Commander Alexander Smith RN served his country with fearless resolution for seventeen years on the quarterdeck, encountering many adventures on the high seas - an intrepid voyager in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. Under the command of Captain James Clark Ross, he became a heroic polar explorer in the north Atlantic and was chosen for the epic 1839-1843 British Antarctic Expedition aboard the Erebus in the pivotal rank of First Mate.For the first time, the expeditions Erebus and Terror penetrated the furthest south into the Antarctic and discovered the ice barrier despite competition of Charles Wilkes' American and Dumont d'Urville's French expeditions. The Ross expedition was the first to go where no human being had gone before.Retiring from the Royal Navy, he was appointed Goldfields Commissioner in Castlemaine during the Victorian gold rushes in 1853. Later, he was elected as a pioneering member of parliament, became a homesteader and gardener and developed a fine reputation as a botanist and naturalist...an extraordinary, but forgotten life.

During the 1940s and '50s in Australia there rose to prominence many icons of Aboriginal descent, representative of the culture of the day and of their own people. Some permanently influenced the minds of Australians and remain famous to this day. Others have been unjustly forgotten. This book offers an unparalleled biographical exploration of their lives, providing a prism through which the reader can view and come to a better understanding of significant aspects of resilient Aboriginal culture and its place in Australian history. Albert Namatjira was a great watercolour landscape artist. Harold Blair was an outstandingly charismatic concert tenor of vast audience appeal. Robert Tudawali and Ngarla Kunoth were the famous stars of Charles Chauvel's ground-breaking Australian movie, Jedda. Reg Saunders was a highly decorated war hero and the first Aboriginal commissioned officer in the permanent Australian armed forces. Harry Penrith (later known as Burnum Burnum) was a brilliant and versatile teenage sporting star and later a public figure of charisma and controversy.

The story of Paul Brickhill: Spitfire pilot, prisoner of war, author of The Great Escape, The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky. A fascinating look at the troubled life story of wartime bravery, the price of fame and of a serious breakdown that lasted two decades. During the 1950s Paul Brickhill, an Australian WWII fighter pilot, prisoner of war and author wrote, without a doubt, the most iconic stories of the RAF in wartime Europe - all tour-de-force books based on brilliant research which today remain unfaded. Most are still in print. Paul Brickhill may have been forgotten, but not his books and not the classic feature film versions derived from them.