Best australia & oceania history books according to redditors

I presume that by this question you are asking whether the British faced the threat that rival colonial empires might try to establish themselves in Australia – not that they faced "competition" from the indigenous population, which is a very different matter. If I'm wrong about this, perhaps you could clarify.

Britain was not the first state to "discover" Australia. Makassan fisherman from Sulawesi, in the Indonesian archipelago, regularly visited the northern and north-western coast from around the middle of the 17th century to collect trepang (sea cucumbers), which had become a popular ingredient in Chinese cookery. These men arrived in significant numbers, several thousand per season, and stayed for 4-6 months at a time in semi-permanent camps on the coast, occasionally even over-wintering. But they were able to establish largely friendly and collaborative relations with the local peoples, who often provided additional labour in season. So friendly were relations, indeed, that a small Aboriginal "colony", made up of adventurous Aboriginal men and women doing what amounted to contract work for ship-masters, existed in Makassar throughout the 19th, and probably the 18th, centuries. I wrote in much more detail about the trepang trade and the Aboriginal colony here. As a result, there was no need for any attempt on the part of the Makassans to forcibly seize land or establish permanent settlements.

With regard to the European side if things, it's plausible (though there is no firm evidence) that Portuguese ships reached the north-western tip of Australia from Timor, a voyage of only 400 miles, during the 16th century, and certain that Dutch ships encountered the north-east tip (the Cape York peninsula) in the first decade of the 17th century, and the southern part of what is now Western Australia in the 1610s and 1620s. The latter encounters were made by chance but the former were explicitly intended to discover whether Australia had resources or trade that were worth exploiting. Later, in 1629, two Dutch sailors who had taken part in the infamous Batavia mutiny, on a small group of islands off the western Australian coast, were intentionally marooned on the mainland as a punishment, but with the idea that a later ship would call for them. These men were instructed to make friends with the local Aboriginal tribes "in order to discover once, for certain, what happens in this land." I wrote at book length about the Batavia, including a chapter about the aftermath of the mutiny and about the two or more Dutch shipwrecks that cast other sailors adrift on the western Australian coast, here.

So the Dutch were certainly potential traders with, or colonisers of, parts of Australia almost two centuries before the British first sent convicts and settlers there. The reason they didn't press on with their exploration was that they had the misfortune to encounter two especially unwelcoming parts of the Australian coast. The Wik peoples of the Cape York peninsula were among the most hostile Aboriginal groups when it came to encounters with Europeans, and at least two Dutch ships lost a significant number of men to attacks by Wik warriors. This, and the fact that no ships touching on the northern coast found any evidence of resources worth trading, deterred further exploration.

The situation on the west coast was if possible even less promising. Dutch ships quite often encountered Western Australia in the period before the development of an effective way of determining longitude at sea. This was because the fastest route on their voyage from Amsterdam to their trading bases in Java involved exploiting the fast current that ran east across the Roaring Forties. If wind and current pushed the dozen or more ships that made this voyage each year west faster than anticipated, they would make a landfall somewhere on the southern part of the western coast. This is one of the bleakest parts of Australia - very sparsely populated, with only two or three small rivers making the ocean and breaking what is otherwise a more or less continuous run of almost 400 miles of vertiginous cliffs, backed by a dry, featureless hinterland, a sight described by one awed Dutch sailor of the 1620s as follows: "The land here appears very bleak, and so abrupt as if the coast had been chopped off with an axe, which makes it almost impossible to land." So unpromising did the prospects of making any money here appear that the Dutch never bothered to send a ship back for the marooned Batavia mutineers, and though Abel Tasman was sent to make a circumnavigation of the Australian continent in the 1640s, he executed his task while staying out of sight of land, other than encountering the southerly island today named for him – Tasmania.

The Dutch, therefore, made no further significant efforts to investigate Australia. We can conclude, then, that one of the main factors that left the continent free for British exploitation was simply luck; the British were the first to encounter the rather more promising stretch of Australian coast in New South Wales, well away from any Dutch landing spots. Even then, however, they saw Australia more as a useful site for a penal colony, designed to drain off the "criminal class" they had exported to the Americas before the American Revolution, than as a potentially lucrative colonial acquisition.

