Collection: Adult Non Fiction - History & Military

In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time. With start...

When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his new bleak and barbarous surroundings. Like many Greeks and Romans, Ovid thought the outer reaches of their world was where civilisation ceased to exist. Our fascination with the Greek and Roman world, and the ab...

The members of the Australian battalion of Gull Force endured some of the harshest prisoner-of-war conditions of any Australian during the Second World War. In February 1942, on the remote island of Ambon in Indonesia, 1150 Australian soldiers were preparing for invasion by Japanese forces. Outnu...

A gripping account of hidden identity, military courage, and an against-all-odds reunion. Four days after Germany's surrender in May 1945, a young British officer took a jeep and headed east into Germany. But this was no ordinary soldier. Manfred Gans was searching for his family. As a Jewish boy...

The official history of the Royal Australian Air Force claims that no enemy submarines operating off the Australian coast during World War II were sunk. But what if history got it wrong? In a fierce and decisive air action off the coast of New South Wales, RAAF Beaufort bombers engaged a colossal...

The impact of World War I still ripples through time. In this moving and essential book, historian Patricia Skehan brings to light secret details of Anzac experiences on the Western Front. In the annals of human history, the stakes are highest in war. And in World War I, what was at stake was the...

The award-winning author of The Sydney Wars reveals the breadth of frontier resistance warfare. The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance ended in 1824 with a series of massacres conducted by settlers in the Bathurst region. From the 1830s, colonists began occupying more and more Aboriginal land acro...

Trails to Freedom is the story of a solo hike across the Alps that brings to life the fascinating, largely unknown history of the Anzac POWs who escaped Fascist Italy to find safety in neutral Switzerland during WWII. In October 1943, four Australian soldiers left Biella in the foothills of the A...

In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa's resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants, if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian...

'The World after Gaza' takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad re-evaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West's triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist ...