With the popularity of The Duck's Australian History game, I thought I would kick off list of Australian history books. Hopefully we can suggest a few to each other to help history fans to find some interesting reading. Don't have to be strictly history books but interesting books about our past.
Australian History Game. https://www.prospectingaustralia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1236
To kick off here are a couple I've enjoyed.
Redbill. Kate Lance
There were once hundreds of ketches like Redbill fishing for pearlshell in the waters of the old northwest, but few had her gift for survival or friendship.
Built in 1903, Redbill sailed through the great days of Broome pearling and the hard years of the Depression. When war came to the Pacific, Redbill was there as the first bombs fell on Darwin. When her pearling years ended, Redbill took on new lives and new masters. In Papua she hunted crocodiles in giant swamps, carried cargo for missionaries and lived with ex-headhunters as they rebuilt their lost artistic past.
As Redbill of Greenpeace she sailed the South Pacific to defy the French. She helped the refugees of East Timor, she carried troubled teenagers through the waters of Bass Strait and she found the way home for a young Aboriginal man.
Over a century Redbill coped with a lot - and then she ran into Rosita, the most powerful tropical cyclone to strike Broome in ninety years...
Like many before her, author Kate Lance fell for Redbill's gentle magic, and in this richly illustrated book she traces the many lives of a most unusual lugger.
Hell, west and crooked. Tom Cole
The horses are hell west and crooked - it'll take a week to muster them." In this remarkable autobiographical account, Tom Cole tells the stories of his life in the outback during the 1920s and 1930s. With great humour and drama, he recounts his adventures as a drover and stationhand in the toughest country in Australia and later on as a buffalo shooter and crocodile hunter in the Northern Territory before the war.
Tom Cole has a couple of other good books. The last Paradise. Riding the wild man plains. Good reads.
Bar Dangerous - A Maritime History of Newcastle by Terry Callen
This one may be hard to find. I've spent several years trying to track it down after I lent my original copy to somebody and never got it back. Cost me twice what I paid for the first copy.
The Man Who Invented Vegemite: The True Story behind an Australian Icon. Jamie Callister
He was the grandson of a gold miner who arrived in Ballarat in the 1850s. His own father, a widower, raised a small army of kids, and Cyril was the first to go to university. He was sent to England during WWI and in the 1920s was employed by the flamboyant and entrepreneurial Fred Walker, charged with the task of creating a substance that would, in time, be named Vegemite. Cyril remained at Kraft until his death in 1949. He was a progressive boss and encouraged further training for all of his staff, many of them women. Cyril was also a husband and father to three childrentwo were struck down by polio as children, while the third, a fighter pilot, was tragically killed while on a dawn air sortie in the Trobriand Islands, east of PNG during WWII.
Australian History Game. https://www.prospectingaustralia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1236
To kick off here are a couple I've enjoyed.
Redbill. Kate Lance
There were once hundreds of ketches like Redbill fishing for pearlshell in the waters of the old northwest, but few had her gift for survival or friendship.
Built in 1903, Redbill sailed through the great days of Broome pearling and the hard years of the Depression. When war came to the Pacific, Redbill was there as the first bombs fell on Darwin. When her pearling years ended, Redbill took on new lives and new masters. In Papua she hunted crocodiles in giant swamps, carried cargo for missionaries and lived with ex-headhunters as they rebuilt their lost artistic past.
As Redbill of Greenpeace she sailed the South Pacific to defy the French. She helped the refugees of East Timor, she carried troubled teenagers through the waters of Bass Strait and she found the way home for a young Aboriginal man.
Over a century Redbill coped with a lot - and then she ran into Rosita, the most powerful tropical cyclone to strike Broome in ninety years...
Like many before her, author Kate Lance fell for Redbill's gentle magic, and in this richly illustrated book she traces the many lives of a most unusual lugger.
Hell, west and crooked. Tom Cole
The horses are hell west and crooked - it'll take a week to muster them." In this remarkable autobiographical account, Tom Cole tells the stories of his life in the outback during the 1920s and 1930s. With great humour and drama, he recounts his adventures as a drover and stationhand in the toughest country in Australia and later on as a buffalo shooter and crocodile hunter in the Northern Territory before the war.
Tom Cole has a couple of other good books. The last Paradise. Riding the wild man plains. Good reads.
Bar Dangerous - A Maritime History of Newcastle by Terry Callen
This one may be hard to find. I've spent several years trying to track it down after I lent my original copy to somebody and never got it back. Cost me twice what I paid for the first copy.
The Man Who Invented Vegemite: The True Story behind an Australian Icon. Jamie Callister
He was the grandson of a gold miner who arrived in Ballarat in the 1850s. His own father, a widower, raised a small army of kids, and Cyril was the first to go to university. He was sent to England during WWI and in the 1920s was employed by the flamboyant and entrepreneurial Fred Walker, charged with the task of creating a substance that would, in time, be named Vegemite. Cyril remained at Kraft until his death in 1949. He was a progressive boss and encouraged further training for all of his staff, many of them women. Cyril was also a husband and father to three childrentwo were struck down by polio as children, while the third, a fighter pilot, was tragically killed while on a dawn air sortie in the Trobriand Islands, east of PNG during WWII.