As a post-script, it's worth noting that things did change in the nineteenth century, when the acquisition of colonies became a higher priority for European states, and more organised attempts were made to find worthwhile areas for invasion and conquest. The reason that the British established the Swan River Colony in 1829 and annexed Western Australia was that they feared the French planned to set up a rival administration on the far side of the continent. A French expedition had been sent to explore the area and consider its suitability for exploitation in 1801-03.

Sources

Jaap Bruijn, "Between Batavia and the Cape: shipping patterns of the Dutch East India Company," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11 (1980)

George Collingridge, The Discovery of Australia: A Critical, Documentary and Historical Investigation Concerning the Priority of Discovery in Australasia Before the Arrival of Lieut. James Cook in the Endeavour in the Year 1770 (1895)

Femme Gaastra, "The Dutch East India Company: a reluctant discoverer." The Great Circle 19 (1997)

J. E. Heeres, The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia, 1606-1756 (1899)

James Henderson, Sent Forth a Dove: Discovery of the Duyfken (1999)

Leslie Marchant, France Australe: A study of the French explorations and attempts to found a
penal colony and strategic base in south western Australia, 1503-1826 (1982)

Michael King wrote a great book, the Penguin History of New Zealand

If you are looking specifically at the history of the penal colonies, try Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore. I read it some time ago and enjoyed it quite a bit.

N.B. Hughes is an Aussie and no fan of the British.

As an addendum to this, I would strongly recommend the book Batavia’s Graveyard: The true story of the mad heretic who led history’s bloodiest mutiny by Mike Dash also known as u/mikedash for a very engaging and comprehensive academic book about this incident and the people involved in it.

Yes. That is: I recall there were two - fundamentally different - schools of thought within the RN/FAA's SHAR-units as of 1982.

• Skipper of HMS Invincible-based NAS.801, Nigel 'Sharkey' Ward, was convinced the SHAR is fully developed and an excellent platform, and taught his pilots to make use of its nav/attack system - including the Blue Fox radar. They acted correspondingly. They also flew CAPs at low altitude, where the Argentinean fighter-bombers operated. Correspondingly, they repeatedly caught and destroyed entire formations of incoming Argentinean fighter-bombers before these could cause any harm.
  
  
• Most of other RN/FAA officers haven't held the SHAR FRS.1 in high esteem. Indeed, it seems there was deep mistrust for its nav/attack systems within the HMS Hermes-based NAS.800 (to which Dave Morgan was assigned, too). Between others, SHARs from that squadron flew their CAPs at medium altitude - which is one of reasons why they missed the first formation of the Skyhawks that 'caused' the 'Catastrophe of Bluff Cove', and why Morgan then missed the second one too (arguably, he and his wingman then at least killed three from that second formation, 'but only after' these could've caused even more damage to British naval and ground units).
  
  For related discussions, see Ward's Sea Harrier over the Falklands.
  
  Curiously, Morgan didn't even try to discuss this issue in his Hostile Skies.

Leviathan by John Birmingham is a good read: http://www.amazon.com/Leviathan-The-unauthorised-biography-Sydney/dp/0091842034

The Polynesians were masters of navigating the open ocean, the Summer Islanders are partly based on them. Along with celestial navigation, they could read the ocean currents and the sky (reflections on clouds) for clues that land could be nearby over the horizon.

We The Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes.

This is a subject I'm extremely interested in. I've actually been thinking about starting a subreddit with a focus on creating realistic, earth-like ecosystems—inventing individual animals and plants and their evolutionary histories, but maybe also trying to collect generalized rules to help with this aspect of worldbuilding.

I've been reading a book about Australian ecology, called The Future Eaters, and there seem to be some interesting patterns that allow for different kinds of animals to exist. Some things I've gleaned from the first few chapters:

• Highly productive environments (lots of water, lots of sunlight, and lots of soil nutrients—the latter of which tends to happen on younger landmasses, or areas where there has been a lot of volcanic activity) mean that there are more individual plants in a given area, and those plants don't have strong defenses against herbivory, since they can just grow new leaves as needed. These environments tend to allow for large herbivore and carnivore populations. Note that it typically takes thousands of herbivores to support 100 or so carnivores, depending on sizes and metabolisms of animals involves. Most animals you encounter in any given place won't be carnivores.
  
  
• When productivity is lower (usually due to too little water and/or periods with too little light—such as what you get into the arctic and antarctic circles), things change. Plants and animals become much more specialized, which means you may have greater biodiversity, but smaller and more thinly spread populations.
  
