At the NSW state election in 2011, the public turned on the 16-year-old Labor administration with unprecedented fury. The Government that had won spectacular victories in 1999 and 2003 was defeated with a swing that was an Australian postwar record. How did it manage to stay in power for four terms? What were its achievements and why did things unravel so badly?In From Carr to Keneally respected experts analyse the four terms of Labor government in NSW: the premiers and th...

For more than five decades, gangs have played a pivotal role in New Zealand crime life, beginning with the bodgies and widgies of the 1950s. Based on 10 years of gang research, this book chronicles the rise of the Hell's Angels and other bike gangs in the 1960s, the growth of the Mongrel Mob and Black Power in the 1970s, and organized crime during the last decade. With descriptions of such events as the Devil's Henchmen throwing Molotov cocktails at the Epitaph Riders in Christchurch's fir...

A broad, concise and inclusive vision of Australia and Australians by one our most renowned historians.After a lifetime of research and debate on Australian and international history, Geoffrey Blainey is well-placed to introduce us to the people who have played a part and to guide us through the events that have created the Australian identity: the mania for spectator sport; the suspicion of the tall poppy; the rivalries of Catholic and Protestant, Sydney and Melbo...

Paul Keating and John Howard altered the nation’s body-clock. Between them, they dominated 30 years of power, as both treasurers and prime ministers. Typically, they have been seen only as antagonists with competing visions of Australia and its place in the world. In The Longest Decade, however, George Megalogenis argues that they also deserve to be seen as the twin architects of the political, economic, and social revolution that took Australia through a period of trauma and reco...

Updated edition, covering Brexit, Trump, Xi’s ambitions for China, and the geopolitical implications of the COVID-19 pandemicEverything Australia wants to achieve as a country depends on its capacity to understand the world outside and to respond effectively to it.In Fear of Abandonment, expert and insider Allan Gyngell tells the story of how Australia has shaped the world and been shaped by it since it established an independent foreign policy dur...

This book is the eagerly awaited companion to Professor James Belich's acclaimed Making Peoples, published in New Zealand, Britain and the United States in 1996. Making Peoples was hailed as a turning point in the writing of New Zealand history.Paradise Reforged picks up where Making Peoples left off, taking the story of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the end of the twentieth century. It begins with the search for 'Better Britain' and ends by analysing the moder...

This is the journal of the two famous explorers who travelled the inland route to Port Phillip, Australia, in 1824.The Hume and Hovell expedition was one of the most important journeys of explorations undertaken in eastern Australia. In 1824 the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Brisbane, commissioned Hamilton Hume and former Royal Navy Captain William Hovell to lead an expedition to find new grazing land in the south of the colony, and also to find a...

Our fern might be silver but us Kiwis love to take that gold medal spot. First to give women the vote, first to climb Mount Everest, first to split the atom .But did you know that it was a Kiwi who was the first player to be sent off in a rugby test? Or that it was a Kiwi who was the first two-time world Scrabble champion? Or indeed that it was a Kiwi who invented the tranquiliser dart gun? Or that a Kiwi was the first person to free dive to 100 metres unassisted?Great ...

Sir Henry Parkes: Father of Federation, Premier of NSW, Statesman, Visionary, Political Leader, Poet, HumanistMay 27, 2015 brings the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Henry Parkes. After he died, the London Times described him as 'a colonial colossus.'Henry Parkes received little schooling and worked on a rope-walk, breaking stones, as an ivory and bone turner, ironmonger, labourer and on the wharves before tr...

In August 1940 Australia had been at war for almost a year when a Hudson bomber – the A16-97 – carrying ten people, including three cabinet ministers, crashed into a ridge near Canberra. In the ghastly inferno that followed the crash, the nation lost its key war leaders. Over the next twelve months, it became clear that the passing of Geoffrey Street, Sir Henry Gullett and James Fairbairn had destabilized Robert Menzies' wartime government. As a direct but delayed consequence, John Curtin ...

In Girt By Sea Mungo MacCallum provides a devastating account of the Howard government's treatment of the refugees as well as delineating the factors in Australian history which have worked towards prejudice and those which have worked against it; ranging from Calwell's postwar immigration policy to the recent revelations of beat-ups and distortions in the 2001 election campaign.This is a powerful account of how the government played on what was ultimately the race issue. ...

In Whitefella Jump Up, Germaine Greer suggests that embracing Aboriginality is the only way Australia can fully imagine itself as a nation. In a wide-ranging essay she looks at the interdependence of black and white and suggests not how the Aborigine question may be settled but how a sense of being Aboriginal might save the soul of Australia.In a sweeping and magisterial essay, touching on everything from Henry Lawson to multiculturalism, Germaine Greer argues that Austral...