Flight to Fame, a classic adventure story, tells the hair-raising tale of the world-first flight from England to Australia, in the words of the pilot, (Sir) Ross Smith.

In March 1919, Australia's prime minister announced a prize of £10,000 for the first successful flight from Great Britain to Australia in under 30 days. Late that same year, the victorious pilots, Ross and Keith Smith, landed in Darwin to international acclaim. The New York Times gushed: 'Captain Ross Smith has done a wonderful thing for the prestige of the British Empire. He must be hailed as the foremost living aviator.' Their achievement was the forerunner to the age of international air travel.

During the race, Ross and his brother Keith (his co-pilot and navigator) wrote in their diaries daily, recording the journey of their four-man crew in their Vickers Vimy G-EAOU twin-engine plane, its open cockpit exposing them to snow, sleet, hail and unbearable heat. Originally published as 14,000 Miles Through the Air (1922), Ross Smith's book recounts their danger-ridden, record-breaking journey - a mere 16 years after the Wright brothers first defied gravity for just a few seconds.

This richly illustrated edition, published to coincide with the flight's centenary, is introduced and edited by historian Peter Monteath.

This book explores the place of China and the Chinese during the age of imperialism. Focusing not only on the state but also on the vitality of Chinese culture and the Chinese diaspora, it examines the seeming contradictions of a period in which China came under immense pressure from imperial expansion while remaining a major political, cultural and demographic force in its own right. Where histories of China commonly highlight episodes of conflict and subjugation in China’s relations with the West, the contributions to this volume explore the complex spaces where empires and their peoples did not merely collide but also became entangled.

Captured Lives peers behind the barbed wire drawn around people deemed threats to Australia's security during the two world wars. Civilians from enemy nations, even if born in Australia, were subjects of suspicion and locked away in internment camps. Prisoners-of-war were shipped from the other side of the world and shut away in camps in country Australia.

No matter how unjust their internment or how severe the privations, most internees and POWs worked out ways to relieve their discomfort, physical and mental, and their boredom. Internees devoted their time to creative pursuits like theatre, musical ensembles, art and photography, while others involved themselves in sporting activities, gardening or studying.

Captured Lives mentions over 30 of the main camps that were spread across Australia during the two world wars. Included are sketches, watercolours and photographs made by internees serve as references of the conditions and life in the camps from an insider's perspective.

With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage Worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered.

Whether in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas or Africa, within Germany’s formal empire or in the imperial spaces of other powers, Germans brought with them assumptions about the nature of extra-European peoples. These assumptions were often subverted, disrupted or overturned by their own experience of frontier interactions, which led some Germans to question European ‘knowledge’ of these non-European peoples. Other Germans, however, signally failed to shift from their earlier assumptions about indigenous people and continued to act in the colonies according to their belief in the innate superiority of Europeans.

Examining the multi-faceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, the wide-ranging research presented in this volume offers historians and anthropologists a clear demonstration of the complexity of frontier zone encounters. It illustrates the variety of forms that agency took for both indigenous peoples and Germans in imperial zones of contact and poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.

On the 18th July 1801 a young man from Manchester by the name of Samuel Smith set sail for Terra Australis. He had taken his place as a mere Landsman - the lowest rank in the Royal Navy - aboard the Investigator. Under the command of the indefatigable Matthew Flinders, Smith was about to participate in one of the great voyages of discovery.

Happily Smith was eager to share his experiences with posterity. His journal, published here for the first time, gives an invaluable 'history from below the decks' account of the voyage which gave Australia its shape and name.

'We none of us ate any salt meat, or anything that would tend to give us a thirst. We are now on what is called the "Table-land", a flat piece of country on the top of a very high mountain. We are now in unexplored country where no white man has been before, so it is uncertain when we may see water again.'

So reads part of the entry in Caroline Creaghe's diary for Monday 23 April 1883. By that time, as the sole female member of an exploring party, she was already well acquainted with the privations and harshness of travel in Australia's north. Ahead lay territory unknown to Europeans, as well as numerous tests of endurance, strength and courage. Creaghe's diary, published here in full for the first time, is one of the most remarkable documents of Australian exploration, written by one of the rarest of explorers - a woman.

Italian edition:

Il Diario Di Emily Caroline Creaghe. Esploratrice, La vita felice, Milan, 2013

New Australian Edition:

Published: April 2021
Publisher: Wakefield Press

Encountering Terra Australis traces the parallel lives and voyages of the explorers Flinders and Baudin, as they travelled to Australia and explored the coastline of mainland Australia and Tasmania. Unusually, the book takes its lead from the voyages of Baudin, rather than Flinders, providing a rather different interpretation than those presently circulating. Furthermore the authors have worked using their own totally fresh translation of Baudin's journals, sourcing original accounts including material which has never before been available in English.

Winner of the Frank Broeze Maritime History Prize

From Beehive Corner and Bert Flugelman's polished balls in Rundle Mall to the vineyards, churches and cemeteries of the Barossa Valley, tangible signs of South Australia's Germans are everywhere to be seen. Too often, however, 'the Germans' are regarded as a single group in the state's history. The truth is more complex and intriguing.

Those who came during the colony's first decades mostly spoke a common language, but were divided by differences of country, culture and class. They were farmers from Silesia and Brandenburg, missionaries from Dresden, liberals from Berlin, merchants from Hamburg, miners from the Harz mountains or erudite graduates from some of the best universities in the world. They brought an astonishing variety of knowledge and talents, and were destined to make a difference in many fields.

No less varied have been the experiences of their descendants and more recent arrivals. Germans have been praised as model citizens, even as over-achievers. But at times they have also been accused of divided loyalties or barefaced treachery.

The essays gathered here explore the multiple origins, experiences and contributions of Germans in South Australia over some 175 years. Part celebration and part sober assessment, this book helps make sense of South Australia today.

In August 1914 war broke out across Europe. Within months hundreds of men - 'enemy aliens' - were interned on Torrens Island, in the Port River estuary near Adelaide. Sailors taken off enemy ships, foreign nationals living in South Australia, and even some naturalised British subjects found themselves behind barbed wire.

Wartime censorship meant people outside knew next to nothing about internment or life in the camp. The camp commandant's brutal behaviour was revealed only years later.

Today, the observations of two internees survive in the diaries of professional boxer Frank Bungardy and the compelling photographs of Paul Dubotzki. These extraordinary sources, brought together in Interned, tell the little-known story of South Australia's 'enemy within' - a story as timely now as it has ever been.

Australians from every field of conflict in World War II found themselves as prisoners in Hitler's notorious Stalags, or prisoner of war camps. Whether captured merchant seamen, bomber crews or soldiers taken in North Africa or the disastrous Greek and Cretan campaigns, they were to see out the war in the heart of Hitler's Europe, their fortunes intimately connected to the fortunes of the Reich.

Most were forced to labour in factories, down mines or on the land – often in conditions of enormous privation and hardship. All suffered from shortages, overcrowding and the mental strain of imprisonment. Some tried to escape, a few successfully, a few paying with their lives. The experiences of Australian POWs in Germany have long been overshadowed by the horrors of Japanese imprisonment, yet their stories of courage, stoicism, suffering and endurance deserve to be told.

Peter Monteath's fascinating narrative history is exhaustively researched, and compelling in its detailed evocation.