  
• When an ecosystem has enough water and light but few nutrients (such as in many rainforests), it can still be pretty productive by having a rapid rate of decay. Basically, these ecosystems recycle their nutrients very quickly.
  
  
• If there's not much water, though, nutrient recycling can't happen as quickly. This makes for very low-productivity environments, where plants are very tough and herbivore-resistant. In these ecosystems, both herbivores and carnivores are a lot more rare.
  
  
• In low-productivity environments, there several tactics animal species employ to keep their metabolisms low. They tend to be smaller. They tend not to be very intelligent. They tend to live a long time and reproduce very slowly (think pandas); or, alternatively, they die shortly after reproducing so that their babies have less competition. They tend to be in low-metabolism clades (e.g., marsupials rather than placental mammals, or reptiles rather than birds, or large insects rather than small rodents).
  
  
• Some animals get around metabolism constraints by migrating. You can get some pretty impressive migrations this way, like wildebeests or right whales.
  
  
• When nutrients are low, carnivorous plants proliferate. They kill for nutrients. Plants that parasitize other plants are pretty common, too.
  
  
• When plants are few and far apart, such as in deserts, they compete for pollinators. These plants tend to have particularly large and bright flowers, they produce a lot of nectar, and their flowering times are staggered throughout the year. This allows for some pretty high-metabolism pollinators, like possums or bats.
  
  
• When determining how productive an environment will be, you have to look not only at its average conditions, but also its most extreme conditions. For example, a place that has a wet season and a dry season won't have both dry-biome plants and wet-biome plants. Instead, it will have plants that must be adapted to both extremes (which tends to be lots of grasses, but not so many trees; trees need more consistent watering). This limits productivity, but it increases specialization—which promotes biodiversity.
  
  
• You also have to look at an environment's stability over long periods of time. If an ecosystem gets wildfires every few years, that's going to put constraints on what can live there. And even if an environment has major changes over really long time periods—e.g., it gets covered in a glacier whenever there's an ice age—that's going to cause mass extinctions every now and then. It takes a long time for an ecosystem to recover from mass extinction.
  
  
• Generally speaking, biodiversity is higher the longer a landscape goes without any major changes. If ice ages—or the periods between them—causes an area to get covered by ocean, it's going to have a lower diversity than a nearby area that doesn't get covered (e.g., Florida is much less diverse than Georgia). The same goes for places that get glaciers (e.g., the Northeastern US is much less diverse than the Southeastern US), or places that turn into deserts.
  
  
• Climate, above all else, determines what an ecosystem is like. Ice ages, ocean currents, rain shadows, El Niño, Hadley cells, and so on are highly worthy of study.
  
  
• Animals can be roughly categorized into guilds. A guild is like a niche or role that a group of species fills. Wolves, hyenas, and thylacines are in the same guild, even though they're not related to each other and don't (or didn't) live near each other. The same guild may occur in different ecosystem spatially, but it will also exist in different ecosystems temporally. For example, ichthyosaurs seem to be the Mesozoic equivalent of dolphins.
  
  
• In a given ecosystem, every niche should be filled by some kind of animal, but generally multiple animals won't fill the same niche (they compete with each other until one goes extinct—which is partly why invasive species are so harmful). Occasionally, new niches may be opened up; for example, when plants colonized land or when birds developed flight. When that happens, you get a sudden burst in evolution. The Cambrian explosion is a good example.
  
  
• All else being equal, amphibians can usually survive in cold environments better than reptiles can. We have a lot of reptiles today, but amphibians have filled those same roles. In a glacial or high-latitude environment, we should expect to see more amphibians filling those niches that reptiles have left vacant.
  
  
• Flying animals (birds and bats especially) are the first to colonize new islands and landmasses, and they tend to be the predominant lifeforms on isolated islands. The first animals to colonize a new landscape have a very good crack at filling all the niches before other animals can. New Zealand is a great example of this, with its very bizarre and diverse array of flightless birds.
  
  
• Marine ecosystems are very poorly understood. It sees some really important factors are nutrient levels, oxygen levels, water temperature, and water clarity.
  
  
• You get a lot of whales and large fish feeding wherever there are ocean upwellings. These apparently happen where wind blows surface water out of the way, drawing deep water (which tends to be cold) up to the surface. Cold water holds more oxygen, plus water from the deep ocean carries nutrients with it. This causes phytoplankton blooms in these areas, which means lots of animals get something to eat.
  
