The action-packed true story of Australia's very own top gun pilot, Matt Hall."I would sit there at the controls and think: I'm going to go left, and I can. I want to go right, and I will. I don't have to follow the road. I don't have to follow rules. I don't have to ask anyone - I can go left when I want, I can go right when I want. I had discovered the freedom that has kept me flying to this day." Since he was old enough to notice planes, Matt Hall wanted to be a pilot. Flying wit...

More than 10,000 Australians served with Bomber Command, a highly trained band of elite flyers who undertook some of the most dangerous operations of World War II. They flew raid after raid over France and Germany knowing that the odds were against them. Stretched to breaking point, nearly 3500 died in the air. Their bravery in extreme circumstances has barely been recognised.Peter Rees traces the extraordinary achievements of these young aviators. He tells their hair-raising stori...

Strap yourself in, hold on tight, and find out exactly what it's like to be Australia's best-loved race driver!Craig Lowndes is Australia's favourite racing driver.A three-time V8 Supercar champion, four-time winner of the Bathurst 1000 and recipient of the Barry Sheene Medal two years in a row, Craig is one of the most successful drivers in the history of Australian motor racing. Loved and respected off the track too, Craig is known as a great bloke, a devoted family man and cattle...

"This is the book that puts the flesh on the bones of its reputation as one of the best aircraft of the Second World War." — Pennant MagazineThe flak started about four or five minutes before the target and immediately it was apparent that it was intense and extremely accurate. Oboe entailed the pilot flying dead straight and level for ten minutes on the attack run. Suddenly a tremendous flash lit up the sky about 50 yards ahea...

In John Bede Cusack's fictionalised military memoir 'They Hosed Them Out', fact and fiction intersect to tell the powerful story of one man's experience as an air gunner during the Second World War. Cusack transcends the limitations of non-fiction and traditional war literature to evoke not only the well-documented horrors of war but also the adventure. Written with a profound mixture of bitterness and cynicism, humour and camaraderie, Cusack's sardonic Australian humour offers a unique an...

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLEROn 19 July 1916, 7000 Australian soldiers - in the first major action of the AIF on the Western Front - attacked entrenched German positions at Fromelles in northern France. By the next day, there were over 5500 casualties, including nearly 2000 dead - a bloodbath that the Australian War Memorial describes as 'the worst 24 hours in Australia's entire history.Just days later, three Australian Divisions attacked German positions at nearby Pozières, an...

February 1942. The Japanese invasion of Timor has begun and attempts to evacuate a group of 29 Australian airmen, charged with keeping an airfield operational until the last moment, are thwarted.Under the leadership of Bryan Rofe, a 24-year-old meteorological officer, the airmen make for remote jungle along the northwest coast. All attempts to rescue the group fail. Malaria-ravaged and starving, these men are taken to the limits of their endurance for 58 days. When a 300-strong Japa...

'As gritty as it is real. An amazing book about ordinary Australians made extraordinary by the times they lived through . . .' - Peter FitzSimonsAbout 1300 Australians died in the desert campaigns of World War I, while another 3500 died in North Africa and the Middle East during World War II. Thousands more carried the wounds of war for the rest of their lives. Countless families were left behind to mourn the dead and comfort the injured. A ripple effect of grief passed down the ge...

The thrilling life of Bert Hinkler, Bundaberg boy, who grew up to become a pioneer of aviation, Mussolini's favourite pilot, dubbed 'the most daring man in the world' by adoring crowds who turned out to see him fly.Grantlee Kieza tells the thrilling story of Bert's life and with it the bigger story of how the world was changed forever by men like Hinkler. Fast paced and revealing, this is an overdue, full-blooded biography about one of Australia's most astonishing sons. He's all but...

This is a fighter pilot's story of eight memorable months from May to December 1940. When the Germans were blitzing their way across France, Pilot Officer Tom Neil had just received his first posting to 249 Squadron.Nineteen years old, fresh from training at Montrose on Hawker Audax biplanes he was soon to be pitch forked into the maelstrom of air fighting on which the survival of Britain was to depend. By the end of the year he had shot down 13 enemy aircraft, seen many of his fri...

The untold story of the Sandakan death marches of World War II.After the fall of Singapore, in February 1942, the Japanese conquerors rounded up tens of thousands of British and Australian soldiers and shipped them to prison camps scattered throughout Hirohito’s newly won Empire.The fall of Britain’s ‘impregnable fortress’ was the greatest humiliation in British military history, for which Churchill never forgave the Japanese.But nothing would surpa...

'We make and we break.'They were the forward scouts, the mine clearers, the bridge builders and the tunnel rats. They were frequently not just on the front line, but right at the sharp end of the action. They were the legendary Aussie sappers, the army engineers, who were literally everywhere in the fighting against the Vietcong.This special breed of soldier lived hard and played hard. They were there at the beginning of the war. They were also among the last to le...