Penguin Books Australia

I do not hesitate to declare that the natives of New South Wales possess a considerable portion of that acumen, or sharpness of intellect, which bespeaks genius.

In 1788 Watkin Tench stepped ashore at Sydney Cove with the First Fleet. This curious young captain of the marines was a natural storyteller. His account of the infant colony is the first classic of Australian literature.

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The vast interior of this new continent was wrapped in total obscurity; and excited, perhaps on that very account, full as much curiosity as did the forms of the shores.

In this edited selection of his journals, Matthew Flinders, Australia's greatest navigator and the man who named our island continent, describes in captivating detail his epic mission to map our shores between 1796 and 1803.

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Wills knew that he was fading fastest. On 26 June, he decided the only honourable thing to do was to sacrifice himself to save his companions. 'Without some change,' he wrote, 'I see little chance for any of us.'

In 1860, an eccentric Irish policeman and a shy English scientist led a cavalcade of men and camels out of Melbourne to cross the continent south to north. Less than a year later seven men...

Murgatroyd has brought together for the first time new scientific and historical evidence, and tells the story of Burke and Wills, the explorers who set out to cross Australia from coast to coast, in brilliant detail.  Here, at last, is the book that brings to life Australia's most infamous story of exploration.  The Dig Tree describes vividly the remarkable courage, the suffering and the...

'Dry heat and hot, dry winds worked upon a land already dry, to suck from it the last, least drop of moisture. Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough.'

- Report of the Royal Commission into the bushfires...

In 1901 the Australian colonies came together to form a new nation which, for the next twenty-six years, was governed from Melbourne. It was a small city, a place where people knew each other—not just the people who mattered, but those who didn't yet—where small changes loomed large and the import of big changes could scarcely be imagined. Yet in the extraordinary first quarter of the twentieth...

It was John Wedge, Batman's private surveyor, who named the Yarra Yarra. In September 1835 he was at the Turning Basin with some Kulin and heard them identify the river as it came over the Falls as, he wrote, 'Yarrow Yarrow'. It was only some months later that Wedge discovered they had been referring to the pattern and movement of water over the Falls, not the river itself.

Watkin Tench sailed to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. In his late twenties, a captain of the marines, he was insatiably curious about the new British colony of Australia. In his four years in the country, he wrote two books about the early settlement which were bestsellers in their day. These are A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789) and An Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson...

A timely reminder of how far we've come since the days of routine slaughter, of how hard conservationists fought to bring it to an end, and how vigilant we must be in making sure that the dark days of whaling are behind us forever.' - Tim Winton

We were flying over a landscape that looked primeval. Way below there were pyramid-shaped peaks covered in tropical forest... Going into the forests of Papua New Guinea today is like taking a trip back in time to Australia 15 million years ago. Then, even in the central desert, there were permanent rivers and lakes surrounded by tropical vegetation. Dolphins and crocodiles lived in the waters, flamingos...

A few months later, an ancient coolibah tree at Cooper Creek bore a strange carving: 'Dig 3ft NW'. Burke, Wills and five...

Both in their mid thirties and working in the Australian bush when war was declared in 1914 they were quick to enlist and were placed in the same machine gun section of the newly formed 16th...

Edited and introduced by Tim Flannery, Terra Australis is a vital step toward a new understanding of our own history. Flinders tells of meeting and communicating with Aborigines, of the scrub and wilderness. His descriptions of the difficulties that...

Good drinkers, bad swimmers and unlikely heroes.

Since Australia's birth in 1901, twenty-seven politicians have run the national show.  Their time at the top has ranged from eight days for Frank Forde to eighteen years for Bob Menzies.  But whatever the length of their term, each Prime Minister has a story worth sharing.

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.

In 1787 a convoy of eleven ships, carrying about 1400 people, set out from England for Botany Bay, on the east coast of New South Wales.  According to the conventional account, it was a shambolic affair: underprepared, poorly equipped and ill-disciplined.  Robert Hughes condemned the organisers for their 'muddle and lack of foresight', while Manning Clark described scenes of 'indescribable...