Henry Sutton - The Innovative Man by Lorayne Branch

$65.00 AUD

Category: History

I have no hesitation in claiming Henry Sutton is Australia's greatest ever inventor and, indeed, one of the greatest inventors the world has ever seen. The range of his inventions is extraordinary, including in lighting, batteries, telephony and wireless telegraphy, photography, flight, microscopy, and car engines. Yet he remains shamefully unheralded. Admired and befriended by some of the great scientists and engineers of his time, such as Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell, his achievements are largely unrecognized. This Australian inventor, working in isolation in Ballarat in the decades around the turn of the 20th century, deserves a place in the pantheon of contributors to the modern technological age. ...Show more

Ten Delightful Tales: Bridge Street - The Historic Heart of Ballarat by Doug Bradby

$9.99 AUD

Category: History

Ten Delightful Tales: Lydiard Street - The Goldfield Grandeur of Ballarat by Doug Bradby

$9.99 AUD

Category: History

Moonlite: The Tragic Love Story of Captain Moonlite and the Bloody End of the Bushrangers by Garry Linnell

$34.99 AUD

Category: History

Charismatic, intelligent and handsome, George Scott is unlike any other bushranger. Born into a privileged life in famine-wracked Ireland, Scott's family loses its fortune and is forced to flee to New Zealand. There, Scott joins the local militia and fights as a soldier against the Maori in the brutal N ew Zealand wars. After recovering from a series of serious gunshot wounds, he sails to Australia and becomes a Lay Preacher, captivating churchgoers with his fiery and inspiring sermons. But Scott is also prone to bursts of madness. The local villagers back in Ireland often whispered that a 'wild drop' ran in the blood of the Scott family. One night he dons a mask in a small country town, arms himself with a gun and, dubbing himself Captain Moonlite, brazenly robs a bank before staging one of the country's most audacious jailbreaks. After falling in love with fellow prisoner James Nesbitt, a boyish petty criminal desperately searching for a father figure, Scott finds himself unable to shrug off his criminal past. Pursued and harassed by the police, he stages a dramatic siege and prepares for a final showdown with the law - and a macabre executioner without a nose. Meticulously researched and drawing on previously unpublished material, Moonlite is a brilliant work of non-fiction that reads like a novel. Told at a cracking pace, and based on many of the extensive letters Scott wrote from his death cell, Moonlite is set amid the violent and sexually-repressed era of Australia in the second half of the 19th century. With a cast of remarkable characters, it weaves together the extraordinary lives of our bushrangers and the desperation of a young nation eager to remove the stains of its convict past. But most of all, Moonlite is a tragic love story. For these are the dying days of the bushrangers and Captain Moonlite is about to make his last stand. ...Show more

The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague (HB) by Richard Fidler

$39.99 AUD

Category: History

ABC broadcaster and bestselling author of Ghost Empire and Saga Land, Richard Fidler is back with a personally curated history of the magical city that is Prague. In 1989, Richard Fidler was living in London as part of the provocative Australian comedy trio The Doug Anthony All Stars when revolution bro ke out across Europe. Excited by this galvanising historic, human, moment, he travelled to Prague, where a decrepit police state was being overthrown by crowds of ecstatic citizens. His experience of the Velvet Revolution never let go of him. Thirty years later Fidler returns to Prague to uncover the glorious and grotesque history of Europe's most instagrammed and uncanny city: a jumble of gothic towers, baroque palaces and zig-zag lanes that has survived plagues, pogroms, Nazi terror and Soviet tanks. Founded in the ninth Century, Prague gave the world the golem, the robot, and the world's biggest statue of Stalin, a behemoth that killed almost everyone who touched it. Fidler tells the story of the reclusive emperor who brought the world's most brilliant minds to Prague Castle to uncover the occult secrets of the universe. He explores the Black Palace, the wartime headquarters of the Nazi SS, and he meets victims of the communist secret police. Reaching back into Prague's mythic past, he finds the city's founder, the pagan priestess Libussa who prophesised: I see a city whose glory will touch the stars. Following the story of Prague from its origins in medieval darkness to its uncertain present, Fidler does what he does so well - curates an absolutely engaging and compelling history of a place. You will learn things you never knew, with a tour guide who is erudite, inquisitive, and the best storyteller you could have as your companion.  ...Show more

Myths and Legends by Sandra Lawrence

$11.99 AUD

$16.99 (29% off)

Category: History

Uncover mythical legends and legendary myths in this beautifully illustrated handbook of stories. Delve into different cultures and religions, meet powerful gods and brave heroes and travel on fabled quests from tales of old.

