Collection: Local History Reference

This book is conceived as the first in a series of volumes about Australia from the first days of British settlement to the present.

In the summer of 1865, when a Confederate warship sailed into the port of Melbourne, 42 men secretly enlisted to fight for the South in the American Civil War. On the notorious raider Shenandoah, scourge of the Yankee merchant fleet, they sailed off to adventure and controversy, and fired the las...

"... In a country like Australia, where it is quite probably that a man who has been a miner and brought up in a grade of society whose customs are, to say the least of it, rather primitive, may in course of time represent his State in a governing body, and become the equal of those born in the r...

Written by art historian/curator Caroline Field, it is a history of the gallery from its formation by Anne and Tam Purves in 1956 to Anne's death in 1999.The gallery has represented some of Australia's finest artists, such as Boyd, Nolan and Smart. The author draws on unpublished archival materia...

The story of Australia's Jewish settlers, from the First Fleet to the gold rushes of the 1850s, is filled with characters - like the convict who became Australia's "first lady" - and adventure. By chronicling the individuals, the Jewish struggle for political and religious tolerance is described.