From the cotton mills of England to the magnificent theatres of Melbourne - a scintillating journey through the golden age of Australian showbusiness.GOLD RUSH ENTERTAINERS'So, Will, are you going to come with me and my team of merry performers to the sunny climes of Australia, where the crowds are already queuing and the streets are paved with gold?'In the second half of the 19th century, Melbourne is a veritable boom town, as hopefuls fr...

In a time when desperate people were seizing with both hands the chance for freedom, refugees from more than seventy nations gathered beneath the Southern Cross to forge a new national identity. They came from all over wartorn Europe to the mountains of Australia to help realise one man's dream: the mighty Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th century. People of all races and creeds tunnelled through a mountain range to turn the course of ...

The Sentimental Bloke tells the story of Bill, a member of a larrikin push (or gang) in Melbourne's Little Lonsdale red-light district, who encounters Doreen, a young woman "of some social aspiration", in a local market. Narrated by Bill, the poems chronicle their courtship and marriage, detailing his transformation from a violence-prone gang member to a contented husband and father. Read by John Derum, these "songs" show us the great romance of the Bloke and his girl Doreen, full...

Forensic psychiatrist Donald Grant asks, what is it about murder that fascinates us? Is it the chill whisper of fear reminding us we too can kill? Grant describes ten true murder cases, each with unique triggers. For most of us, murder is an arm's length experience, close enough to frighten and fascinate yet far enough not to traumatise. For those directly affected, murder can be scarring. Our restless chatter about murder, our state of heightened alert, our endless appetite for news, may ...

Originally released as a B-side in 1980, Down Under made Men at Work the biggest band on the planet. The song became an alternative Australian anthem and its video (recorded on the sand dunes of Cronulla) became an image of Australia recognised the world over. Even when Men at Work suddenly disappeared, Down Under remained in the national psyche. Nearly three decades later, Spicks and Specks innocently revealed a link between the song and the tune of the old Kookaburra nursery rhyme, and t...

Just after Christmas 1803, convict William Buckley fled an embryonic settlement in the land of the Kulin nation (now the Port Phillip area), to take his chances in the wilderness. A few months later, the local Aboriginal people found the six-foot-five former soldier near death. Believing he was a lost kinsman returned from the dead, they took him in, and for thirty-two years Buckley lived as a Wadawurrung man, learning his adopted tribe's language, skills and methods to survive. The outsid...

The war on drugs has been official American policy since the 1970s. It is at best a failed policy, according to bestselling author Antony Loewenstein. Its direct results have included mass incarceration in the US and extreme violence in different parts of the world. And now the Trump administration is unleashing diplomatic and military forces against any softening of the conflict. Pills, Powder, and Smoke investigates the individuals, officials, activists, victims, DEA agents and trafficke...

James Moody of the 2/1st Machine Gun Battalion found an Egyptian dog in 1940, who became Horrie, the Battalion's mascot. He wrote it first as a simple tale, augmented by his own photographs of Horrie and his mates in action in Greece, Crete and Palestine. This was sent to Ion Idriess, who developed the book with a series of questions, to finally develop the classic tale of man's best friend: Horrie the Wog Dog. Published for the first time is Moody's original tale, and extended response to...

'One hundred years after the charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade at Beersheba in October 1917 ... The Desert Column is based on the diaries that he kept through out the war. Published in 1932, it is one of Idriess' earliest works. Harry Chauvel noted in the foreword that it was the only book of the campaign that to his knowledge was 'viewed entirely from the private soldier's point of view' ... Idriess served as a sniper with the 5th Australian Light Horse. Enlisting in 1914, he began hi...

'How did such big balls get in such short pants?' – Aerosmith's Steve Tyler on Angus, at the induction of AC/DC into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Angus Young, the co-founder and last remaining original member of AC/DC, has for more than 40 years been the face, sound and sometimes the exposed backside of the trailblazing rock band. In his trademark schoolboy outfit, Angus rose from the obscurity of working-class Glasgow and Sydney to become hard rock's greatest guitarist. High Voltage is t...

The Glugs of Gosh is a book of satirical verse written by Australian author C. J. Dennis, published by Angus & Robertson in 1917. The book's 13 poems are vignettes of life in a fictional kingdom called Gosh, inhabited by an arboreal race (that is to say, climbers) known as Glugs. Dennis describes the Glugs as a "stupid race of docile folk". Written in the style of children's nonsense poetry, the work attacks free trade, along with what Dennis saw as Australia's social conformity, ...

Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles – from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In The Great World, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But The Great World is more than a novel of war. Ranging over 70 years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbur...