Rogues and vagabonds, idle, pimping, 'spunging' slaves and lechers. 'Honest hypocrites' and 'the motley representatives of human nature.'That's how actors were described back in the day. It wasn't until around 150 years ago that the profession of acting was considered even remotely respectable.Exits and Entrances is the author's personal and often biased account of how theatre and the people who worked in it have evolved since the golden age of Eli...

In 1787 a handful of people - convicts, marines and government officials - sail across the world to settle a new colony and call it New South Wales.In 1801 Mary Pitt, a widow with five children, migrates to New South Wales from her home in Dorset to live among these same convicts.Why?Two hundred odd years later Mary’s great great great great granddaughter travels to what is now Australia to discover the answer to why her ancestress risked the lives of her e...

In the 19th century Australia went from struggling penal colony to a thriving community with a bright future.George Matcham Pitt's life spanned the greater part of this century. A larger than life character and a master of rhetoric, fond of quoting from classic poets, opinionated and generous to a fault, GM, as he was known, went from humble farmer to landowner, auctioneer and the founder of one of Australia's first and best-known stock and station agents Pitt, Son...

'Love is like a red red rose' - beautiful, desirable, prickly and not always easy to find.A collection of stories about love in adversity: Love unrequited, or unwanted. Love obsessive, love unexpected; love that makes the world go around and turns people mad.If all we need for a peaceful and happy world is to love one another, why don't we simply do so?Why does a simple thing like love have to be so complicated?

WHY were men and women in New South Wales once ordered to wear skirts for sea bathing?WHAT did famous writers such as Mark Twain and Anthony Trollope have to say about Australia?HOW did the miracle known as the Sydney Opera House ever see the light of day?WHAT'S the point of family history?Australia And How To Find It is a mixture of odds and sods about that weird, eccentric country...

The sensational true tale that inspired the major motion picture Belle starring Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Penelope Wilton, and Matthew Goode—a stunning story of the first mixed-race girl introduced to high society England and raised as a lady.The illegitimate daughter of a captain in the Royal Navy and an enslaved African woman, Dido Belle was sent to live with her great-uncle, the Earl of Mansfield, one of the most powerful men of the time a...

In this side-splitting sequel to his best-selling history, David Hunt takes us to the Australian frontier. This was the Wild South, home to hardy pioneers, gun-slinging bushrangers, directionally challenged explorers, nervous indigenous people, Caroline Chisholm and sheep. Lots of sheep.First there was Girt. Now comes . . . True GirtTrue Girt introduces Thomas Davey, the hard-drinking Tasmanian governor who invented the Blow My Skull cocktail, a...

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 ...

A dramatic and fast-paced biography of a currency lass born to convicts who gained their freedom and then their fortune in 1840s Sydney. At the age of 15 Mary Ann Gill slipped out her bedroom window to elope with a gentleman settler, but when her father discovered his daughter's disappearance he pursued the couple and fired two pistols at his daughter's suitor, unleashing a national scandal.One wet autumn evening in 1848, fifteen-year-old Mary Ann Gill stole out of...

The extraordinary story of Mary Reibey - immortalised on the Australian $20 note, Australia's first female entrepreneur and the most powerful woman in colonial historySHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 INDIE BOOK AWARDSIn 1791, teenage runaway and sometime horse thief Mary Reibey narrowly escaped the English gallows with transportation to the brutal new penal colony at Sydney Cove.It was the beginning of a 60-plus year story ...

As Europeans moved into new lands in Queensland in the 19th century, violent encounters with local Aboriginals mostly followed. Drawing on extensive original research, Timothy Bottoms tells the story of the most violent frontier in Australian colonial history.'This is an important, well researched book: challenging, compelling and controversial. It is a must read for anyone interested in Australian history.' - Henry ReynoldsThe Queensland frontier ...

The Vanished Land is the Western District of Victoria stripped of its identity, its social elite of grazing dynasties departed for their own reasons. The melancholic exodus has increased recently as the myriad pressures of holding inherited land have become intolerable in a nation never intimidated by ditching its past. This historic plain of fecundity demands an investigation of its ending as the home of a ruling class that for 150 years bestrode an Australia riding on the sheep's back. &...