Collection: Adult Non Fiction - History

A travel narrative, a memoir and a thought-provoking look at Australia's complicated history with Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) Islands and the asylum seekers detained there. Five years after first living in the Indian Ocean Territories, Renee Pettitt-Schipp finds herself returning, haunted by me...

Topf and Sons designed and built the crematoria at the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen. At its height sixty-six Topf triple muffle ovens were in operation - forty-six of which were at Auschwitz. For five years the gas chambers and cremat...

The Architecture of Devotion: James Goold and His Legacies in Colonial Melbourne' honours the life and cultural contribution of Archbishop James Alipius Goold (1812-1886). Goold arrived in 1848 as the first Catholic bishop of the newly created diocese of Melbourne and quickly adapted to Australia...

Between 1941 and 1945, more than eight hundred shiploads of supplies were delivered to the Soviet Union protected by allied naval forces. Each journey was a battle against the elements, with turbulent seas, extreme cold, and the constant dread of torpedoes. These Arctic convoys have been mytholog...

This is the story of the intrepid Australian geologists who discovered pink diamonds in the Kimberley. This is a valuable insight into an industry once widely praised but now undervalued by a nation that relies on it so strongly. The remote Kimberley region of Western Australia has a rich history...

This major new work fundamentally reassesses the operations by the Western allies to deliver war supplies to Russia via the Arctic sea route between 1941 and 1945. It explores the motives underpinning Western aid, its real impact on the Soviet war effort, and its influence on wider Allied and Ger...

Army Girls is the intimate story of the final few women who served in World War II and are still alive to tell their tale. They were female soldiers in a war Britain wanted to fight without conscripting women. It was a vain hope, by December 1941 for the first time in British history women were c...