  
• In warm waters, phytoplankton can't grow as well. These leads to very clear waters, such as you often see in the tropics. Where the water is clear and sufficiently shallow, coral reefs can grow. Coral reefs, like many rainforests, have very few nutrients—but they make up for it by having very fast nutrient cycling. (Note, this is why overfishing around coral reefs is so damaging. It robs these ecosystems of precious nutrients that would otherwise get cycled back in.)
  
  
• When nutrients get added to these warm waters—such as from river runoff—you get algae blooms. Algae blooms kill coral, because coral needs very clear water in order to get enough sunlight. Areas around river mouths don't get coral so much, but they get a lot of other animals due to the presence of phytoplankton.

Mythology is awesome - most box bookstores (like B&N) have at least a small mythology section where you can get your hands on original sources like The Prose Edda and such. Joseph Campbell is pretty popular and whoever owns the rights to his work keeps cranking out reprints of his lectures, so those are usually good too (sometimes they sound too "self-helpy" though). Anthropology (particularly folklore) dips into the same vein, so people like Ruth Benedict are good to read too. I'll mention a couple of things that might pique your interest as well, since you won't usually find them on reading lists.

• If you like the theme of universalism among myths and how those symbols reverberate in the human psyche, try Anthony Steven's Ariadne's Clue. Steven's draws from Jung to make an analysis of mythological symbols and tropes in those stories.
  
  
• Some scholars feel like myths embody a prehistoric awakening of sentience and intelligence - basically that these stories are early blueprints for what makes us human. If you're interested in that, try The Origins and History of Consciousness (Erich Neumann, the author, was also a Jungian and heavily relies on archtype theory in this book).
  
  
• For just a good read, try The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.
  
  
• If you're curious about myth construction, try Roland Barthes Mythologies. It's actually pretty accessible compared to the stuffiness of other academics and philosophers, and focuses on modern myths.
  
  
• Oh yeah! If you like Grail lore (the holy grail and Arthurian studies, which is more about legends than myths I suppose), Jung's wife wrote a book about it. Which I still need to finish. (ugh)
  
  I love mythology so I'm always excited to hear people talking about it.

You could also read 'The Fatal Shore'. Fair warning: it can be pretty gruesome and disturbing.

http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Shore-Epic-Australias-Founding/dp/0394753666/

There are so many things wrong in this I don't know where to start. Your knowledge of specifics is dreadful.

> we handed over enough intelligence for the Brits to sink the ARA General Belgrano, killing 323 sailors. Thankfully they did that as a WWII light cruiser would be devastating...to a pack of kittens in a life raft.

It was armed with the same Exocets that sank HMS Glamorgan and outgunned the British fleet. It was hardly benign.

> including failing to press the advantage they had with anti-ship missiles

They used all the air launched ones they had, and made valiant efforts to convert the ship based ones to fire from land, holing HMS Glamorgan in the process. What do you mean?

> it is hard to sink a ship when you don't attach fuses to the damn explosives

They had fuses; they were fused incorrectly.

> Not only did the Brits lose a destroyer to a Navy that could not fuse an explosive

The British lost 7 ships, including 2 destroyers.

> routinely couldn't use their harrier jets for day missions as the Brits balked at the cost of replacing them should they get shot down, and couldn't use them at night

That's simply incorrect. The Sea Harrier was used for night missions throughout the war. See Sea Harrier Over the Falklands by Sharkey Ward.

> Brits handed off Victoria Crosses like they had just rebuilt the Empire to its heyday

Only 2 were awarded.

> Thatcher got to show the boys that a woman can waste humans lives to distract from pressing issues on the home front as good as the boys

She didn't start the war.

> There is a lesson somewhere in all this.

Do your research.

Ok. Interesting. Here's the memoir I read - by Sharkey Ward. There's a passage in it where low on fuel he has to make the snap decision to fire cannons at an argentinian hercules flying a mission back to Argentina.

https://www.amazon.com/Harrier-Falklands-Cassell-Military-Paperbacks/dp/0304355429

He blew the wing off, sending it down. Then 20 years later he gave an extraordinary interview with the son of the hercules pilot, very emotional -

https://perros.metro951.com/2011/04/27/malvinas-para-siempre/

It is very dry and info-dense, but I highly recommend reading We The Navigators.

It details a wide range of navigation and landfall techniques used by pre-western contact Pacific Islanders.

Lost in Shangri-La?

