Penguin Books Australia

In 1835 an illegal squatter camp was established on the banks of the Yarra River. In defiance of authorities in London and Sydney, Tasmanian speculators began sending men and sheep across Bass Strait – and so changed the shape of Australian history. Before the founding of Melbourne, British settlement on the mainland amounted to a few pinpoints on a map. Ten years later, it had become a sea of...

Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen's Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life. In this book, James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo skin and living off the land. Behind the official...

For the first time in two hundred years, here is a full and authentic account of the beginnings of modern Australia.

We all know the conventional story.  Established as a dumping ground for Britain's criminals, Australia owes its existence simply to over-crowded jails and a daunting remoteness from everywhere else.

WITH THE FOUNDING OF MELBOURNE IN 1835, a flood of settlers began spreading out across the Australian continent.  In three years more land – and more people – were conquered than in the preceding fifty.

This bestselling history of Scotland traces the epic story of a nation from the Union with England to today's debates on the possibilities of Scottish independence in the future. Ranging from high politics to everyday life, The Scottish Nation is the most read modern history of Scotland at home and abroad: vital to understanding an ancient nation at a crucial time.

'Outstanding . . . if you are after...

In the early nineteenth century China remained almost untouched by Britain and other European powers - ferocious laws forbade all trade with the West outside one tiny area of Canton. Anyone teaching a European to speak Chinese could be executed. But as new technology began to unbalance the relationship, foreigners gathered like wolves around the weakening Qing Empire. China should be opened, they believed...

The Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women and children have sought their fortunes in every conceivable walk of life and in every imaginable climate. All over the British Empire, the United States and elsewhere, the Scottish contribution to the development of the modern world has been a formidable one, from finance to industry, philosophy...

WINNER OF THE NEW YORK CIVIL WAR ROUND TABLE'S FLETCHER PRATT AWARD

From the firing on Fort Sumter to the shot the killed Abraham Lincoln, this fascinating compendium of the civil War conveys the sights, sounds, and emotions of the conflict that shaped our history and out national consciousness.  Here is the vivid and compelling commentary of generals, common soldiers, politicians, and ordinary...

Historian Deborah J. Swiss tells the heartbreaking, horrifying, and ultimately triumphant story of the women exiled from the British Isles and forced into slavery and savagery-women who created the most liberated society of their time.

Convicted of minor crimes, four women-Agnes McMillan, Janet Houston, Bridget Mulligan, and Ludlow Tedder-were exiled to Van Diemen's Land, later known as Tasmania. ...

'So they went forth, and they were given over to death by the guns.'

—Rangipito, of Ngati Rahiri

In the two decades before the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand was ripped asunder by island-spanning waves of warfare, extreme violence and cannibalism. Great war parties surged the length of the land to avenge historic grievances, killing and burning as they went. Whole peoples were uprooted and found...

'Few historian write as well as McPherson, and none evoke the sound of battle with greater clarity . . . McPherson draws on almost fifty years of research to present a cogent and concise narrative of how Lincoln, working against enormous odds, saved the United States of America.'
- Jean Edward Smith, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

An unrivalled account of the American Civil War from the Confederate perspective. 

'An amusing and lively book, stuffed full of anecdotes and interesting titbits' Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

'May God forgive us for our sorry deeds and for our glorious intentions'

Who were the men governing the Empire in the nineteenth century? How were they chosen and controlled? How did they see their mission? And why did they do it?

'Riveting . . . the reader is swept along . . . one can hardly overestimate the brilliance of Foreman's conception . . . a shimmering tapestry'  JAY PARINI, GUARDIAN

No other soldier has provoked as much anger and fervour as Napoleon Bonaparte. Was he a conqueror or a liberator? An aggressor or a victim? A sinner or a saint?

In the early part of Queen Victoria's reign, the British Empire was well on the way to becoming the greatest empire the world had ever seen. This is the story of how it happened and the people who made it happen, from Afghanistan and India, to Russia and the Far East.

Saul David creates a vivid portrait of the seemingly endless and brutal wars that were fought in the name of trade, civilisation and...

Burke's seminal work was written during the early months of the French Revolution, and it predicted with uncanny accuracy many of its worst excesses, including the Reign of Terror. A scathing attack on the revolution's attitudes to existing institutions, property and religion, it makes a cogent case for upholding inherited rights and established customs, argues for piecemeal reform rather than revolutionary...

In 1882 Mark Twain returned to the river of his childhood, determined to write the definitive travel book on the Mississippi.