Patsy Adam-Smith   The Anzacs (Penguin Aus). Gleaned from diaries, letters and interviews, this is a classic account of Australia's involvement in World War I, with a special focus on the campaign that has become part of the Australian legend, Gallipoli, where thousands of "Anzacs" lost their lives.

 

Robyn Annear   Nothing But Gold (Penguin Aus). With an eye for interestingly obscure details and managing to convey a sense of irony without becoming cynical, this is a wonderfully readable account of the gold rushes of the nineteenth century, a period in Australia's history which perhaps did more than any other to shape the country's national character.

Len Beadell   Outback Highways (Weldon Aus). Extracts from Len Beadell's half-dozen books, cheerfully recounting his life in the central Australian deserts as a surveyor, and his involvement in the construction of Woomera and the atomic bomb test sites.

John Birmingham   Leviathan: the unauthorised biography of Sydney (Knopf/Random House Aus). This Birmingham 1999 tome casts a contemporary eye at the dark side of Sydney's history, from nauseating accounts of Rocks' slum life and the 1900 plague outbreak, through the 1970s traumas of Vietnamese boat people, now Sydney residents, to scandals of police corruption.

Michael Cannon   Black Land White Land:Who Killed the Koories? (Minerva Aus). An account of the violent 1840s in New South Wales, as colonists and pioneers moving inland clashed with the local Aboriginal tribes.

Paul Carter   The Road to Botany Bay (Faber & Faber UK o/p; University of Chicago Press US). A fascinating and original analysis of "discovery" as cultural imperialism, and the metaphysics of exploration.

Manning Clark   A Short History of Australia (Penguin Aus). A condensed version of this leading historian's multivolumed tome, focusing on dreary successions of political administrations over two centuries, and cynically concluding with the "Age of Ruins".

David Day   Claiming A Continent: A History of Australia (Angus & Robertson Aus). The freshest general and easily readable history available, concluding in 1996. Day looks at Australia's history from a contemporary point of view, with the possession, dispossession and ownership of the land - and thus issues of race - central to his narrative. Excellent recommended reading of recent texts at the end of each chapter.

Bruce Elder   Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788 (New Holland Aus). A heart-rending account of the horrors inflicted on the continent's indigenous peoples, covering infamous nineteenth century massacres as well as more recent mid-twentieth-century scandals of the "Stolen Generation" children.

Tim Flannery (ed) Watkin Trench 1788 (Text Publishing Aus). One of the most vivid accounts of early Sydney was written by a twenty-something captain of the marines, Watkin Trench, who arrived with the First Fleet. Trench's humanity and youthful curiosity shine through the pages of "A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay" and "A Complete Account of the Settlement of Port Jackson", and the characters who peopled the early settlement, like the Aboriginal Bennelong, come alive.

Harry Gordon   Voyage from Shame: the Cowra Breakout and Afterwards (University of Queensland Press Aus). Excellent account of the breakout of Japanese prisoners of war from a camp in New South Wales during World War II.

Robert Hughes   The Fatal Shore (Harvill Press UK; Random US; Pan Aus). A minutely detailed epic of the origins of transportation and the brutal beginnings of white Australia.

Alan Moorehead   Coopers Creek (Penguin UK; Grove Atlantic US o/p). An historian's dramatic retelling of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, which set out in 1860 to make the first south-to-north crossing of the continent. A classic of exploration.

Cassandra Pybus   Community of Thieves (Minerva Aus). Attempting to reconcile past and future, fourth-generation Tasmanian Pybus provides a deeply felt account of the near-annihilation of the island's Aboriginal people.

Henry Reynolds   The Other Side of the Frontier and The Law of the Land (both Penguin Aus). A revisionist historian demonstrates that Aboriginal resistance to colonial invasion was both considerable and organized. His latest book, The Whispering in Our Hearts (Allen & Unwin Aus), is a history of those settler Australians who, troubled by the treatment of Aboriginal people, spoke out and took political action.

Portia Robinson   The Women of Botany Bay (Macquarie Aus). After ten years of painstaking research into the records of every woman transported from Britain and Ireland between 1787 and 1828, as well as the wives of convicts who settled in Australia, Robinson is able to tell us, with conviction and passion, just who the women of Botany Bay really were.

Eric Rolls   Sojourners and Citizens : Flowers and the Wide Sea (both University of Queensland Press Aus). The first and second volumes of Rolls' fascinatingly detailed history of the Chinese in Australia.

Ann Summers   Damned Whores and God's Police (McPhee Gribble Aus). Stereotypical images of women in Australian society are explored in this ground-breaking reappraisal of Australian history from a feminist point of view, updated in 1994.