Chinese subversion come, unexpectedly, from the left. Aligning themselves with hawkish think tanks, they call for new security laws, increased scrutiny of Chinese Australians and, if necessary, military force - a prescription for a sharp rightward turn in Australian politics. In this insightful critique, David Brophy offers a progressive alternative. Instead of punitive measures that restrict rights and stoke suspicion of minorities - moves that would only make Australia more like China - we need democratic solutions that strengthen Australian institutions and embrace, not alienate, Chinese Australians. Above all, we need forms of international solidarity that don't reduce human rights to a mere bargaining chip.Bush bashers
By Len Beadell. 1994
Len Beadell's 'Gunbarrel Road Construction Party' built a network of roads stretching 6500 kilometres across almost unknown wilderness in Central…
Australia. Beadell tells the story of his second road - 1600 kilometres from east to west, from South Australia to West Australia through the heart of the Great Victoria Desert. Construction took years, as the road was driven through the almost impenetrable territory which, until Beadell's bulldozer came along, had stopped everything but camels.Flagship: the cruiser HMAS Australia II and the Pacific war on Japan
By Michael Carlton. 2017
In 1924, the grand old battle cruiser HMAS Australia I was sunk off Sydney Heads. Once she had been the…
pride of the navy and the nation. She had saved Australia from an attack by a German squadron in the Pacific in World War I. But after the war she was obsolete, and a victim in the race to disarm after WWI. It was a day of national mourning when they blew the bottom out of her; she went to her sea grave smothered in flowers and wreaths sent from around the country. Four years later, in 1928, the RAN acquired a new ship of the same name, the fast and modern heavy cruiser HMAS Australia II. During the Depression of the early 30s the navy virtually rotted on the beach - until the world so belatedly awoke to the menace of Hitler's Germany. Australia saw her first action of World War II against the Vichy French, during the abortive 1940 attempt to install the young General de Gaulle as free French leader in Dakar, West Africa. She patrolled the North Atlantic on the lookout for German battleships and - in a feat of amazing seamanship - rescued the crew of a downed RAF Coastal Command aircraft in the teeth of an Atlantic gale. She was later bombed by the Luftwaffe in Liverpool. Australia returned home to join the war against the Japanese, as the flagship of the RAN.1421: the year China discovered the world
By John Cullen, Gavin Menzies. 2003
A fictionalised "alternative history" of the discovery of the New World. On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world…
had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was "to proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, reached America seventy years before Columbus, and Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook.Essential but unplanned: the story of Melbourne's lanes
By Weston Bate. 1994
Humanity: a moral history of the twentieth century
By Jonathan Glover. 1999
This book is about history and morality in the twentieth century. It is about the psychology which made possible Hiroshima,…
the Nazi genocide, the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and many other atrocities. In modern technological war, victims are distant and responsibility is fragmented. The scientists making the atomic bomb thought that they were only providing a weapon: how it was used was to be the responsibility of society. The people who dropped the bomb were only obeying orders. The machinery of the political decision-taking was so complex that no one among the politicians was unambiguously responsible. No one thought of themselves as causing the horrors of Hiroshima. Jonathan Glover examines tribalism: how, in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, people who once lived together became trapped into mutual fear and hatred. He investigates how, in Stalin's Russia, Mao's China and in Cambodia, systems of belief made atrocities possible. The analysis of Nazism explores the emotionally powerful combination of tribalism and belief which enabled people to commit acts otherwise unimaginable. Drawing on accounts of participants, victims and observers, Jonathan Glover shows that different atrocities have common patterns which suggest weak points in our psychology. The resulting picture is used as a guide for the ethics we should create if we hope to overcome them.The gift of the gab
By Barry Dickins. 1981
On Radji Beach
By Ian W Shaw. 2012
On 12 February 1942, Singapore was just days away from its fall to the Japanese. As the city burned, hundreds…
of desperate people scrambled to the docks to flee. Amongst them were 65 Australian Army nurses, who boarded a coastal freighter, the Vyner Brooke. But theirs was a doomed voyage. Japanese bombers attacked and sank the vessel off Sumatra. Those who survived drifted for up to three days before making landfall on one of the many beaches on Banka Island. A group of survivors, including 22 nurses, gathered at Radji Beach. They voted to surrender, but the Japanese patrol that found them divided them into three groups and the executions began. In the last group were the Australian nurses, who died in a hail of bullets as they walked, abreast, into the sea. Miraculously, there was one survivor, Vivian Bullwinkel, who in spite of a bullet wound endured 13 days in the jungle before surrendering to another Japanese patrol. She was reunited with the other surviving Vyner Brooke nurses in a makeshift camp on the island. Three-and-a-half years later, only 24 made it home. Meticulously researched from the diaries and papers of some of the nurses who survived, this is a moving account of the fate of every nurse who boarded the Vyner Brooke that day.The killer koala
By Kenneth Cook, Jacqueline Kent. 1986
In "the killer koala" the author has gathered a selection of hilarious stories culled from his various experiences while travelling…
all over Australia, from the red deserts, to the jungles, to remote parts of the Great Barrier Reef.Jacqui Lambie is a senator but not a politician. She's passionate, fiery, forthright and combative - traits that saw her…
re-elected to the Senate in the 2016 election by her Tasmanian constituents. Her story of serving her country yet having to battle the army and the DVA for compensation over a crippling injury sustained as a soldier, of experiencing and overcoming addiction and depression, of raising two children as a single mother, has resonated not just with her voters, but with the wider Australian public. Now she tells the full story of her life in a memoir that is as fascinating, honest, surprising and headline-grabbing as the woman herself.The reason for God: belief in an age of skepticism
