Collection: Adult Non Fiction - History & Military

In 1957, Ella Simon of Purfleet mission near Taree, New South Wales, applied for and was granted a certificate of exemption. Exemption gave her legal freedoms denied to other Indigenous Australians at that time: she could travel freely, open a bank account, and live and work where she wanted. In ...

An accessible, insightful and authoritative account of the fall of Europe through the use of one of the most successful military strategies in modern warfare. Historian, author and broadcaster James Holland draws on the latest research and interviews with participants to bring colour, detail and ...

Presents a personal account of the Parachute Regiment's ferocious tour of duty in Helmand Province, Afghanistan 2006 by a man who was involved in the thick of the action.

In sixteenth-century Europe, two women came to hold all the power, against all the odds. They were Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici. One a Virgin Queen who ruled her kingdom alone, and the other a clandestine leader who used her children to shape the dynasties of Europe, much has been written ...

For Service, the great unanswered question is how to reconcile the two vital narratives that underpin the extraordinary but troubled events of 1917. One puts the blame squarely on Tsar Nicholas II and on Alexander Kerensky's provisional government that deposed him. The other is the view from the ...

To contemporaries, the Wars of the Roses were known collectively as a "cousins' war." The series of dynastic conflicts that tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in fifteenth-century England was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. As acclaimed hi...

With the Australian troops crossing of the Kumusi River in mid-November, after pushing the Japanese back along the Kokoda Track, the time had come to face the entrenched Japanese at their beachhead at Gona, Sanananda and Buna. The end of the Kokoda Campaign in mid-November 1942 marked a turning p...

David Sornig examines how the 8 km-square zone to the west of central Melbourne became the city's blind spot. Once a fertile wetland with a large blue saltwater lagoon, it passed through various incarnations -- from boneyards and rubbish tips; through the Depression-era Dudley Flats shanty town; ...

The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) is one of the most intriguing conflicts of modern history. It has been labeled many things -- the first media war, a precursor of the First and Second World Wars, the originator of apartheid. The difference in status and resources between the superpower Great Britai...

Bomber Boys is the extraordinary and little known story of more than 100 Dutch airmen, stranded in Australia with no country to return to, who were joined by a contingent of Australians to make up the RAAF's No. 18 (Netherlands East Indies) Squadron. Formed in Canberra in April 1942, the squadron...