Vernon Lee Walker, a young Englishman from industrial Wolverhampton, meets his death on a beach on Pentecost Island in the South Pacific on the eve of Christmas 1887. Why did Vernon die, in what circumstances, and who was responsible? Was he, as once branded, simply a 'bad colonist'? Or was he a Candide, an innocent abroad, mixing invisibly with the rich and famous, manipulated by a calculating brother, unable to change the world around him? An historian finds Vernon’s letters home to England, spanning a dozen years. With decreasing frequency, these follow his trajectory, first in Melbourne and Sydney, then as he yields to the spell of the Pacific. But what happens between the lines? Does he fall in love with his brother’s wife? What does a boy not tell his mother? The novelist steps in. This is a unique fusion of authentic history and informed invention - a tragic story of colonialism in Australia and the Pacific, told with compassion, humour and a deep understanding of time and place.

In 1915, Major Richard Francis Fitz-Gerald was the last Australian to leave an exposed position at Gallipoli. He was awarded the DSO for that and served on the Western Front through to the end of the Great War. Everywhere he went, often while in danger, he collected materials that marked his experience - photographs, orders, his battalion’s timetable for evacuation, and a souvenir map of Gallipoli that he annotated by hand. He wrote careful comments on everything he kept, transforming public documents into personal sites of memory and retrieval. He also kept a diary for the first year of his experience, covering Gallipoli, Egypt, and France. 'Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War' personalises the difficult position of a front-line officer by closely examining the things he carried, collected, and preserved for the rest of his life.

"In these three volumes we have one of the greatest novels not only of our generation, but of our language ..

In his long career in the Royal Australian Navy, Guy Griffiths participated in its emergence from Depression-era stricture, pre-World War II, to its reinvention in the 1950s and 60s as a capable middle-power force centred on aircraft carriers in the missile age. In this time, he personally experienced the RAN's darkest days in the face of the Japanese onslaught and its fi nest hour in the Philippines Campaign of World War II, and its close involvements in the Korean War and then the Vietnam War. He witnessed the realities of war in positions of increasing responsibility. Guy Griffiths: The Life & Times of an Australian Admiral is the authorised biography of Rear Admiral Guy Griffiths AO, DSO, DSC, RAN. "From country boy to gold-braided admiral, Guy Griffiths has led a richly-textured life of service to the navy and the nation. As a teenage midshipman he survived the disastrous sinking of the battlecruiser HMS Repulse off Malaya in 1941 and went on to fight at sea with distinction in another two wars: Korea and Vietnam. It is an unmatched record of courage, dedication and achievement. This is the enthralling biography of a remarkable sailor and a genuinely great Australian." - Mike Carlton AM, bestselling author of Flagship& First Victory

Traumatologist Paul Valent believes that knowledge of human responses in disasters can help individuals and societies to better control catastrophic events, such as the present pandemic. This concise book will help the general reader to understand the very wide mental health effects of this pandemic, and thus to understand how distress may be better managed today and in the future. The author summarises disaster responses as they have manifested in this pandemic. These responses are biological, psychological and social, and they affect individuals, families, children and vulnerable groups. He also provides a framework which helps to the reader to understand, and thus be better informed to treat, the wide-ranging consequences of the pandemic.

On 24 September 2019 the 17-year-old activist Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit saying, ‘People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction’. A day earlier, however, the climate policy foundation Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) sent the UN their World Climate Declaration, signed by 800 prominent scientists including Nobel Laureate Professor Ivar Giaever and Greenpeace co-founder Dr Patrick Moore, stating that there is no climate emergency: ‘You’re tired of alarmism and failed predictions of climate models that can’t predict the past, let alone the future. You distrust the business leaders, politicians and scientists of the climate industrial complex – you just want The Facts.’ This book contains original research and new theories of climate and will arm you with these facts. Leading scientists are contributors, including former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Center Dr Roy Spencer, and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report Professor Emeritus of Meteorology Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and many more.

The story of Magna Carta is the essential prologue to the story of Western democracy. It is a foundation stone in the political culture and legal system of Australia and other countries that share a common law heritage. This book combines a most readable general history of the influence of Magna Carta in the emergence of Western democracy since 1215 with beginning and concluding observations on the Great Charter’s relevance to Australia, the European settlement of which began as that of a penal colony. Magna Carta was soon, however, to provide a sound basis for the ‘British right’ to colonial self-government. This is the tale of the importance of history and culture in securing rights, and how the Great Charter is far more pivotal to our present freedom than a face-value reading of the document would allow.

Generations of Australians have been reared on the belief the fall of Singapore in February 1942 was a British betrayal that exposed Australia to Japanese invasion. In The Road to Singapore a young American historian, using archival records from across the globe, exposes the notion of a British betrayal as nothing more than a myth. British authorities never gave Australia an iron-clad guarantee against enemy attack and invasion and always stressed the need for Australians to take responsibility for home defence. The causes and consequences of the refusal to heed this advice are explained in this scholarly, readable and salutary study.

