Australiana > Biography

"Robert Menzies remains a towering figure in our political and cultural history. This collection of letters written to his only daughter, Heather, is brimful of warmth, love and humour, and provides a fascinating insight into one of our most influential Australians. 'As prime minister, Menzies strode the stage like a colossus ...here he is affectionate paterfamilias, supportive sibling, benevolent uncle.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Menzies was a very accomplished writer and the combination of geniality and acerbity is winning.' The Age... read more

'People who truly live in the outback listen to it. What they hear, I do not know ...What the country says is beyond words.' In the early 1950s, Australia was riding on the sheep's back and no-one doubted the wisdom of making a life in the wool industry, certainly not sixteen-year-old Ian Parkes. Having grown up with his grandfather's stories about the bush, he was eager to earn his way on sheep stations in the Australian outback. But he had no idea that the country would creep inside him and take root. Tough yet tender, funny one ... read more

Growing up in suburban Perth in the 1920s, the two Durack girls were fascinated by tales of the pioneering past of their father and grandfather overlanding from Queensland in the 1880s and setting up four vast cattle stations in the remote north. A year spent together on the stations in their early twenties ignited in the sisters a lifelong love of the Kimberley, along with a growing unease about the situation of the Aboriginal people employed there. Through war, love affairs, children and eventual old age, the Duracks continued to... read more

Bad Ground is the exclusive, authorised story of the 14-day entombment and rescue of Beaconsfield miners Brant Webb and Todd Russell and the fascinating aftermath. The blast and rock fall which occurred one kilometre underground on Anzac Day, 25 April 2006 killed their fellow worker, Larry Knight and left their shift manager in no doubt they were also dead.Tony Wright's enthralling, often spine-chilling narrative begins with a masterfully rendered portrait of the small Tasmanian mining township in which the drama unfolded, a townsh... read more

Sue Williams has delivered us Women of the Outback and Outback Spirit, stories she gathers from the people of the bush. Ever curious, this time Sue puts herself in the firing line, seeking to find the essence of the outback experience - perfect for all us armchair travellers. She travelled the width and length of Australia by bus, train, car, campervan, Troopy, horse, goat, foot and plane. She took part in the droving of 600 head of cattle through Queensland and got rolled by her horse. She helped pregnancy-test cattle at a remote ... read more

True life stories of ordinary women achieving extraordinary feats on the land in rural Australia.

From an early age Gina Rinehart knew she was heir to one of Australia's largest fortunes. Her father, Lang Hancock, loved her dearly and groomed her to take over the company. Then along came Rose, the Filipina housekeeper Lang married in 1985, and the obsessively private House of Hancock was changed forever. Hancock's death in 1992 opened floodgates of litigation, with Rose and Gina fixtures in the courts fighting it out for their share of Lang's mining assets. The Pilbara Princess has now become the Queen of Litigation, taking on ... read more

An analysis of the individuals making up the lost generation of WWI. They involve a range of backgrounds and experiences, all states and classes, and come from a variety of military units - not just the infantry.

Australian Story is without doubt one of the best-loved shows on the ABC. A cornerstone of Monday night viewing for 15 years, it has brought into our homes and hearts the very personal accounts of our fellow Australians - people both famous and far from famous. With its unique approach and impeccable research, this iconic show represents storytelling at its very best. Australian Story: Stories of courage, determination and love features ten very special Australian Stories from the last four years, selected by the Australian Story ... read more

Splints to Silk recounts the life of Francis Walsh AM, QC, from his early life in rural Victoria, overcoming childhood polio and learning to walk at the age of seven, through his long and distinguished legal career, culminating in his appointment as judge of the County Court of Victoria.

