Collection: Adult Non Fiction - History & Military

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the victorious powers turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For the Allied powers, the trials were an opportunity both to render judgement on their vanquished foes and to crea...

When America retreated from Kabul amid chaos in 2021, Lieutenant General Sami Sadat, the last commander of the army of the Afghan republic, was still fighting to the end. In this firsthand account, he reveals how his troops were starved of ammunition for two years before the final pullout, while ...

"Australia's war tales could be said to be the closest thing we have to sacred stories: ANZAC, Simpson and his donkey, Changi, the wronged diggers in Vietnam, Ben Roberts-Smith. Millions of dollars are spent enshrining these stories in the War Memorial in Canberra and the Australian National Memo...

This book for the first time tells the full story of the Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and American units involved. Fewer than 1,000 Australian and Canadian infantrymen, supported by New Zealand artillery and 15 American Sherman tanks fought off an entire Chinese Division of over 12,000 men a...

Dominic Chinea turns his attention to Machines. Featuring 100 machines, defined as items with a mechanism to help transfer energy, Dom looks at objects including the potter's wheel, grain mill, sewing machine, printing press, wheel maker and plenty more. Each machine has a fascinating history and...

"For centuries, men have been writing histories of antiquity filled with warlords, emperors and kings. But when it comes to incorporating women aside from Cleopatra and Boudica, writers have been more comfortable describing mythical heroines than real ones. While Penelope and Helen of Troy live o...

An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. This is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past - part poetry, part prose, microhistory, me...

This remarkable treasury of tales and trivia will whisk you on a jaw-dropping journey through time and space, stopping off to marvel at only the obscure, the startling and the straight-up weird. In it, Edward Brooke-Hitching considers questions such as: Why is a cat technically a liquid and a sol...

In this engaging narrative, Wright follows the story of petitions on bark created by the Yirrkala community in Arnhem Land in 1963, protesting bauxite mining on traditional lands. In 1963--a year of race riots in the United States and explosive agitation for civil rights worldwide--the Indigenous...

Few Australians realise that of the 62,000 Anzac soldiers who died in the Great War, over one-third are still listed as missing. With no marked graves, the only reminders of their sacrifice are the many names inscribed on ageing war memorials around the world. Scott Bennett deftly tells the story...