Also: Sea Harrier Over The Falklands, by Sharkey Ward...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Harrier-Over-Falklands-PAPERBACKS/dp/0304355429

They don't have anything to do with Canadian politics specifically but two very interesting books that I just finished.

1. Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama
   
   
2. The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond
   
   Diamond's new book has opened my eyes on the value which traditional societies can provide to modern one's today. A really thought provoking book. Fukuyama is one of my most trusted authors on topics including sociology and historical development, the book focuses on political institutions and their development specifically through China and the Middle East (because that was where it all started).

Sea Harrier over the Falklands, by Sharkey Ward. Not just for the GR.3 and FRS.1 performance in the conflict itself, but for the evaluations in the late 70s / early 80s in which Harriers got the better of USAF F-15s among other types.

Not a new idea. This was a central pillar of Tim Flannery's 1994 book The Future Eaters, and the 1998 doco series of the same name series he wrote and featured in. It generated a bit of debate then, though his conclusions (while similar) were based on different evidence.

Recently read this book, and the author describes how the entirety of Australia was described by the first colonists as looking like English gentleman's parks, with very abrupt differences between perfect almost manicured grassland and dense forest. The aboriginals made funnels to push kangaroos down into ambushes, and fields with crops that animals loved but were environmentally? kept away from, all made by using fire. Blew my mind.

If you can get a hold of this book;

leviathan: the unauthorised biography of Sydney

There is a huge chunk in there, devoted to Bligh, The rum rebellion and the nature of power in Sydney.

Not to mention it's a fantastic balls n all history of Sydney.



>My man points about various realms of Polynesia and Micronesia being better off before European conquests stand, though.

Oh I completely agree with that.

As an Australian, I am constantly annoyed at the condescending, paternalistic attitude we take towards the pacific islands.

Batavia's Graveyard is about a mutiny on one of the Dutch East India Company's ships in the 17th century. I loved the book and never want to get on a boat ever again!

Batavia's Graveyard is a good read about this event.

Any book by Mary Roach- her books are hilarious, random, and informative. I like Jon Krakauer's, Sarah Vowell's, and Bill Bryson's books as well.

Some of my favorites that I can think of offhand (as another poster mentioned, I loved Devil in the White City)

No Picnic on Mount Kenya

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Collapse

The Closing of the Western Mind

What is the What

A Long Way Gone

Alliance of Enemies

The Lucifer Effect

The World Without Us

What the Dog Saw

The God Delusion (you'd probably enjoy Richard Dawkins' other books as well if you like science)

One Down, One Dead

Lust for Life

Lost in Shangri-La

Endurance

True Story

Havana Nocturne

Bruce Chatwin is my fav... here are thoe ones I've read thusfar....

In Patagonia




The Songlines

On the Black Hill


Utz

You need to read this book: https://www.amazon.com/We-Navigators-Ancient-Landfinding-Pacific/dp/0824815823

In that case, if you want to explore the subject further, the books of James Churchward I mentioned earlier are a good place to start.

This link will tell you a bit about him. You can find a Kindle edition of his first book about Lemurea (which he called 'Mu'—hence the use of the word by the pop group video you posted a link to) on Amazon: The Lost Continent of Mu. His other books are still available in various editions, new and second-hand.

I hope that's of help?

weird, i own this book and yeah, feel bad for all the ones ive killed now

https://www.amazon.com/Australias-Dangerous-Creatures-Readers-Digest/dp/0864380186

side note i owned this since i was like 5

First, for a proper, basic understanding of what makes people happy on the most fundamental level, and what social structures support that best, I think anthropology is a good place to start. I recommend The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond, which is an overview of modern primitive societies suggesting the social structures humans evolved. The idea is that anything contrary to the evolved structure risks being contrary to the human organism itself, and thus can be a cause of stress. Specifically, daily life in "Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic" (WEIRD) societies is in fact an aberration compared to how we evolved to live.

Obviously, any return to primitivism would be absurd, so next you would want to look into sociology, political science, psychology, and any number of other sciences to figure out how to apply just the benefits of primitive social structures in a modern, progressive, open society manner that guarantees human rights and diversity.

Personally, I think that the way humans will organize themselves in the future, assuming we even survive the next few centuries, will be a global network of massively distributed communities, each small in population and run via direct democracy, which is reminiscent of tribal social structures, but with all the benefits of the modern Internet, technology, medicine, science, etc.

