Collection: Local History Reference

Bishopscourt was built as the family home of Melbourne's Anglican bishops and archbishops and their wives. For the fourteen women whose task it was to manager her private household, Bishopscourt represented a unique challenge.

In this bestselling book master story-teller Geoffrey Blainey takes us on an absorbing guided tour of a vanished Australia. Covering the years from the first gold rush to World War I, Blainey paints a fascinating picture of how our forebears lived - in the outback, in towns and cities, at sea and...

See previous edition; Who killed the koories for annotation.

Unsympathetic account of George Augustus Robinson's life; details of 1830 military action that became known as the Black Line; conciliator with Tasmanian Aborigines as Friendly Mission; his relationship with Trucanini; establishment of Wybalenna mission; appointment as Chief Protector of Abori...

"Blak Cook Book explores the two main competing views of Cook and all that he symbolises. It also presents a view of James Cook as just one man and a view of his journeys from the perspective of the First Nations whose lives, lands and stories were ruptured as a result."--page 11.

Before there was Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, there was Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab -- the biggest and fastest-selling detective novel of the 1800s, and Australia's first literary blockbuster. Fergus Hume was an aspiring playwright when he moved from Dunedin to Melbourne in...

Almost a hundred thousand single women emigrated from Britain to the Australian colonies between 1850 and 1900. The popular assumption is that these women went to find husbands, but this text establishes that the female emigration schemes were devised to ease the shortage of domestic servants.