It remains the greatest act of theft in Australian history. On a moonlit night in 1852, the barque, Nelson, was riding atanchor in Hobson's Bay in the then young Colony of Victoria. Aboard the vessel was an 8,000 ounce gold consignmentbound for London. In an audacious assault, a band of heavily armed pirates took possession of the ship, shooting her chiefofficer and imprisoning her crew. The pirates then helped themselves to the gold. In today's money, their heist woul...

The greatest escape story of Australian colonial history by the son of Australia’s best-loved storytellerIn 1823, cockney sailor and chancer James Porter was convicted of stealing a stack of beaver furs and transported halfway around the world to Van Diemen's Land. After several escape attempts from the notorious penal colony, Porter, who told authorities he was a 'beer-machine maker', was sent to Macquarie Harbour, known in Van Diemen's Land as hell on earth....

How the mighty clipper ships transformed Australia from convict outpost to a nation.More than one million Australians can trace their heritage to the migrant ships of the mid-to-late 19th century...The story of the Clipper ships, and the tens of thousands of migrants they bought to the Australian colony of the nineteenth century, is one of the world's great migration stories. For anyone who travelled to Australia before 1850, it was a long and arduous journey that could tak...

Thousands of convicts were transported to Australia. Of these, some managed to escape incarceration and went on to achieve notoriety in their new land. A few tried to invent a Robin Hood reputation, taking the side of the poor settler against those in authority. Some committed crimes so heinous they were both feared and despised by the general population. Their lives were desperate, their fate often tragic. AUSTRALIAS MOST NOTORIOUS CONVICTS reveals not only their stories but also the horr...

**The convict women who built a continent..."A moving and fascinating story." --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's GhostHistorian Deborah J. Swiss tells the heartbreaking, horrifying, and ultimately triumphant story of the women exiled from the British Isles and forced into slavery and savagery-who created the most liberated society of their time.**The Tin Ticket takes us to the dawn of the nineteenth century and into the lives of Agnes McMillan, wh...

In the pre-dawn hours of April 1, 1873—as the lookouts looked, the steersman steered, and the captain slept—something was happening to the SS Atlantic. The tide had quietly carried the White Star Line ocean liner twelve miles off course, and land was closer than anybody realized—or was willing to believe. The wreck of the SS Atlantic would become the worst transatlantic passenger ship disaster before Titanic, and although it happened almost 150 years ago, there are still many unanswered qu...

Based on an elaborate reconstruction of day-to-day life at Macquarie Harbour, one of Australia's most notorious sites of convict punishment, this is the true story of how, in 1827, nine convicts opted for 'state-assisted' escape (the death sentence) rather than endure the hardships and privations of the penal settlement on Sarah Island.In October 1827, nine convicts who had endured years of unimaginable cruelty at the hands of the system opted for 'state-assist...

EIGHTY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, the legend of Ernest Shackleton and the extraordinary story of the Endurance South Pole expedition still hold a compelling grip on the public imagination. Trapped in drifting polar pack ice, Ernest Shackleton and his crew fought for survival against all the odds. When the Endurance was finally crushed, they were stranded on ice-floes for more than a year before reaching Elephant Island in April 1916. From there Shackleton and his five men emb...

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...

The epic story of one of Australia's greatest maritime disasters, the wreck of the Dunbar.'gripping, engaging popular history' - Sydney Morning HeraldThe Dunbar was one of the most advanced and celebrated sailing ships of the mid-19th century. Built to carry passengers in speed and luxury on the long route from Britain to Australia, it was the Titanic of its day.Late at night on 20 August 1857, af...

The tragic tale of the sinking of the famine ship, the St. John in Massachusetts Bay in 1849. The Great Irish Famine drove huge numbers of Irish men and women to leave the island and pursue their survival in foreign lands. In 1847, some 200,000 people sailed for Boston alone. Of this massive group, 2,000 never made it to their destination, killed by disease and hunger during the voyages, their remains consigned to a watery grave. The sinking of the brig St. John off the coast of Massachuse...

From the first wreck in 1622 off Western Australia to the tragedy of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, Evan McHugh captures all the drama of Australia's maritime history. There are swashbuckling mutineers, violent storms, uncharted reefs, enemy warships, as well as ripping yarns about Dutchmen and lascars, Aborigines and escaped convicts. In producing this remarkable book, McHugh has made extensive use of first-hand accounts and contemporary records. With characteristic flair, he also ...