It’s February 1942 and the Second World War is raging. Japanese planes are bombing Darwin, Australia fears an invasion, and the train track leads straight through the desert to Adelaide. Fourteen-year-old Rosemary Lister begins a diary to share the upheavals and tensions of her new life in the country, storing memories for her father, missing ......

1914. Some men of the First Australian Imperial Force had a rendezvous with death in the silence in the summer night, but many were to survive only to face the thudding of the guns, again and again until 11 November 1918 at 11am, enduring physical and psychological horrors. This volume is packed with unusual stories of a deeply personal nature: ......

The Ypres salient was the favourite battle ground of the devil and his minions wrote one returned serviceman after the First World War. Few who fought in the infamous third battle of Ypres - now known as Passchendaele - in 1917 would have disagreed. All five of the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) infantry divisions were engaged in this bloody ......

The AIF and the Hundred Days Battlefields such as Gallipoli, Fromelles, Pozières, Bullecourt and Passchendaele are burnt into the Australian Great War psyche. Unfortunately the sheer guts, fortitude and sacrifice of the diggers in those battles had often been wasted by poor leadership and planning. From an Australian perspective, such sacrifice ......

1918 was a year of triumph for the Australian Corps in France yet today this is seldom recognised by most Australians. Our perceptions have been clouded by legends, built up over the past century, that have trivialised their achievement. Here an ex-soldier, Pat Beale DSO MC, uses his military background to help re-discover why and how the Corps ......

The word Anzac has been the subject of a century of legal regulation in Australia and internationally. In Anzac: The Landing, The Legend, The Law, Catherine Bond interrogates the legal history of one of Australia and New Zealands most revered words and the restrictions on the acronym that still exist today.

This book ......

Australias Greatest Escapes is a collection of stories about the most hazardous aspect of the prisoner of war experience - escape. Here is all the adventure, suspense and courage of ordinary Australians who defied their captors; men who tunnelled to freedom, crawled through stinking drains, or clawed a passage beneath barbed wire in a ......

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germanys infamous escape-proof wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape from the massive floodlit stronghold . . . by any ......

This book is the first in the Australian Guerrilla series by the author of The Desert Column, and one who was a sniper in World War 1. Published in 1942 with the imminent threat of invasion by the Japanese, this shows how one can become an expert with the rifle.

This edition of a work of the first of its kind to be published in Australia in 2006 is an updated analysis of what happened to soldiers who suffered psychologically in the First World War. Madness and the Military compellingly revisits this long-ignored aspect of Australian military history and suggests a link with so-called shell shock and ......

The Forgotten provides a doorway into a lost part of Australian history. The Chinese Labour Corps comprised some 200,000 labourers who worked under difficult and dangerous conditions during World War I. The Forgotten celebrates the shared history between China and Australia and the combined efforts to promote peace.

The bravest thing God ever made, said a British officer of the insubordinate Aussies at Gallipoli. And before the Normandy invasion, Field Marshal Montgomerys chief of staff remarked, I only wish we had the Australian 9th Division with us this morning. But there is more to the Australian experience of war than heroic endeavour and bravery. Jim ......

Before the Manhattan Project, before nuclear warfare and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was the twentieth centurys great scientific quest to fathom the secrets of the atom. It was through that search for the inner workings of matter that a unique friendship was forged, a partnership that defied academic orthodoxy and altered the ......

At the end of the First World War, there were 270,000 demobilised Australian soldiers in Europe. Getting them home after the Armistice was a task of epic proportions that would take more than two years. In the meantime, how to keep these disgruntled, damaged men with guns occupied? In a word: sport. The Oarsmen tells the story of the servicemen ......

With a reputation for being hard to discipline, generosity to their comrades, frankness and sticking it up any sign of pomposity, Australian soldiers were a wild and irreverent lot, even in the worst of circumstances during World War II. In Larrikins in Khaki, Tim Bowden has collected compelling and vivid stories of individual soldiers whose ......

Opinion is still sharply divided on whether Breaker Morant and his Australian co-defendants were criminals who got what they deserved, or scapegoats used by the British Empire. Major Thomas, the bush lawyer drafted in at the last minute to defend them, is invariably depicted either as a hero or an incompetent fool. Now, for the first time, Greg ......

Since the end of their involvement in the Vietnam War, the Australian Army has been modernized in every respect. After peacekeeping duties in South-East Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the 1980s-90s, Diggers were sent to safeguard the newly independent East Timor from Indonesian harassment in 1999, and to provide long-term protection and ......