Queensland’s Last Anzac


Book Description

Sgt Edward David (Ted) Smout OAM was Queensland’s Last Anzac who died on 22 June 2004. A man, who typically at the time lied about his age to enlist, survived the ravages of war after spending some time fighting at the Somme in 1918. He was an eyewitness to the final moments of the infamous “Red Baron”, Manfred von Richtofen. He was discharged on 8 September 1919 10 months following the Armistice on 11 November 1918. Smout was awarded France’s highest honour, a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in 1998 and an OAM for service to the community. The Ted Smout Memorial Bridge which crosses Bramble Bay linking Clontarf and Brighton was named in his honour in 2009.




The Last Charge of the Australian Light Horse


Book Description

On 31st October 1917, as the day's light faded, the Australian Light Horse charged against their enemy. Eight hundred men and horses galloped four miles across open country, towards the artillery, rifles and machine guns of the Turks occupying the seemingly unassailable town of Beersheba. What happened in the next hour changed the course of history. This brave battle and the extraordinary adventures that led to it are brought vividly to life by Australia's greatest storyteller, Peter FitzSimons. It is an epic tale of farm boys, drovers, bank clerks, dentists, poets and scoundrels transported to fight a war half a world away, and is full of incredible characters: from Major Banjo Paterson to Lawrence of Arabia; the brilliant writer Trooper Ion Idriess and the humble General Harry Chauvel; the tearaway Test fast bowler 'Tibby' Cotter and the infamous warhorse, Bill the Bastard. All have their part to play in the enthralling, sprawling drama of the Australian Light Horse. Theirs was a war fought in an ancient land with modern weapons; where the men of the Light Horse were trained in sight of the pyramids, drank in the brothels of Cairo and fought through lands known to them only as names from the Bible. The Last Charge of the Australian Light Horse traces the hard path of the Light Horse from the bleakest of starts - being deprived of their horses and fighting at Gallipoli in the tragic Battle of the Nek - to triumph and glory in the desert. Revealing the feats of the Australians who built the legend, it is a brilliantly told tale of courage, resilience and derring-do from Australia's favourite storyteller.




The Story of Australia


Book Description

The Story of Australia provides a fresh, engaging and comprehensive introduction to Australia’s history and geography. An island continent with distinct physical features, Australia is home to the most enduring Indigenous cultures on the planet. In the late eighteenth century newcomers from distant worlds brought great change. Since that time, Australia has been shaped by many peoples with competing visions of what the future might hold. This new history of Australia integrates a rich body of scholarship from many disciplines, drawing upon maps, novels, poetry, art, music, diaries and letters, government and scientific reports, newspapers, architecture and the land itself, engaging with Australia in its historical, geographical, national and global contexts. It pays particular attention to women and Indigenous Australians, as well as exploring key themes including invasion/colonisation, land use, urbanisation, war, migration, suburbia and social movements for change. Elegantly written, readers will enjoy Australia’s story from its origins to the present as the nation seeks to resolve tensions between Indigenous dispossession, British tradition and multicultural diversity while finding its place in an Asian region and dealing with global challenges like climate change. It is an ideal text for students, academics and general readers with an interest in Australian history, geography, politics and culture.




Anzac Memories


Book Description

Anzac Memories was first published to acclaim in 1994, and has achieved international renown for its pioneering contribution to the study of war memory and mythology. Michael McKernan wrote that the book gave ‘as good a picture of the impact of the Great War on individuals and Australia as we are likely to get in this generation’, and Michael Roper concluded that ‘an immense achievement of this book is that it so clearly illuminates the historical processes that left men like my grandfather forever struggling to fashion myths which they could live by’. In this new edition Alistair Thomson explores how the Anzac legend has transformed over the past quarter century, how a ‘post-memory’ of the Great War creates new challenges and opportunities for making sense of the national past, and how veterans’ war memories can still challenge and complicate national mythologies. He returns to a family war history that he could not write about twenty years ago because of the stigma of war and mental illness, and he uses newly released Repatriation files to question his own earlier account of veterans’ post-war lives and memories and to think afresh about war and memory.







Australian Good Birding Guide: Southern & Central Queensland


Book Description

This is the fourth book in the series of comprehensive guidebooks to birdwatching destinations in Australia. The Southern and Central QLD guide describes the most interesting and reasonably accessible birding spots located in the southern half of the vast Queensland State. Description of each birding site includes, at a minimum, habitat description, site facilities and key avifauna. The authors have cross-checked and supplemented their findings with verified sightings reported online. www.australian-good-birding-guide.com Other books by Ted & Alex Wnorowski: Australian Good Birdwatching Guide: NSW-ACT Australian Good Birdwatching Guide: Tasmania Australian Good Birdwatching Guide: Victoria In preparation: Australian Good Birdwatching Guide: Northern Queensland.




Salute


Book Description

These papers, archived from the website of Salute : Queensland Anzac Centenary 2014-2018, is a Queensland Anzac Centenary publication showcasing some of the commemorative activities and grants projects completed since 2014. Salute is a tribute to the servicemen and women who served and sacrificed, not only in the Great War, but also over the subsequent century of service. In commemorating the Anzac Centenary, we are reminded of how brave young Australians lived the Anzac values of courage, integrity, resilience, mateship, teamwork, duty and sacrifice.




Australia and the Great War


Book Description

Australia and the Great War explores both the immediate and long-term consequences of the war on this complex relationship, looking in particular at identity, history, gender, propaganda, economics and nationalism. This multidisciplinary collection of essays unveils the creation and subsequent [mis]use of histories and mythologies while considering the necessity and nature of both remembering, and forgetting, war.




Rethinking settler colonialism


Book Description

Rethinking settler colonialism focuses on the long history of contact between indigenous peoples and the white colonial communities who settled in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. It interrogates how histories of colonial settlement have been mythologised, narrated and embodied in public culture in the twentieth century (through monuments, exhibitions and images) and charts some of the vociferous challenges to such histories that have emerged over recent years. Despite a shared familiarity with cultural and political institutions, practices and policies amongst the white settler communities, the distinctiveness which marked these constituencies as variously, ‘Australian’, ‘South African’, ‘Canadian’ or ‘New Zealander’, was fundamentally contingent upon their relationship to and with the various indigenous communities they encountered. In each of these countries these communities were displaced, marginalised and sometimes subjected to attempted genocide through the colonial process. Recently these groups have renewed their claims for greater political representation and autonomy. The essays and artwork in this book insist that an understanding of the political and cultural institutions and practices which shaped settler-colonial societies in the past can provide important insights into how this legacy of unequal rights can be contested in the present. It will be of interest to those studying the effects of colonial powers on indigenous populations, and the legacies of imperial rule in postcolonial societies.




Legends of People, Myths of State


Book Description

The civil war in Sri Lanka and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it inspired the writing of this book some twenty-three years ago. The argument was developed through a comparative analysis of nationalism in Sri Lanka with the author’s native Australia. At the time this constituted an innovative approach to comparison in anthropology, as well as to nationalism and its possibilities. It was not based on differences but on the way in which perspectives from within the two nationalisms, when seen side-by-side, could present an understanding of their implication in producing the violence of war, racism, and social exclusion. The book has lost none of its importance and urgency as proven by the chapters in the Appendix, written by top scholars working in Sri Lanka and in Australia. These contributions bring together new material and critically explore the book’s themes and their continued relevance to the various trajectories in nationalist processes since the first publication of the book.