Titres dans Australie et Océanie

The stories and verses in this collection are not just anecdotes, racing history pieces, or rehashed feature articles from sports journalists; first and foremost they are good literature. The common thread running through the wonderful Australian short stories featured in this volume is the real Aussie character and passion for life that racing seems to bring out in our culture. There are tales of childhood dreams, great achievements, victory in adversity and also tales of tragedy and heartbreak. There are stories of crazy schemes and hilarious events that could only happen on an Australian racetrack.

The controversial Battle at Xa Long Tan was not only a critical episode in Australia's Vietnam involvement; it was also a textbook nightmare in the history of jungle warfare. Reconstructing this dramatic action from secret documents and the vivid recollections of many diggers who fought at Long Tan, Terry Burstall challenges the official army version.

In August 1948, 545 passengers boarded an overcrowded, clapped-out vessel in Marseilles to face an uncertain future in Australia and New Zealand. They came from displaced persons camps in Germany, death camps in Poland, labour camps in Hungary, gulags in Siberia and stony Aegean islands. There were those who had been hunted by the Nazis and those who had welcomed them; those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled them.

This book is the first comprehensive account of how Australia attained the world's highest living standards within a few decades of European settlement, and how the nation has sustained an enviable level of income to the present. Beginning with the Aboriginal economy at the end of the 18th century, Ian McLean argues that Australia's remarkable prosperity across nearly two centuries was reached and maintained by several shifting factors.

Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti - war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.

For months during 1943 there was no night in Hellfire Pass. By the light of flares, carbide lamps and bamboo fires, men near-naked and skeletal cut a passage through stone to make way for a railway. Among these men were some of the 22,000 Australian soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese during World War II. In camps across Asia and the Pacific, they struggled, died, and survived with a little help from their mates.

In the 1930s, Jill Ker's parents bought a sheep farm on the western plains of New South Wales. In 1944, they lost nearly everything when a drought hit. Forced to leave Coorain, 11-year-old Jill and her mother settled in Sydney where Jill struggled to find a place for herself among Sydney's elite. Her story, both a chronicle of life in the Australian outback and the odyssey of a brilliant woman fighting the constraints of her time, offers a loving view of Australia.

Ned Kelly the man - warts and all - the most vivid portrait yet of Australia's immortal outlaw! Author, Ian Jones, acknowledged Kelly authority, shares with us the results of a lifetime's research. For the first time, Ned Kelly truly emerges as a man - a man who hated conflict yet never escaped it. A private man incapable of being ordinary and unnoticed. A man who was seen, even in his own lifetime, as what he represented rather than what he was.

"We are the people our parents warned us about" is the motto of the Bandidos, one of the world's most feared outlaw motorcycle gangs. For ten years, Steve Utah was a Bandidos insider. He arranged the security of their clubhouses. He 'cooked' ecstasy and ice for them. He was at meetings where interstate and overseas drug and weapons smuggling was planned. He saw stolen military weapons being sold. He witnessed vicious beatings, helped dump corpses.It all became too much and, in an attempt to regain control of his life, Utah resorted to the unthinkable....

There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever. In this absolutely riveting account of a key moment in the history of World War II, one of America's leading naval historians, Craig L. Symonds, paints an unforgettable portrait of ingenuity, courage, and sacrifice.

Simultaneous release of the thrilling new volume of true stories from airmen of the Second World War, from the author of Flak (also available in audio by Bolinda). Michael Veitch's life-long obsession with the aircraft of the Second World War led him to conclude that every single person who flew, or flew in them, has at least one extraordinary story to tell. With most of these veterans in their 80's, he knew that it was a matter of urgency to find them now, before their personal stories disappear forever.

Monsoon is a journey into the hearts and memories of those caught in a certain time in a particular place. Sandy Donaldson has been working for a volunteer organisation in Vietnam for the past four years. As her contract nears its end, she is reluctant to leave so she invites her oldest friend, Anna, to come for a holiday and discover its beautiful tourist destinations. Both girls have unexplored links to this country.

After a lifetime of research and debate on Australian and international history, Geoffrey Blainey is well-placed to introduce us to the people who have played a part and to guide us through the events which have created the Australian identity: the mania for spectator sport, the suspicion of the tall poppy, the rivalries of Catholic and Protestant, Sydney and Melbourne, new and old homelands, the conflicts of war abroad and race at home, the importance of technology, the recognition of our Aboriginal past and Native Title.

In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

Great Pioneer Women of the Outback profiles 10 female pioneers, from Jeannie Gunn, author of We of the Never Never, to equally remarkable but lesser known women, such as Emma Withnell in Western Australia and Evelyn Maunsell in Queensland. Building on the women's records and her own knowledge of Australian history, Susanna de Vries documents the grit and determination it took to build what many today would consider an extraordinary life.

The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works?

No visit to Sydney is complete without a trip to the historic Rocks district on the harbour foreshore. And no visit to the Rocks would be complete without this self-guided audio walk. The Rocks is the enclave where European Sydney had its beginnings. Here the first convicts were ordered to build their huts and here they worked the sandstone that made Australia's first buildings. This self-guided walk will take you to the places they lived and tell you their stories.

Take a self-guided audio walk from Sydney's Circular Quay -- the spot where European Australia had its beginnings. The walk takes in the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Opera House and winds its way along Sydney Harbour into the Royal Botanic Gardens. It finishes at Mrs Macquarie's Chair, with views of Fort Denison, Garden Island and down harbour. As you enjoy spectacular views and iconic landmarks, you'll enjoy a breezy commentary on 200 years of Australian history.

A fascinating look at a neglected Allied front in the Southern hemisphere, Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia, 1942 follows its successful predecessors as a captivating historical document of a pivotal era in history.

In 1902, newly-married Jeannie Gunn (Mrs Aeneas Gunn) left the security and comfort of her Melbourne home to travel to the depths of the Northern Territory, Australia, where her husband had been appointed manager of 'The Elsey', a large cattle station. One of the very few white women in the area, she was at first resented by people on and around the station, till her warmth and spirit won their affection and respect. This is her moving and simple account of her life amidst the beauty and cruelty of the land.