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?

1920s England. One conventional society lady's life is about to change forever.Claudia is a fifty-something super-respectable mother of three who has never put a foot wrong in her life.But now, rattling around her too-big family home, her daughters fled the nest and her husband working overseas, Claudia faces a blank future.Then an unexpected event shakes her out of her torpor in an unexpected way, and urges her to venture into the world with a fres...

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...

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. &...

An incredible collection of true crime characters from Australia's master storyteller.The bold, the bad, and the slightly mad…Criminality, some say, is part of Australia's national identity, and in Great Australian Rascals, Rogues and Ratbags Jim Haynes profiles fifteen larger-than-life Aussie rogues - some of our greatest ne'er-do-wells from colonial times to the modern era. These stories uncover the truth and expose the myths abo...

Many thousands of abandoned children were treated as free labour in late 19th century Australia, yet their stories have been hidden until now, even to their descendants. Lucy Frost's painstaking research has uncovered what really happened to the convict orphans.Longlisted for the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier's Prize for Non-fictionLonglisted for the 2024 Green Family Tasmanian History AwardAll families have...