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Rachel Kennedy stood out on a wild frontier dominated by men... her extraordinary and unputdownable pioneering story is told for the first time'Just a girl, but when it came to chasing wild horses nobody questioned Rachel Kennedy's skill in a saddle. What raised eyebrows was the type of saddle she used: a man's.'Rachel Kennedy was a colonial folk hero. Born in the wild and remote Warrumbungle mountains of western New South Wales in 1845, she was described by Duke Tritton of The Bulletin as Australia's greatest pioneer woman of them all.Rachel caught brumbies, hid bushrangers, went to war with squatter kings, fed starving families during the shearing strikes, worked as a revered bush nurse and midwife, and fought for the underdog after observing the bitter experiences of the Chinese on the goldfields. She also built rare friendships with Aboriginal people, including a lifelong relationship with her'sister'Mary Jane Cain, a proud campaigner for the rights of her people.Meticulously researched and written with compelling energy, this is a vivid and at times heartbreaking story of a pioneering woman who left a legacy that went well beyond her lifetime.

Provocative and disconcerting, The False Past confronts what many generations hold near and dear about their memorials. What if everything we know about colonial history is wrong? What if history is driven by vanity and unexamined moral claims? What if fabrication and corruption are so integral to history that it must be written anew? These questions, posed by Nietzsche, are answered in this exciting new work. The False Past takes a disturbing escapade through Australia's colonial past. Using a Nietzschean evaluation of how the eternal recurrence of suffering worked in practice, it announces a fresh vision for frontier history. And in the finest Nietzschean tradition, Price reveals the uncaring absurdity and inconsistency of settlers in the pioneer past as their supreme failing because it produces contemporary trauma. The False Past evaluates claims to colonial nobility, too. Who were the souls aiming beyond humanity who rose up Down Under? Was its Übermensch a dark and moody genius with a taste for conquest, a supreme talent in pastoral profiteering, an Indigenous exemplar, or a cunning bushranger out on a mission? Awkward and confronting, bold and experimental, this book often says the unsayable. The False Past lays siege to nostalgia, piety, vanity and nihilism to explain how unfounded exceptionalism has come to rule our lives. A revisionist assault on settled history, The False Past promises to spark debate among readers for many years to come.

Ochre and Rust offers a fresh perspective on frontier relations between Australian Aboriginal people and European colonists. Nine museum artefacts take the reader into a fascinating zone of encounter and mutual curiosity between collectors and those indigenous people who piqued or responded to their interest. While colonialism is the broad frame, details gleaned from archives, images and the objects themselves reveal a new picture of interaction between individual Aboriginal people and European collectors. Philip Jones explores and makes sense of particular historical moments in colonial history, when Aboriginal people perceived and expected other, more elusive outcomes. Ochre and Rust, an elegantly written challenge to received wisdom about the colonial frontier, has won Australia's inaugural Prime Minister's Award for Literary Non-Fiction.

Tales from life on the land and outback adventures continue to intrigue, puzzle and entertain us. This collection is Graham Seal at his best.'Graham Seal has the knack of the storyteller'- Warren Fahey AMThe tradition of yarns from the bush goes back to the earliest days in Australia. Colourful rural characters and dramatic incidents parade through our history and folklore, entertaining and appalling us in equal measure. Graham Seal has gathered classic and little-known stories from when most Australians lived outside the cities, and communication was by dirt track or boat. There's the time when farmers used their Ferguson tractors to save a town from floodwaters; when soldiers took on mobs of emus devastating the wheat crop; the Lady Bushranger who lived rough in a cave; Bob the railway dog who hitched rides on trains for years; and the many dubious strategies devised against the pesky bush fly over the years.True or more than a little exaggerated, these stories reflect the distinctive way of life of rural and outback folk which continues to this day.

A unique history of Australia retold through the extraordinary lives of Peter Bradley's three ancestors: a father, son and grandson. James Bradley was a First Fleet convict found guilty of stealing a white linen handkerchief worth two shillings, and sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia. Joseph Bradley worked his life in the most dangerous occupation of the time – whaling – and despite his parents being uneducated and illiterate went on to write a journal about his experiences, rich in history and insight. Roland Bradley was a man of unionism and politics, and like his father and grandfather took up the fight against the rich and powerful through his involvement with the early Maritime union. In 1894, he wrote an account of surviving the shipwreck of the SS Kanahooka, which forced its inhabitants to wander the wilderness of North Queensland for 18 days. Following the early struggles of a fledgling colony to nationhood, Convicted is an engrossing and highly imaginative retelling of the story of one family, entwined with the history of this country from the landing of the First Fleet in 1788.

Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780–1940, Revised Edition is a sociohistorical tour de force that examines the entwined formation of racial theory and sexual constructs within settler colonialism in the United States and Australia from the Age of Revolution to the Great Depression. Gregory D. Smithers historicizes the dissemination and application of scientific and social-scientific ideas within the process of nation building in two countries with large Indigenous populations and shows how intellectual constructs of race and sexuality were mobilized to subdue Aboriginal peoples. Building on the comparative settler-colonial and imperial histories that appeared after the book's original publication, this completely revised edition includes two new chapters. In this singular contribution to the study of transnational and comparative settler colonialism, Smithers expands on recent scholarship to illuminate both the subject of the scientific study of race and sexuality and the national and interrelated histories of the United States and Australia.

When Georgiana Molloy gave birth on the beach at Augusta in 1830 with boxes of her possessions lying where they'd landed, she was one of the many women who literally had to remake their homes out of the broken bones of their past. In this passionate book Maggie MacKellar tells the stories of women on the frontier in Canada and Australia who ventured out in bonnets and petticoats to collect seeds, who abandoned sidesaddles to ride in the mountains, who risked their reputations to climb mountains—and beyond this it tells of the risky business of women who put their lives on the page to claim the importance of their experience. Core of My Heart, My Country weaves together experience and insight from women who lived and wrote in different landscapes, in different climates and in different eras. It is a provocative and remarkable encounter with buried stories and persistent myths.

The incredible life story of the original nomadic writer, Ernestine Hill.Long before Robyn Davidson wrote Tracks, the extraordinary Ernestine Hill was renowned for her intrepid travels across Australia's vast outback.After the birth of her illegitimate son, Ernestine Hill abandoned her comfortable urban life as a journalist for a nomadic one, writing about this country's vast interior and bringing the outback into the popular imagination of Australians.Throughout the 1930s Ernestine's hugely popular stories about Australia's remotest regions appeared in newspapers and journals around the nation. She still remains famous for her bestselling books The Great Australian Loneliness, The Territory, Flying Doctor Calling and My Love Must Wait.Call of the Outback provides a vivid portrait of Ernestine, from the early brilliance she showed as a child in Brisbane to her later life. In particular it evokes Ernestine's larger-than-life personality, the exotic landscapes she explored and the remarkable characters she met on her travels.