Collection: Adult Non Fiction - History

During WW2, a group of Jewish refugees (intellectuals, writers, artists and athletes - most from Germany and Austria) escaped to Britain and were interned as 'enemy aliens'. In 1942, they were selected and trained to form a special unit of commandoes who would be sent back into Europe to play a s...

A saga of daring exploits by Australian Yachtsmen Scheme volunteers who served as officers in the Royal Navy and saw action in some of the most dangerous theatres of the war at sea, including the Atlantic convoys, the Artic supply run to Russia, covert operations and the Allied landings. At home,...

Yarra Birrarung: Artists, Writers and the River is an illustrated history of life on the Yarra. Through the lens of artists and writers, the book explores how life has flourished on the river, including recreation, industry and land use, as well as infrastructure, natural history and social histo...

When did globalization begin? Most observers have settled on 1492, the year Columbus discovered America. But as celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen shows, it was the year 1000, when for the first time new trade routes linked the entire globe, so an object could in theory circumnavigate the w...

Welcome to the White House. At the heart of Washington, there is a circus. It's raucous, noisy and full of clowns. Reporting on it is a daily cacophony. Four major stories can blow up and blow out before breakfast, and political weather systems are moving at warp speed. The one thing absent from ...

For the ten years from 1902, when Australia's suffrage campaigners won the vote for white women, the world looked to this trailblazing young democracy for inspiration. Clare Wright's epic new history tells the story of that victory - and of Australia's role in the subsequent international struggl...

Everyone knows the word 'war'. But very few understand what it truly means. When you find you have to face it, you feel totally lost, walled in by fright and despair. Until you've been there, you don't know what war is. This is the gripping, urgent and moving diary of young Ukrainian refugee Yeva...

"Z Special Unit, one of the most intrepid but arguably the most unsung of Allied Special Forces of the Second World War waged a guerrilla war against Japan for two years in the south-west Pacific. On some of their 81 operations Z Special Unit slipped into enemy harbors in canoes and silently mine...