Henry Lawson epitomised the weather-beaten laconic when he said: ‘Death is about the only cheerful thing in the bush.’ A century later, Bill Bryson, in Down Under (2000), picked up where Lawson left off: he defined the ‘real Australia’ as places where ‘no sane person would choose to live’. Somewhere in between, Patrick White created one of those dubious entities, a sweat-stained e ... (read more)
Peter Cochrane
Dr Peter Cochrane FAHA has written extensively about war. His books include the companion volume to the ABC series Australians at War, First World War: The Western Front 1916–1918 and Simpson and the Donkey: The making of a legend. He is also the author of the award-winning Colonial Ambition and the novella Governor Bligh and the Short Man.
Freedom on the Fatal Shore brings together John Hirst’s celebrated works on the early history of New South Wales: Convict Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1983, and Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, published in 1988. Both books have been out of print for some time; the chance of picking up a second-hand copy is almost nil. Black Inc. has done historians, students and general reade ... (read more)
Chester Wilmot was on board British Airways Flight 781 on 10 January 1954 when it exploded in midair and crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the island of Elba. He was forty-two years old, a distinguished wartime broadcaster, a bestselling historian, a BBC regular, the military correspondent for the Observer and a pioneer of documentary television. He was at the peak of his powers, a success at ... (read more)