After the mutiny on the Bounty on 28 April 1789, led by Fletcher Christian, Captain William Bligh and 18 others were forced onto a 7-metre-long open boat and cast adrift. It was the beginning of a 47-day, 6700-kilometre journey from Tofua (a volcanic island in the Tonga group) to Timor. On this amazing voyage of survival, Bligh wrote daily entries in a small water-stained notebook and a selection of facsimile pages from this notebook is the foundation of In Blighs Hand: Surviving the Mutiny on the Bounty. All but one of the men sur... read more

Douglas Mawson is the best known of Australia's Antarctic explorers. After an apprenticeship on an expedition with Ernest Shackleton, which saw Mawson lead a small team to the South Magnetic Pole for the first time, his own expedition of 1911-14 captured the imagination of Australians, at a time when knowledge of Antarctica was scant and the frozen continent still largely unexplored. Douglas Mawson: The Life of an Explorer puts Antarctic exploration into the context of the times, and makes fantastic reading and viewing for anyone i... read more

A memoir of love, laughter, loss and billycarts. Peter FitzSimons's account of growing up on the rural outskirts of Sydney in the 1960s is first and foremost a tribute to family. But it is also a salute to times and generations past, when praise was understated but love unstinting; work was hard and values clear; when people stood by each other in adversity. Above all, in the FitzSimons home, days were for doing. In this rollicking and often hilarious memoir, Peter describes a childhood of mischief, camaraderie, eccentric c... read more

If he had never become Prime Minister, Paul Keating's place in Australian history would still have been assured. He was the Treasurer who deregulated the economy; the weaver of Labor's modern story; its heavy weapon in the parliament. He was also the great enigma - a self-educated boy from Sydney's working class and a defining element of the head-kicking Labor right who loved Paris, Mahler and Second Empire clocks. Paul Keating did become Prime Minister. In December 1991 he wrested it from Bob Hawke and the bruises from that strug... read more

At twenty-something, Alice is hungry for the milestones of young womanhood: leaving home, choosing a career, finding friendship and love on her own terms. But with each step she takes away from home, she feels the sharp tug of invisible threads: the love and worry of her Chinese-Cambodian parents, who want more than anything to keep her from harm. Her father fears for her safety to an extraordinary degree - but why? As she digs further into her father's story, Alice embarks on a journey of painful discovery: of memories lost and fo... read more

Heysen to Heysen is a showcase of letters between Nora and Hans Heysen from the collection of the National Library of Australia. Accompanied by carefully selected images and text by leading art historian Catherine Speck, the publication lifts the lid on a vista of Australian art. In 1934, when Nora first travelled to London to study art, she experienced her first time away from home and the first of many, often exotic places from where she would write home to Hahndorf, South Australia. The correspondence between Nora and Hans conti... read more

In Come the Revolution, journalist Alex Mitchell gives a rollicking account of life in newspapers and his radical past as a Trotskyist. From the cut-throat era of Sydney tabloids, he graduated to Fleet Street as an investigative reporter, taking part in the exposure of Soviet double agent Kim Philby. Giving up his job to become editor of Britains Trotskyist daily, he entered a world of class struggle politics and national liberation movements. With fellow revolutionary Vanessa Redgrave he travelled the US and the Middle East, meeti... read more

In the early 1930s, Nancy Wake was a young woman enjoying a bohemian life in Paris. By the end of the Second World War, she was the Gestapo's most wanted person. As a naive, young journalist, Nancy Wake witnessed a horrific scene of Nazi violence in a Viennese street. From that moment, she declared that she would do everything in her power to rid Europe of the Nazis. What began as a courier job here and there became a highly successful escape network for Allied soldiers, perfectly camouflaged by Nancy's high-society life in Marseil... read more

This is an original take on a classic story - how a child of immigrants moves between two cultures. In place of piety and predictability, however, Unpolished Gem offers a vivid and ironic sense of both worlds. It combines the story of Pung's life growing up in suburban Footscray with the inherited stories of the women in her family - stories of madness, survival and heartbreak. Original and brave, this is a girl's own story that introduces an unforgettable voice and captures the experience of Asian immigrants to Australia.

Colonial architect John James Clark was fourteen when he began practising as an architect. By the age of nineteen he had designed the Melbourne Treasury, Australias finest Renaissance Revival building, which celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2012. Over six decades, he designed some of the most beautiful buildings in Australia and New Zealand Melbournes Government House, City Baths and Royal Mint as well as the Treasury Building in Brisbane and the Auckland Town Hall. While he is little-known today, when he died in 1915 he was de... read more