If only these walls and this land could talk . . . The Sydney Opera House is a breathtaking building, recognised around the world as a symbol of modern Australia. Along with the Taj Mahal and other World Heritage sites, it is celebrated for its architectural grandeur and the daring and innovation of its design. It showcases the incomparable talents involved in its conception, construction and performance history. But this stunning house on Bennelong Point also holds many secrets and scandals. In his gripping biography, Peter FitzSimons marvels at how this magnificent building came to be, details its enthralling history and reveals the dramatic stories and hidden secrets about the people whose lives have been affected, both negatively and positively, by its presence. He shares how a conservative 1950s state government had the incredible vision and courage to embark on this nation-defining structure; how an architect from Denmark and construction workers from Australia and abroad invented new techniques to bring it to completion; how ambition, betrayal, professional rivalry, sexual intrigue, murder, bullying and breakdowns are woven into its creation; and how it is now acknowledged as one of the wonders and masterpieces of human ingenuity.

A detailed study of the origins and demise of schooner-based pearling in Australia. For most of its history, Australian pearling was a shore-based activity. But from the mid-1880s until the World War I era, the industry was dominated by highly mobile, heavily capitalized, schooner-based fleets of pearling luggers, known as floating stations, that exploited Australia's northern continental shelf and the nearby waters of the Netherlands Indies. Octopus Crowd:Maritime History and the Business of Australian Pearling in Its Schooner Age is the first book-length study of schooner-based pearling and explores the floating station system and the men who developed and employed it. Steve Mullins focuses on the Clark Combination, a syndicate led by James Clark, Australia's most influential pearler. The combination honed the floating station system to the point where it was accused of exhausting pearling grounds, elbowing out small-time operators, strangling the economies of pearling ports, and bringing the industry to the brink of disaster. Combination partners were vilified as monopolists-they were referred to as an ""octopus crowd""-and their schooners were stigmatized as hell ships and floating sweatshops. Schooner-based floating stations crossed maritime frontiers with impunity, testing colonial and national territorial jurisdictions. The Clark Combination passed through four fisheries management regimes, triggering significant change and causing governments to alter laws and extend maritime boundaries. It drew labor from ports across the Asia-Pacific, and its product competed in a volatile world market. Octopus Crowd takes all these factors into account to explain Australian pearling during its schooner age. It argues that the demise of the floating station system was not caused by resource depletion, as was often predicted, but by ideology and Australia's shifting sociopolitical landscape.

This is the first major collaborative reappraisal of Australia's experience of empire since the end of the British Empire itself.
The volume examines the meaning and importance of empire in Australia across a broad spectrum of historical issues-ranging from the disinheritance of the Aborigines to the foundations of a new democratic state. The overriding theme is the distinctive Australian perspective on empire. The country's adherence to imperial ideals and aspirations involved not merely the building of a 'new Britannia' but also the forging of a distinctive new culture and society. It was Australian interests and aspirations which ultimately shaped "Australia's Empire."
While modern Australians have often played down the significance of their British imperial past, the contributors to this book argue that the legacies of empire continue to influence the temper and texture of Australian society today.

"Along the Archival Grain" offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space.

Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.

Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith were the original pioneers of Australian aviation. Together they succeeded in a number of record-breaking flights that made them instant celebrities in Australia and around the world: the first east-to-west crossing of the Pacific, the first trans-Tasman flight, Australia to New Zealand, the first flight from New Zealand to Australia. Business ventures followed for them, as they set up Australian National Airways in late 1928. Smithy was the face of the airline, happier in the cockpit or in front of an audience than in the boardroom. Ulm on the other hand was in his element as managing director. Ulm had the tenacity and organisational skills, yet Smithy had the charisma and the public acclaim. In 1932, Kingsford Smith received a knighthood for his services to flying, Ulm did not. Business setbacks and dramas followed, as Ulm tried to develop the embryonic Australian airline industry. ANA fought hard against the young Qantas, already an establishment favourite, but a catastrophic crash on the airline's regular route from Sydney to Melbourne and the increasing bite of the Great Depression forced ANA's bankruptcy in 1933. Desperate to drum up publicity for a new airline venture, Ulm's final flight was meant to demonstrate the potential for a regular trans-Pacific passenger service. Somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii his plane, Stella Australis, disappeared. No trace of the plane or crew were ever found. In the years since his death, attention has focused more and more on Smithy, leaving Ulm neglected and overshadowed. This biography will attempt to rectify that, showing that Ulm was at least Smithy's equal as a flyer, and in many ways his superior as a visionary, as an organiser and as a businessman. His untimely death robbed Australia of a huge talent.

As a journalist, Stewart Cockburn was instinctive and fearless. The 16-year-old copy boy who started at the Adelaide Advertiser in 1938 was to have a career in writing, radio and television that spanned more than 45 years. Restless ambition took him to post-war London with Reuters, to Melbourne with the Herald, to Canberra as Press Secretary to Prime Minister Robert Menzies, and to Washington, DC as Press Attache at the Australian Embassy. On returning to the Advertiser, Cockburn's feature-writing won him a Walkley Award and his opinion columns were ever informative and influential. In 1978 he challenged Premier Don Dunstan's politically charged sacking of Police Commissioner Harold Salisbury. His tenacious journalism also prompted the 1983 Royal Commission into the scientifically questionable murder conviction of Eddie Splatt. His books included The Salisbury Affair and very fine biographies of South Australia's long-serving Premier Sir Thomas Playford and, with David Ellyard, the eminent nuclear scientist Sir Mark Oliphant. In this biography, Stewart Cockburn's daughter Jennifer draws on his many letters and journals, bringing to life the father she knew and the changing times he so closely observed.

On the night of 31 May 1942, Sydney was doing what it does best: partying. The theatres, restaurants, dance halls, illegal gambling dens, clubs and brothels offered plenty of choice to roistering sailors, soldiers and airmen on leave in Australia's most glamorous city. The war seemed far away. Newspapers devoted more pages to horse racing than to Hitler. That Sunday night the party came to a shattering halt when three Japanese midget submarines crept into the harbour, past eight electronic indicator loops, past six patrolling Royal Australian Navy ships, and past an anti-submarine net stretched across the inner harbour entrance. Their arrival triggered a night of mayhem, courage, chaos and high farce which left 27 sailors dead and a city bewildered. The war, it seemed, was no longer confined to distant desert and jungle. It was right here at Australia's front door. Written at the pace of a thriller and based on new first person accounts and previously unpublished official documents, A Very Rude Awakening is a ground-breaking and myth-busting look at one of the most extraordinary stories ever told of Australia at war.

In the century from the death of Captain James Cook in 1779 to the rise of the sugar plantations in the 1870s, thousands of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) men left Hawai'i to work on ships at sea and in na 'aina 'e (foreign lands)-on the Arctic Ocean and throughout the Pacific Ocean, and in the equatorial islands and California. Beyond Hawai'i tells the stories of these forgotten indigenous workers and how their labor shaped the Pacific World, the global economy, and the environment. Whether harvesting sandalwood or bird guano, hunting whales, or mining gold, these migrant workers were essential to the expansion of transnational capitalism and global ecological change. Bridging American, Chinese, and Pacific historiographies, Beyond Hawai'i is the first book to argue that indigenous labor-more than the movement of ships and spread of diseases-unified the Pacific World.