Collection: Adult Non Fiction - History

In August 1833, the Amphitrite, a small convict ship bound for the colonies of Australia, was wrecked in a terrible storm on the coast of France. She carried 102 female prisoners, 12 of their children, along with the captain, the crew, a medical officer and his wife. Only three people survived.

The Italian Renaissance shaped western culture - but it was far stranger and darker than many of us realise. We revere Leonardo da Vinci for his art but few now appreciate his ingenious designs for weaponry. We know the Mona Lisa for her smile but not that she was married to a slave-trader. We vi...

Becoming China is an account of China's past and present, how a small group of people at the edge of the Yellow River evolved to become the state of China today. This book weaves together the inspirations, ideas, wars and dreams to reveal the heart of what it means to be Chinese and how the past ...

Before becoming the prime ministers who led Australia in moments of extraordinary crisis and transformation, John Curtin and James Scullin were two young working-class men who dreamt of changing their country for the better. Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin tells the tale of their intertwin...

What happened when people went mad in the fledgling colony of New South Wales? In this important new history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we find out through the correspondence of tireless colonial secretaries, the brazen language of lawyers and judges and firebrand poli...

Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won't convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women. The Beekeeper of Sinjar, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several...

A hundred years ago in October 1917 members of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade participated in what is now regarded as the last great successful cavalry charge. Waving bayonets overhead in the dying light, they raced across six kilometres of exposed ground in Palestine, surprising the well...