After the 1838 Lower Canada rebellion, 58 French Canadians were convicted of treason, sentenced to death, and later transported to life at hard labour in New South Wales. From the day they left Quebec, until the last man returned home in 1848 their activities were closely observed in journals, diaries and newspapers, and it seems they were viewed with wariness and fascination and treated with leniency. Some became servants and tradesman for their French-speaking superintendent; others were only lightly employed; and with a sympathetic handling of their petitions by the Governor, political efforts locally and in Britain and Canada, and sheer luck, they only served two years before parole was granted and they were pardoned. Brian Petrie was born in New South Wales and educated in Australia and in Canada and in the United States at the University of Alberta and Michigan State University. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and at Concordia University in Montreal. His teaching speciality was in social class and structured inequality. Dr Petrie became interested in the fate of the French Canadian Patriotes when he visited the Archives of New South Wales during a sabbatical leave. He was shown documentation of the prisoners as they were landed after their voyage from Quebec on HMS Buffalo and he soon realised that there was a wealth of information on these men. He was also surprised to find that the training track at Concord Oval in Sydney had once been the site of the Patriotes incarceration at Longbottom Stockade. These personal connections led to the long process of collecting information from several international and national archives and securing the translation of the diaries and journals.

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th US president in 2016 was a pivotal moment in history for America and for the world. A celebrity rather than a politician, Trump promised to turn politics on its head - and he did. Is he an aberration or does he represent a continuity of forces already in play? Who was he, where did he come from, and what did he do? These are questions future historians will ask as they grapple with the meaning of Trump, the implications of his presidency and his place in history.

The 20th-century anatomists Grafton Elliot Smith, Frederic Wood Jones and Arthur Keith travelled the globe collecting, cataloguing and constructing morphologies of the biological world with the aim of weaving these into a new vision of bio-ecology that links humans to their deep past as well as their evolutionary niche. They dissected human bodies and scrutinised the living, explaining for the first time the intricacies of human biology. They placed the body in its environment and gave it a history, thus creating an ecological synthesis in striking contrast to the model of humanity that they inherited as students. Their version of human development and history profoundly influenced public opinion as they wrote prolifically for the press; they published bestsellers on human origins and evolution; they spoke eloquently at public meetings and on the radio. They wanted their anatomical insight to shape public policy. And by changing popular views of race and environment, they moulded attitudes as to what it meant to be human in a post-Darwinian world - thus providing a potent critique of racism.

Soon after its foundation in 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia gave women the vote and the right to sit in parliament. Women’s suffrage was in fact a major aspect of the new nation’s progressive and international thinking. With great vigour, Australian women, including the Melbourne-born artist Dora Meeson Coates, ably involved themselves with the women’s movement in Great Britain. And with astounding presumption, the Australian parliament sent a Resolution to its lofty Westminster counterpart recommending that women’s suffrage be adopted. Here, Myra Scott vividly describes the increasingly violent women’s movement in England, the opposition to it by menfolk generally, the British Prime Minister’s personal bias against it, Australia’s part in this scenario, Meeson’s creative activism - and her rousing Suffrage Banner, which has pride of place in Australia’s parliament house.

Nazi Dreamtime is the ground-breaking story of extreme-right, ultra-nationalist thought and practice in Australia in the period immediately before and during the Second World War. It focuses on those native-born Australians who were attracted to the ideology of Nazism in Germany from 1933. Their belief was that the achievements and tenets of the Nazi regime were applicable to Australian political and cultural life to some extent. These Nazi enthusiasts and their fellow-travellers differed markedly over the extent of that applicability, but all agreed that Australians ought to learn from and follow the European experiment of the ‘German revolution’. The appeal of Nazism was marked in the immediate post-Depression years amongst those Australians who rejected democracy but were uncomfortable with alternatives on the conservative Right and on the Left. The aggressive foreign policy followed by Berlin in the late-thirties failed to shake the faith of these ideologues and even the duress of war would not dislodge the faith of some in Hitlerism. This group was charitably described as ‘well-meaning dreamers’ by one renegade amongst them and their ranks included tourists, appeasers, political agitators, propagandists, writers, poets, mystics, aesthetes, academics, soldiers and outright cranks. Some were obscure figures; others enjoyed a high public profile and were well-known. Many thought that aboriginal concepts of dreaming could be merged with a local variant of national-socialism to form a white dreaming – a Nazi Dreamtime under the Southern Cross. Only the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 terminated the prospects of what had turned from dream to nightmare, although the idea lingered.

Gold-fuelled Melbourne was booming, but dwelling in the fault lines of the proud young colony was an alarming fact - Victoria had the highest rate of insanity in the world. Was it the antipodean sun, gold mania, excessive masturbation, the heady pace of modern life?The true story of colonial Victoria’s quest to cure insanity unfolds through the lives of three English newcomers - a gifted artist, exiled from his homeland for his madness; an ambitious doctor, bringing enlightened treatment ideals to his post in charge of the overflowing asylum; and a mysterious undercover journalist, who sensationally exposed the lunatics’ plight in Melbourne’s press. Amid the clamour of fraught endeavours and maddened minds, the story reveals unexpected hope, creativity and ennobling humanity - and surprising contemporary relevance as we continue to grapple with this ancient human malady.

Meticulously using contemporary newspaper reports, court records, published memoirs, private letters and diaries, Michael Wilding tells the story of three troubled geniuses of Australian writing and their world of poetry and poverty, alcohol and opiates, horse-racing and theatre, journalism and publishing. Gordon shot himself, unable to pay the printer of his poems; Kendall ended up in a mental hospital after forging a cheque, and Clarke died bankrupt for a second time.

This memoir offers a rare insight into everyday life during the first year of the reform movement that created the China of the twenty-first century. The book interweaves personal encounters with records of the democracy movement in Shanghai, revealing a vast outpouring of grievances by ordinary people at a time of dramatic social change.