Violence was a constant on all colonial frontiers, from the British expansion into the Australian and African continents, to the expansion of the United States and the Napoleonic Empire's many incursions into Europe. Yet how did the forms of violence perpetrated in these four corners of the world compare? Did the oppression and exploitation of colonized peoples constitute a new form of violence? Or was it the same that Europeans had always used against conquered peoples?In this boo...

The 1838 Myall Creek Massacre is remembered for the brutality of the crime committed by white settlers against innocent Aboriginal men, women and children, but also because eleven of the twelve assassins were arrested and brought to trial. Amid tremendous controversy, seven were hanged. Myall Creek was not the last time the colonial administration sought to apply the law equally to Aboriginal people and settlers, but it was the last time perpetrators of a massacre were convicted and hanged...

'Lyndall Ryan's new account of the extraordinary and dramatic story of the Tasmanian Aborigines is told with passion and eloquence. It is a book that will inform and move anyone with an interest in Australian history.' - Professor Henry Reynolds, University of Tasmania'A powerful and insightful historical account about a unique island and its First peoples, their dispossession and their struggle for survival and cultural birth right/heritage that reaches from the deep past...

Massacres and mass killings have always marked if not shaped the history of the world and as such are subjects of increasing interest among historians. The premise underlying this collection is that massacres were an integral, if not accepted part (until quite recently) of warfare, and that they were often fundamental to the colonizing process in the early modern and modern worlds. Making a deliberate distinction between ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’, the editors call for an entirely separate ...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This incredible true history of the colonization of Australia explores how the convict transportation system created the country we know today."One of the greatest non-fiction books I’ve ever read ... Hughes brings us an entire world." —Los Angeles Times**Digging deep into the dark history of England's infamous efforts to move 160,000 men and women thousands of miles to the other side of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ...

This bestselling book, the triumphant fruit of careful research, wide reading and judicious assessment, is the unchallenged contemporary reference on the history of New Zealand. New Zealand was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind. It was also the first to introduce full democracy. Between those events, and in the century that followed, the movements and conflicts of human history have been played out more intensively and more rapidly in ...

The often harsh and unforgiving Australian landscape was a far cry from what the early colonisers were used to, and it proved a daunting obstacle to settlement. However, a few brave and at times foolhardy men were determined to prove themselves equal to the challenge. AUSTRALIA'S GREAT EXPLORERS looks at the tragedies and triumphs of men such as Wentworth and Lawson, Hume and Hovell, Burke and Wills, Leichhardt and Strzelecki as they battled to conquer the Great Diving Range, find an elusi...

In this volume of a unique history of Australia where people are always centre stage, bestselling author Thomas Keneally brings to life the vast range of characters who have formed our national story.Convicts and Aborigines, settlers and soldiers, patriots and reformers, bushrangers and gold seekers, it is from their lives and their stories that he has woven a vibrant history to do full justice to the rich and colourful nature of our unique national character.The story begi...

Winner of the 2014 Victorian Premier's Award for non-fiction!Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas. Why are there no official memorials or commemorations of the wars that were fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists? Why is it more controversial to talk about the frontier war now than it was one hundred years ago? Forgotten War continues the story told in Henry Reynolds' seminal book The Oth...

New Zealand to many is 'Middle Earth', home of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it was also the last major land mass on the planet to be settled by humans.The country was catapulted kicking and screaming from the stone age to the space age within 200 years of Captain Cook setting foot there...Who really got to New Zealand first? Which version of the Treaty of Waitangi is the most accurate? What impact did a massive asteroid strike in the 15th century have on human settlem...

An electrifying, epic history of the city of Sydney as you have never seen her before.'To peer deeply into this ghost city, the one lying beneath the surface, is to understand that Sydney has a soul and that it is a very dark place indeed.'Beneath the shining harbour, amid the towers of global greed and deep inside the bad-drugs madness of the suburban wastelands, lies Sydney's shadow history. Terrifying tsunamis, corpse-robbing morgue staff, killer cops, neo-Nazis, power j...

The Colony is the story of the marvellously contrary, endlessly energetic early years of Sydney. It is an intimate account of the transformation of a campsite in a beautiful cove to the town that later became Australia's largest and best-known city.From the sparkling beaches to the foothills of the Blue Mountains, Grace Karskens skilfully reveals how landscape shaped the lives of the original Aboriginal inhabitants and newcomers alike. She traces the ways in which relation...