By Timothy J Keller. 2008
Although a vocal minority continues to attack religious faith, for most Americans, faith is a large part of their lives:…
86% of Americans refer to themselves as religious, and 75% of all Americans consider themselves Christians. So how should they respond to these passionate, learned, and persuasive books that promote science and secularism over religion and faith? For years, Tim Keller has compiled a list of the most frequently voiced "doubts" skeptics bring to his Manhattan church; here, he dismantles each of them. Written with atheists, agnostics, and skeptics in mind, Keller also provides an intelligent platform on which true believers can stand their ground when bombarded by the backlash. This book challenges such ideology at its core and points to the true path and purpose of Christianity.Struggletown: public and private life in Richmond, 1900-1965
By Janet McCalman, Emily Spadinger. 1984
A social history of working class life and politics in twentieth-century Australia, focusing on Richmond and its slum areas. It…
portrays the struggles and conflicts of men and women through the wars, depression, post-war boom, and the first influx of non-British immigrants.The Longreach story: a history of Longreach and shire
By Angela G. I. Moffat. 2014
Unbreakable rock: exploring the mystery of Altyerre
By Michael J Bowden. 2020
Altyerre reaches out from the eternity of creation and encloses Arrernte people in country. Altyerre explains how the Arrernte have…
survived Invasion and Mission. Altyerre is an unbreakable rock. Drawing on over thirty years of relationship with the people and land of Central Australia, Michael Bowden guides us into the world of Altyerre, the ancient dreamtime of the Arrernte people. In these insightful accounts of love, life and football he explores the sacredness of everyday life through an Arrernte lens and invites us to join him in searching for Mystery in our own lives.For decades, US military operations have been contaminating the Pacific region with toxic substances, including plutonium, dioxin, and VX nerve…
agent. Hundreds of thousands of service members, their families, and residents have been exposed—but the United States has hidden the damage and refused to help victims. After World War II, the United States granted immunity to Japanese military scientists in exchange for their data on biological weapons tests conducted in China; in the following years, nuclear detonations in the Pacific obliterated entire islands and exposed Americans, Marshallese, Chamorros, and Japanese fishing crews to radioactive fallout. At the same time, the United States experimented with biological weapons on Okinawa and stockpiled the island with nuclear and chemical munitions, causing numerous accidents. Meanwhile, the CIA orchestrated a campaign to introduce nuclear power to Japan—the folly of which became horrifyingly clear in the 2011 meltdowns in Fukushima Prefecture. Caught in a geopolitical grey zone, US territories have been among the worst affected by military contamination, including Guam, Saipan, and Johnston Island, the final disposal site of apocalyptic volumes of chemical weapons and Agent Orange. Accompanying this damage, US authorities have waged a campaign of cover-ups, lies, and attacks on the media, which the author has experienced firsthand in the form of military surveillance and attempts by the State Department to impede his work. Now, for the first time, this explosive book reveals the horrific extent of contamination in the Pacific and the lengths the Pentagon will go to conceal it.The Cowra breakout
By Mat McLachlan. 2022
During World War II, in the town of Cowra in central New South Wales, Japanese prisoners of war were held…
in a POW camp. By August 1944, over a thousand were interned and on the icy night of August 5th they staged one of the largest prison breakouts in history, launching the only land battle of World War II to be fought on Australian soil. Five Australian soldiers and more than 230 Japanese POWs would die during what became known as The Cowra Breakout. This compelling and fascinating book, written by one of Australia's leading battlefield historians, vividly traces the full story of the Breakout. It is a tale of proud warriors and misfit Australian soldiers. Of negligence and complacency, and of authorities too slow to recognise danger before it occurred - and too quick to cover it up when it was too late. But mostly it is a story about raw human emotions, and the extremes that people will go to when they feel all hope is lost.Here are the stories of Australia's iconic battles and campaigns from the time of federation to the Vietnam War. Some…
are still household names, although their historical significance may be a mystery to most Aussies. Others are barely remembered now, but are part in our history and deserve to be retold. Most importantly, this collection demonstrates the extraordinary courage, resilience, stoic humor, personal heroism, and sacrifice that created the legend of the Aussie digger, soldiers, sailors and airmen who did things their own way and earned the undying respect of both their allies and their enemies. These are the stories that explain Australia's wartime reputation. Fifteen years before Gallipoli, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing of stoic Australian courage, would say, "When the ballad makers of Australia seek for a subject, let them turn to Elands River." Of Gallipoli, a British officer called the cheerful, insubordinate Aussies "the bravest thing God ever made." And before the Normandy invasion, Field Marshall Montgomery's chief of staff remarked, "I only wish we had the Australian 9th Division with us this morning."The whispering wire: tracing the Overland Telegraph Line through the heart of Australia
By Rosamund Burton. 2022
Interweaving history and travel, this story traces one woman's journey tracing the 3200-km Overland Telegraph Line from Adelaide to Darwin.…
Constructed between 1870 and 1872, the line transformed Adelaide into Australia's communication hub, connecting the continent with the rest of the world and heralding the dawn of instant communication.Struggling with a lack of experience and fitness, Rosamund Burton and her friend cycle the first 800 km from Adelaide through the Flinders Ranges to the deserted outback town of Farina, battling piercing winds and pelting rain, visiting sites and chatting with locals as they go.The author moves across the continent, storytelling, sharing its sometimes brutal history and listening to those who have lived in this harsh but beautiful country. This quest for connection with the land and an understanding of its people, is also an exploration of what it means for the author, being Irish born, to belong in Australia.