Penguin Books Australia

Twenty-five years ago, a young curator of mammals from the Australian Museum in Sydney set out to research the fauna of the Pacific Islands. Starting with a survey of one of the most inaccessible islands in Melanesia—Woodlark, in the Trobriands Group—that young scientist found himself ghost-whispering, snake wrestling, Quadoi hunting and plunged waist-deep into a sludge...

The rivalry between Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen is a familiar story; what fewer people know is that, in 1912, five separate teams were exploring beyond the limits of the known world: Scott for Britain, Amundsen for Norway, Mawson for Australasia, Filchner for Germany and Shirase for Japan. The Antarctic discoveries made by these brave explorers enthralled the world and forever changed the way we...

WHEN SOMEBODY SWINDLED THE PERTH MINT OUT OF GOLD WORTH OVER HALF A MILLION DOLLARS IN 1982, LOCAL POLICE THOUGHT THEY HAD CAUGHT THE OFFENDERS.

The Mickelberg brothers, Ray, Peter and Brian, were their prime suspects.  They were charge and convicted despite the fact the gold was never found, and before the trial had even commenced were also charged with defrauding millionaire Alan Bond with a...

Here is a remarkable story of how the Arab Islamic world is being transformed, one life at a time.

The official companion book to the HBO® miniseries available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Hugh Ambrose's bestseller follows the struggles and triumphs of four US Marines and a US Navy carrier pilot fighting in the Pacific region during World War II. 

Crime is a collection of true crime stories told by one of Germany's most prominent defense lawyers. Some of the cases are strange, some bewildering and others heartbreaking, but all are told with genuine concern for those who have slipped through the protective nets of society.
- What would make a polite, well-liked doctor cut up his wife's with an axe?
- Why would a boy slaughter the sheep in his...

War at the Wall Street Journal is a comprehensive and readable account of how Rupert Murdoch came to own the crown jewel of American business journalism, written by former Journal media writer Sarah Ellison.

At nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a life of crime … crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shinbun . For twelve years of eighty-hour work weeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are as familiar as ramen noodles and sake. But when his final scoop brought him face...

Would you go to the gates of Hell for your job?

In October 1975, during the decolonisation of Portuguese Timor, five young television reporters travelled from Australia to report on the brewing unrest in the region.   It was a journey that would be their last:   Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, and Tony Stewart of Channel Seven, and Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie of Channel Nine, were killed by the Indonesian military as they filmed...

More than 75,000 Australians and New Zealanders went to war on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. They shared a horror, but their courage on a battlefield of tragic errors and unimaginable suffering helped build a legend, the legend of the Anzacs. The Anzacs lost more men on the Western Front than they did against the Turks at Gallipoli. Yet, rightly or wrongly, Gallipoli is etched deepest into the Australian...

At exactly 1.30 p.m. on 1 September 1918, the dozen men of Nine Platoon, 21st Australian Infantry Battalion, rose from Elsa Trench and walked across a weedy beet-field toward the German defenders of Mont St Quentin. Within hours, three were dead and five more were wounded, one of whom died six weeks later. The survivors returned from war, more-or-less intact, to live through the next sixty-odd years...

In this intensely personal account, Barry Heard draws on his own experiences as a young conscript, along with those of his comrades to look back at life before, during, and after the Vietnam War. The result is a sympathetic vision of a group of young men who were sent off to war completely unprepared for the emotional and psychological impact it would have on them.