Events at Abu Ghraib prison and the 1968 My Lai Massacre show that the behaviour of the military can descend into barbarism. How strong is the military’s commitment to avoiding such atrocities?
John Murphy’s Evatt: A life is a biography of Australian parliamentarian and jurist HV Evatt. Remembered as the first foreign minister to argue for an independent Australian policy in the 1940s and fo
Drawing on interviews conducted for her doctoral thesis, the author describes the story of displaced persons who migrated from postwar camps in Central and Eastern Europe to Australia after World W
Australia does not have a bill or charter of rights, which means there is no comprehensive law that enshrines human rights in Australia – even though these laws are standard in the rest of the d
Describes the intense commercial rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne over a period of 150 years. While Sydney was established nearly 50 years before Melbourne, the great wealth generated by the Victo
The annual collection celebrating the finest voices in Australian science writing. From the furthest reaches of the universe to the microscopic world of our genes, science offers writers the kind of s
Australian military history is full of heroes ? big names that loom large in the public memory of the nation’s wartime experiences, like Monash, Chauvel, Jacka and Blamey. There is no question tha
In Australia’s rush to commemorate all things Anzac, have we lost our ability to look beyond war as the central pillar of Australia’s history and identity? The passionate historians of the Honest H
As Australia became a nation in 1901, no one anticipated that ‘Aboriginal affairs’ would become an on-going national preoccupation. Not ‘dying out’ as predicted, Aboriginal num
This is the history of John Vincent Barry: judge, historian, criminologist, civil libertarian and public intellectual before his time. Drawing on an archive of more than 10,000 letters as well as rece
Today, roughly 100,000 Gypsies call Australia home, yet until now their experiences have been hidden from our history, and from our present. Here, award-winning memoirist and novelist Mandy Sayer w
In the first of four volumes on the Howard Government’s nearly 12 years in office, The Ascent to Power covers the 1996 election and the practical challenges of the Coalition’s first year i
A new edition of this bestselling Australian classic. After the Japanese invasion of Burma in late 1941, 11-year-old Colin McPhedran was forced to flee his homeland on foot, across the steep Patkoi Mo
While Harry Seidler is one of Australia’s most famous architects, little is known of his European-born contemporaries. The Other Moderns uncovers the work of Sydney’s forgotten émig
On Track tells the story of John Blay’s long-distance search for the Bundian Way, an important Aboriginal pathway between Mt Kosciuszko and Twofold Bay near Eden on the New South Wales far south coast
Digging through the myths around Australia’s most famous artist, many of which he created himself as a masterful self-promoter, this book is the biography that Sidney Nolan deserves. In an authoritati
Scots have been 'invisible' ethnics but happen to be Australia's third largest immigrant group. The Scots in Australia is a long overdue and comprehensive history of Scottish immigrants?including conv
How does dust connect the cosmos with our bed sheets? Why do lobsters do the Mexican Wave backwards? And what makes us feel ‘wetness’ when there’s no such thing as ‘wet’ nerve receptors? Now in its fi
?Australian governments find it easy to go to war. Their leaders seem to be able to withdraw with a calm conscience, answerable neither to God nor humanity.’ Australia lost 600 men in the Boer War,