Edit: mobile app messed up the formatting

I blame this book for the bullshit necrotic white tail myth.

> Just get a couple 55 gallon water drums and a few sack of beans, white rice, and sugar, that will last considerably longer for 20 times less than MRE's or freeze dried.

And by week 2 you'll be wanting to blow your brains out out of sheer boredom. Go read long-term survival situations, you can be surrounded by food and get so tired of eating it that you'll get a conditioned taste aversion and actually gag trying to choke it down after a while. People have nearly starved to death while surrounded by food that they were gobbling down in the beginning from this. Variety is important if you are prepping for a mid to long-term situation.

Edit: Read Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Joan Druett. This is one example I can think of off the top of my head where one of the two shipwrecked groups on the island had ample access to food at one point and were having to force-feed themselves.

Here's a good book on this.

Also for those interested, this is his book about his experiences operating the Harrier FRS1 in the Falklands conflict.

I haven't read a lot on the subject, but I loved [The Fatal Shore] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Fatal-Shore-Australias-Founding/dp/0394753666) by Robert Hughes. It's long and involved, but well-written.

If you'd consider historical fiction, [Against The Wind] (http://books.google.com/books/about/Against_the_Wind.html?id=NyZCmwEACAAJ), by Bronwyn Binns and Ian Jones is based on the story of an ancestor of hers. It's a great story and a quick read (the mini-series from 1979 still has fans all over the world). I think it's out of print, though.

A comprehensive yet accessible book on this subject is The Biggest Estate on Earth.

For non-fiction that reads like fiction, check out Lost in Shangra-la . It is amazingly well researched.

I actually have, as part of a school trip to study the ecosystem. I really wish I still had that book, so I could give better examples than just an overview, but essentially the author's argument was that life on Australia evolved to deal with its rather resource poor ecosystem. So while you do still have predators, you don't see the large mammals that evolved on the more resource rich continents like Asia and Africa. The largest predators are the crocodiles, which have much lower energy requirements being cold-blooded lizards (plus they can hunt in the water), and after that you have dingoes, which are much smaller than the wolves and tigers of Eurasia on top of being not native to Australia (there is no archaeological record of them before humans arrived on the continent). Most other native fauna and flora have adapted low energy means to survive. The kangaroo's hop, for instance, is much more energy efficient than walking on four legs like most marsupials/mammals. And when you look at the environment as a whole, there is this rather strange symbiosis to it (the author compares it to the evolutionary arms race that defines the species of Eurasia/Africa, who are not as constrained by resources).

The reason why I brought all of this up is in answer to OPs question: the Aborigines never adopted a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle because they were limited by their poor environment. They instead adapted to their environment by living a lower energy hunter gatherer lifestyle. Incidentally, as part of my trip we spent a weekend with an aboriginal elder. He taught us basic things about their culture (including how to properly throw a boomerang :D) and I remember thinking about how in tune with nature these people really seemed. They had to be, or else they would exhaust the environment and die.

Anyways, the book is The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0802139434). If you are into evolutionary biology or just wonder why Australia has so many unique species, check it out.

It's a fantastic book if you're interested in the Harrier or want to know a lot about it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Harrier-Over-Falklands-PAPERBACKS/dp/0304355429

That's also good if you want to read a pilots account of flying one in combat.

Oh, no, no, no. I recommend to you a close read of The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, which will get you better understanding of how it wasn't ever a "nation of inmates", as you say.

That won't cover the period where the world was falling in love with Australia, though, and it flirted closely with being the best of all of the other Big Experiments up into the '90s (with some extremely notable and regrettable exceptions). I don't know what reading to recommend for that, unfortunately.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing.

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson.

Island of the Lost by Joan Druett.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King.

Non-fiction for sure. I do really like history but sometimes its just too dense. I like to switch it up with non-fiction (or some sci-fi) that are kinda self-contained and only relate tangentially to larger events or just a lighter biography. Thinking Shadow Divers, The lost city of Z, Lost in Shangri-La, At Ease - Eisenhower or An American Doctor's Odyssey

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: Batavia's Graveyard


|Country|Link|
|:-----------|:------------|
|Spain|amazon.es|
|Mexico|amazon.com.mx|
|France|amazon.fr|
|Germany|amazon.de|
|Japan|amazon.co.jp|
|Canada|amazon.ca|
|Australia|amazon.com.au|
|Italy|amazon.it|




This bot is currently in testing so let me know what you think by voting (or commenting). The thread for feature requests can be found here.

