The stories behind Australia's many, many strange, inappropriate and downright hilarious place names.From Dismal Swamp to Useless Loop, Intercourse Island to Dead Mans Gully, Mount Buggery to Nowhere Else, Australia has some of the strangest, funniest, weirdest and most out-of-place names going - now described and explained in one humorous and fascinating book.Australia's vast spaces and irreverent, larrikin history have given us some of the best place name...

With pearls of wisdom and tall tales from some of Australia's well-known rugby league players, Wit and Wisdom of the League is a hilarious insight into the game from players, coaches and commentators past and present.Whether you are an elite athlete, ambitious professional, dedicated parent or hard-working student, all of us are at times challenged by doubts and setbacks. This collection of inspiring and oft times hilarious quotes and tall tales from some of Austra...

Whether you are an elite athlete, ambitious professional, dedicated parent or hard-working student, all of us are at times challenged by doubts and setbacks. This collection of inspiring and oft times hilarious quotes and quips from some of Australia's leading AFL players will lighten your mood and give an insight into the lives of people truly challenged by their own thoughts. With pearls of wisdom from some of AFL's best players and sharpest minds, Wit and Wisdom of the Players

Who stole the priceless Picasso from the NGV?Was Errol Flynn a Nazi spy? Did an Australian killthe infamous Red Baron?If you think Australia’s history is straightforward,you’re dead wrong. This is a land of the strange,the spooky and the unexplained. From the eerieball of light that stalked a terrified family acrossthe Nullabor, to the whereabouts of Victoria’sparliamentary mace, to the unidentified bodyfound propped up on an A...

Three brothers, one death, a fenceline stretching to the horizon. Two brothers meet at the border of their vast cattle properties under the unrelenting sun of outback Queensland. They are at the stockman's grave, a landmark so old, no one can remember who is buried there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last hope for their middle brother, Cameron. The Bright family's quiet existence is thrown into grief and anguish. Something had been troubling Cam. Did he lose hope and walk t...

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING ERIC BANA AS AARON FALK.It hasn't rained in Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the farming community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are discovered shot to death on their property. Everyone assumes Luke Hadler committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son. Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to his hometown for the funerals and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. As suspicion spr...

This is the brutal history of Auckland Island, a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean that faces year-round freezing rain and howling winds, making it one of the most forbidding places in the world—where to be shipwrecked means almost certain death.In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relent...

New Zealand to many is 'Middle Earth', home of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it was also the last major land mass on the planet to be settled by humans.The country was catapulted kicking and screaming from the stone age to the space age within 200 years of Captain Cook setting foot there...Who really got to New Zealand first? Which version of the Treaty of Waitangi is the most accurate? What impact did a massive asteroid strike in the 15th century have on human settlem...

The Colony is the story of the marvellously contrary, endlessly energetic early years of Sydney. It is an intimate account of the transformation of a campsite in a beautiful cove to the town that later became Australia's largest and best-known city.From the sparkling beaches to the foothills of the Blue Mountains, Grace Karskens skilfully reveals how landscape shaped the lives of the original Aboriginal inhabitants and newcomers alike. She traces the ways in which relation...

QUINCY (1838-1848) UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams. ...

The first single volume history to cover all the battles fought by the Australians against the Japanese in Papua New Guinea.Hell's Battlefield is the first book that tells the whole story of the Australians against the Japanese in New Guinea during World War II, from invasion in 1942 to the brutal end game in 1945. Besides giving new perspectives on the Kokoda campaign, the book covers the battles that preceded and those that followed, most of which have p...

As part of the controversial Earl Grey Scheme, this is the true story of the Kerry girls who were shipped to Australia from the four Kerry workhouses of Dingle, Kenmare, Killarney and Listowel in 1849 and 1850.Leaving behind scenes of destitution and misery, the girls, some of whom spoke only Irish, set off to the other side of the world without any idea of what lay ahead. This book tells of their 'selection' and their transportation to New South Wales and Adelaide...