Last Convict by Anthony Hill

$32.99 AUD

Category: History

'It's a good story, Samuel. You're a piece of living history.' Oxford 1863 - Young Samuel Speed sets a barley stack alight in the hope it will earn him a bed in prison for the night. He wants nothing more than a morsel of food in his belly and a warm place to sleep off the streets. What he receives is a sentence of seven years' servitude, to be served half a world away in the penal colony of Fremantle, Western Australia. When Samuel boards the transport ship Belgravia, he is stripped of his clothing and even his name, and given regulations of when to rise, eat, clean and sleep. On arrival at Fremantle Prison, hard labour is added to the mix and he wonders if life can get any worse. The only solace he finds is a love of reading, which allows the likes of Tom Sawyer and Oliver Twist to become his lifelong friends. Samuel is granted a ticket of leave in 1867 and full freedom in 1871, but what sort of life can a man forge for himself in the colony, with no skills, no money and no family? Will it be the beginning of the life he has always dreamed of, or do some sentences truly never end? A colourful recreation of the life and times of the last known convict to be sent to Australia, The Last Convict is a moving study of old age and loneliness, as one social outcast finds meaning in his impoverished life through the power of literature. Meticulously researched and brilliantly woven into an engaging fictional account, it is an unforgettable story by an award-winning writer and historian. ...Show more

The Astonishing History of Ballarat 1851-1855 Volume 1 by Doug Bradby; Carson Ellis (Illustrator)

$19.95 AUD

Category: History

In 1851, Ballarat was a tranquil and beautiful valley. By 1855, it had become the thriving centre of the world's largest alluvial goldfield. But how did such a feat occur when at the beginning, diggers had little or no knowledge of where to look for gold or how to extract it from the gravel and quartz?F rom finding specimens of gold at Poverty Point and Golden Point, to sinking 60-metre shafts through wet and dangerous earth, this book reveals the journey undertaken by the diggers as they mastered the complex Ballarat East goldfield in the exciting years of 1851-55. It was an astonishing intellectual and physical achievement.The diggers of Ballarat extracted an astonishing two million ounces of gold, and Ballarat would never be the same again. ...Show more

Troy by Stephen Fry

$35.00 AUD

Category: History | Series: Stephen Fry's Greek Myths

Following Top Ten bestsellers Mythos and Heroes, this third volume retells the epic tale of Troy The story of Troy speaks to all of us - the kidnapping of Helen, a queen celebrated for her beauty, sees the Greeks launch a thousand ships against the city of Troy, to which they will lay siege for ten whol e years. It is a terrible war with casualties on all sides as well as strained relations between allies, whose consequences become tragedies. In Troy you will find heroism and hatred, love and loss, revenge and regret, desire and despair. It is these human passions, written bloodily in the sands of a distant shore, that still speak to us today.   ...Show more

Mining Mud and Medals by Di Campbell (Research by); Damien Finlayson; Simon Jacks; Janice Newton; Clare Gervasoni (Index by); Yvon Davis ((various roles)); Michael Taffe 10th

$33.00 AUD

Category: History

Members of the Australian Mining Corps were commonly known as 'tunnellers'. They worked continuously in wet and muddy conditions, under constant enemy threat in often narrow tunnels, under no man's land.The Ballarat Electorate has enjoyed a long history connected with mining and many men with mining exp ertise enlisted during WWI, to join the Australian Mining Corps. Mining Mud & Medals, seeks to highlight the role of the men who served in the Australian Tunnelling Corps during WW1, especially those from the Ballarat Electorate. Mining Mud & Medals is a project of the Victorian Interpretive Projects Inc ...Show more

Auschwitz Photographer: Based on the True Story of Prisoner 3444 Wilhelm Brasse by Luca Crippa; Maurizio Onnis

$35.00 AUD

Category: History

'I looked death in the eyes. I did it fifty thousand times...' Wilhelm Brasse When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939, he was asked to swear allegiance to Hitler and join the Wehrmacht. He refused. He was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp as political prisoner number 3444. A trained portrait photographer, he was ordered by the SS to record the inner workings of the camp. He began by taking identification photographs of the prisoners as they entered the camp, went on to capture the criminal medical experiments of Josef Mengele, and also recorded executions. Between 1940 and 1945, Brasse took around 50,000 photographs of the horror around him. He took them because he had no choice. Eventually, Brasse's conscience wouldn't allow him to hide behind his camera. First he risked his life by joining the camp's Resistance movement, faking documents for prisoners, trying to smuggle images to the outside world to reveal what was happening. Then, when Soviet troops finally advanced on the camp to liberate it, Brasse refused SS orders to destroy his photographs. 'Because the world must know,' he said. For readers of The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz, this extraordinary true story of horror, hope and courage lies at the very heart of the Holocaust. 'Brasse has left us with a powerful legacy in images. Because of them we can see the victims of the Holocaust as human and not statistics.' Fergal Keane   ...Show more

How Great Thine Aunt - The Life and Times of Missionary Sisters: Margaret Sandeman Davies MA DipEd Principal of Ilsin Girls' School Korea and Ellice Jean by John Thompson-Gray

$24.99 AUD

Category: History

This is the untold story of Margaret and Jean Davies and their uncompromising faith, amazing courage and endless endurance.Margaret was called to Korea as an educator from 1910 to 1940. During the Mansei Uprising, Japanese police arrested her for inciting to riot and drove Kim Il-Sung into Manchuria whe re he founded Korean Communism. Jean gave up a promising career in surgery at the Women's Hospital in Melbourne to practise at a mission hospital in Chinju, Korea. Sent home as a foreign alien before the attack on Pearl Harbor she practised at outback mission stations in Australia, doubling as the Flying Doctor. She medically examined the population of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) as a first step to rid the country of leprosy. Jean returned to Pukatja in South Australia during British nuclear bomb testing at Maralinga. ...Show more