If you want to learn more about this incredible story, I highly recommend Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash. It gives an amazing amount of insight into the events preceding the horror of the voyage as well.

And yeah, how is there not a movie about this yet.

> The Maoris were left alone for decades as they gradually had extended contact with Europeans, and were eventually approached by the British when that contact turned abusive in the 1840s to accept British sovereignty in exchange for British protection.

Its not really that simple

Maori is a strongly tribal culture (tribes are called Iwi), and in response to British fears of French settlement, the United tribes of NZ were set up, and declared their independence as an entity to have formal contact with the crown. This lead to the writing and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - which was written in two versions Maori and English. The two versions are vastly different, (and many maori cheifs did not have written communication skills as Maori is originally a spoken language). Many signed the treaty on the understanding of what was explained to them, and signed with the shape of their Iwi moko (tattoo) The two versions are arguably very different. Anyway, the treaty initially led the way to willing sale of land by maori, but eventually maori became less willing to sell - but the demand for land was increasing as more settlers arrived (in some cases buying their land before they left England) the government engaged in some less than ethical land transfer, in some cases "buying" from people who did not own the land they sold (maori are a tribal culture, arguably they assume "guardianship" (Kaitiatitanga) rather than property, land is collectively "owned" if you will. This was the benining of the Maori Land Wars, (which apparently is where the brittish got the idea of "trench warfare used in WWI) but also included the Parihaka maori Peace resistance..

For anyone interested, could I recommend The penguin history of New Zealand by NZ historian Michael King
, it should be required reading for every Kiwi.

It's out of print, but if you have a Kindle look out for John Birmingham's Leviathan. It's probably the best popular general history of Sydney.

There's a great book called "lost in Shangri-La" about this.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Shangri-Survival-Adventure-Incredible/dp/0061988359

Try this one and you have a little left over for something else.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Shangri-Survival-Adventure-Incredible/dp/0061988340/ref=amb_link_356763542_3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-6&pf_rd_r=1PH8N1KYP59FYZXACN4Q&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1313957462&pf_rd_i=283155

This is a great book if you want to know more!

https://www.amazon.com/We-Navigators-Ancient-Landfinding-Pacific/dp/0824815823

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We,_the_Navigators

https://www.amazon.com/We-Navigators-Ancient-Landfinding-Pacific/dp/0824815823

Probably never read this book.

There was a section about how someone had their eye ripped open by a swooping magpie.

this one was a good read.

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I recently took a cross country flight and was reading "The Lost Continent Of Mu" by James Churchward. Fascinating book, but I was particularly struck by how he allowed his own bias into his descriptions of the perfect society of Mu.

There are many things he made clear he didn't know, but he was sure to (multiple times) let the reader know that among this great society of equals, the WHITE MEN were the rulers.

Read that a last sentence a few times. And now you know how 'history' works. He's discussing a society that generated the sum total of ancient art and mythology by interpreting dead languages from literal stone tablets... but he still couldn't imagine a society where men ruled as true equals.

I used to really dislike Sydney, then I grew to love it for (rather than despite) all of its foibles. It's a mean, crass, dirty town and that's why it'll always be so close to my heart. Read Leviathan, The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney sometime.

The first small convict flotilla of 11 ships found its way into Sydney Harbor in the humid summer (January in those parts) of 1788. America had had an oblique hand both in this first tenuous settlement and in the development of all the other vast Australian outdoor gulags. For the American colonies, which had once taken Britain's prisoners, often assigning them to farmers along the Eastern seaboard, were now independent and refused to receive Britain's exported criminality.

You can read about Australia's beginnings as a penal colony and the effects that that had on the development of the country here:

[The Fatal Shore] (https://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Shore-Epic-Australias-Founding/dp/0394753666)

After WW2 the Greeks chartered planes to send young teens out to Oz as 'domestic servants'. You can imagine how well that went for them.

Australia has an appalling history of human right abuses and while I love my Aussie family members none of them have a damn fucking clue about anything.

This is an excellent book if anyone gives a damn
https://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Shore-Epic-Australias-Founding/dp/0394753666

Evolutionary there's advantage in exterminating males (including male children) and abduct and rape the females during wars.

See e.g. http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional/dp/0670024813 for a description of an environment we've evolved to fit into.