WESTERN AUSTRALIA: Comes with an Active Table of Contents.    This history is full of vivid details of the hard life of the first explorers and pioneers.    It covers the period from 1600 to 1901. It has all the makings of an adventure story with epic shipping voyages, politics, starvation, searches for water and minerals, convicts, and hard work.  In most countries, the story of the European settlers creating villages...

Patty spent the first thirty three years of her life living with her family on remote outback station properties - Old Bando, Minetta, Old Outstation - in south west Queensland, Australia. When her brother, Kerry developed a brain tumor, they moved to live in Charleville - a small outback town. Patty has an understanding of the land, and a great love of reading. Look beyond the words to a life lived devoid of any luxuries, without ever a complaint, but full of simple joys, happiness and lo...

Living in the wilder parts of Australia has its challenges.These are the true stories of one person's journey from Australia's suburbs to the remote northern Outback, and then to remote rural Tasmania.It is a story of deadly snakes, bush drumming, killer bicycles, Tasmanian tigers, and barramundi fishing.Compiled by Matt Flynn, a former Northern Territory journalist who also publishes fishing and outdoors magazines.

A riveting novel that tells the story of Sydney and the people who shaped its character, its skyline and its heart.BOUND FOR DESTINYIn 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naïve nineteen-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town and a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross.GREED AND HONOURThomas fathers a dynasty that will last more than two hundred years. His descend...

A sweeping story of wealth, power, privilege and betrayal, set on a grand sugar cane plantation in Queensland.LEGACY IN THE CANE FIELDSIn 1881 'Big Jim' Durham ruthlessly creates for Elianne Desmarais, his young French wife, the finest of the great sugar mills of the Southern Queensland cane fields, and names it in her honour.SUGAR AND SECRETSThe massive estate becomes a self-sufficient fortress and home to hundreds of worke...

Constantinople, 1919. Joshua Connor, an Australian farmer, arrives in Turkey to fulfil a pledge made on his wife's grave - to find the bodies of their three sons, lost in Gallipoli, and bring them home.In the enemy city Connor meets Orhan, a mischievous Turkish boy, and his mother Ayshe, who is struggling to keep her family hotel afloat and rebuild her life after the war.Connor can trace life-giving water under the earth, but finding his sons at Gallipoli seems impossible w...

Gritty, heartrending and unputdownable – the story of two sisters sent first to an English, then an Australian orphanage in the aftermath of World War II.Rita and Rosie Stevens are only nine and five years old when their widowed mother marries a violent bully called Jimmy Randall and has a baby boy by him. Under pressure from her new husband, she is persuaded to send the girls to an orphanage – not knowing that the papers she has s...

#1 New York Times BestsellerAvailable in a special hardcover edition, Christina Baker Kline’s smash bestseller, a captivating historical novel that is “a lovely novel about the search for family that also happens to illuminate a fascinating and forgotten chapter of American history” (Ann Packer).Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of aband...

FOR nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to expect. It was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I was not unwilling to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale, among scenes that had attracted me in youth and health. I chartered accordingly Dr

'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...

The book that shocked a nation, with a major new twist in one of the most perplexing maritime murder mysteries of this millennium. Fifteen-hundred revelers gathered for New Year's Eve at a picturesque Lodge, accessible only by boat, in New Zealand's stunningly scenic Marlborough Sounds.Two of those revelers, 21 year old Ben Smart and 17 year old Olivia Hope, were never seen again.This is, for the first time, the real story of what happened. Scott Watson was convicted of the...

Fairness and Freedom compares the history of two open societies--New Zealand and the United States--with much in common. Both have democratic polities, mixed-enterprise economies, individuated societies, pluralist cultures, and a deep concern for human rights and the rule of law. But all of these elements take different forms, because constellations of value are far apart. The dream of living free is America's Polaris; fairness and natural justice are New Zealand's Southern Cross. Fischer ...