The true story of murder on HMAS Australia. During World War II a sailor is killed, the suspects are part of a rumoured homosexual group on board the flagship. What followed was one of the most controversial events in the history of the Royal Australian Navy and triggered unprecedented legal and political events.
When Dick and “jack Idriess went aboard the Nancy Bell at Cooktown – they thought they were signing on for a trochus-fishing expedition, would earn some money, and go back to gold prospecting. Cross-eyed Joe, a wily Filipino skipper was after something more valuable than trochus. With the appearance of the Japanese manned black lugger the boys ......
This books looks at Idriess and his Aboriginal prospecting friends, the Bairds, working their way through far north-east Queensland over 100 years ago, from the Daintree and the Bloomfield Rivers to Mount Molloy.
The greatest engineering feat of 19th century Australia
The greatest engineering problem facing Australia – the tyranny of distance – had a solution: the electric telegraph. This is a history of the Overland Telegragh Line from Port Augusta to Port Darwin, written for its 150th anniversary.
Back in print after 60 years. Ion Idriess was one of those who set out from Derby with the ending of the Wet. This is the story of his wanderings in 1932-3 and what he heard and saw along the way, at a time when wireless and air and motor transport were rapidly changing life in the North and North-west.
Great fun, all colour book, with lots of great reminders of great songs of the 60s and 70s. As Toby Creswell says: "Gertrude and Me beautifully captures the beginnings of alternative culture in Australia in both Sydney and Melbourne.
North West Australia - in the Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges, formerly known as the King Leopold Ranges between 1879 and 2020, is the setting for the story of Aboriginal leader Jandamarra and his fight again white invasion of his country. As the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in 1952:Jandamarra, who was also known as Pigeon, had been a blacktracker of ......
A novel about eccentric 19th-century Englishman Alexander Hare: a trader and slave-owner in the East and a friend of Thomas Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, but Hare's chief claim to fame is as the creator of a harem of women from throughout Asia.
From life in small New South Wales country towns to the glitter of Sydney, this memoir explores life in a changing Australia, from ages 7 to 17. Especially written and recorded for ABC Radio, this book evokes an innocent Australia through a quietly comic delivery.
Before he became famous with his books, Ion Idriess wrote paragraphs and short stories for The Bulletin newspaper in the 1920s and early 1930s, often under pseudonyms like "Gouger" (a miner of Opals). This collection was first published in hardback in 2013, and makes for great reading about early prospecting and Australians living in the Wild.
Idriess latest book is the romance of the Edie Creek and Bulolo diggings, situated inland from Salamau; and the associated names of diggers as "Shark Eye Bill" (William Park), Matt Crowe, Jim Preston, Arthur Dowling, Frank and Jim Pryke... men who in pre-war years crept across the frontier, defying the Germans and dodging the headhunters.
A fresh take on the story behind the wreck of the Schomberg, off the coast of Peterborough, Victoria in 1855. The author uses previously undiscovered sources to provide an alternative discussion to the conventional narrative of Captain Forbes.
MAN TRACKS tells of stirring episodes in the pursuit, of lawbreakers in the primitive lands. Every chapter is authentic. Patrols through the Kimberleys, the wild Fitzmaurice River country, the nor'-west of Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and Central Australia; each incident recorded from the lips of the pursuers and pursued whether ......
In the 22nd edition of this book, Ion Idriess tells of his beginnings, of his childhood in Lismore, Tamworth and Broken Hill, of his apprenticeship in bushcraft, and of the growing love for the Australian Outback which illumines all his work. He tells of the jobs he had, - as rouseabout, horse breaker, horse tailer, shearer.
From 1933 to 1935, Ita Wegman was confronted by both Nazi fascism and internal crises in the General Anthroposophical Society. During those years, she travelled to Palestine in the fall of 1934 following a grave illness that nearly ended with her death. Her correspondence during this period, as well as her notes on the trip, reveal the great ......
In 1920, though, as the three ex-diggers talked across the bar at the West Coast, swapping stories of the War and goings-on in Cooktown and along the coast, the pioneer vision would have still been fresh and sustained by hope and dreams. All that was needed was a little luck – which might come from the Chinese gambling den across the way, or at ......