Showing titles in Australia & Oceania

In Loving Country, co-authors Bruce Pascoe and Vicky Shukurolgou show travellers how to see the country as herself, to know her whole and old story and to find the way to fall in love with her, our home. Listeners are encouraged to discover sacred Australia by reconsidering the accepted history and hearing diverse stories of her Indigenous people. The intention of this audiobook is to foster communication and understanding between all peoples and country, to encourage environmental and social change.

A true story of a man who took it upon himself to live alone on a deserted island in the South Pacific, in fact he loved it so much he decided to return and stay a while longer!

The third and most ambitious of Michael Palin's adventures is a voyage of epic proportions - the circumnavigation of the Pacific Rim. He travels for almost a year through the 18 countries that border the world's largest ocean, and is forced to negotiate mountains, plunging gorges, cross glaciers and dodge icebergs. Volcanoes also mark Palin's journey. He climbs one which has freshly erupted and follows great rivers like the Yangtze and the Amazon to some of the most remote places on earth.

Written and read by best-selling Australian author and much-loved actor William McInnes, this is a story about our love affair with holidays. It's about going away and staying at home. It's about the relaxing times you had as a kid, escapes you have with your children and the stories you hear from your friends. It can be about a romantic sunset, the spare seat at breakfast being taken by an attractive stranger, a miraculous airline upgrade....

An enthralling journey, showcasing Watson's trademark literary gift and sardonic wit, through the Australian landscape and character. While most Australians live in cities clinging to the coastal fringe, our sense of what an Australian is, or should be, is drawn from the vast and varied inland called the bush. But what do we mean by 'the bush', and how has it shaped us?

Robyn Davidson's perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea began with only four camels and a dog for company. Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia's landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people and a willingness to cast away the trappings of her former identity.

Driving around Australia is one of life's biggest adventures, if you're crazy enough to do it. But as anyone who has broken down on the Nullarbor can attest, it's nerve-wracking to head out into the big red. David Batty knows how to get out of hairy situations because he's wound up in a bunch himself. From nearly being washed away by flash floods in the Kimberley to being marooned on an island in the Top End eating stingray, Batty's Bush Bible is chock-full of yarns from David's four decades as a film director in the most remote regions of Australia.

Twenty years ago Joe Bennett hitchhiked the length and breadth of New Zealand. The result was A Land of Two Halves, a portrait of the country and its many contradictions that is as telling today as it was then. For as Joe says in his reintroduction to this classic road trip, the name of the All Black first five may have changed but there is still an All Black first five, the waves still thump against Hokitika beach and the debate still rages over the Treaty of Waitangi.

In New Guinea Pidgin, Thrown Way Leg means to go on a journey and it is also Tim Flannery's invitation to join him on his breathtaking adventure through the jungles of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya. Flannery meets skilled hunters, befriends shaman, climbs mountains never before scaled by Europeans, discovers new species and stumbles across the giant bones of extinct marsupials. You will never think about the bird-shaped island to our north the same way again.

From Curio Bay in Southland to Totaranui in Golden Bay, this is both a provocative history and a vast expedition across the land once known as Middle Island, as Ansley visits the places and people who hold the clues to the South's famous character. Not so very long ago, the South Island had most of New Zealand's people and just about all of the money. Gold miners found fortunes in the hills and rivers, sheep barons bestrode mountains, valleys and plains. Wealthy southerners ruled the embryonic government. Where now lies the South Island's golden fleece? And what is its future?

Will Chaffey is 18 when he boards a plane in New York bound for Australia. Taking time off to work and travel, Will meets an enigmatic wanderer and herpetologist. Together they cross the inland desert to the tropical northwest coast, home to the saltwater crocodile, a known man-eater and a predator who has been hunting since the age of the dinosaurs. They devise a plan to explore the remote Prince Regent River, a trek so dangerous it had never been attempted by outsiders.

This true story tells of one family’s hilarious journey through Australia’s rugged Outback countryside. The intrepid adventurers work their way through numerous mishaps, including an ill-advised river-crossing and an inappropriately packed roof rack. They also engage in some truly horrible singing.

Book One in the series, inspired by radio interviews collected on round-Australia jaunt for a national broadcaster; stories mostly light and bright with an amusing “innocent abroad” feel.

When Tim Bowden went back to Tasmania to explore his state of origin for the first time in many years, he was reminded of his adolescent assertion that "Tasmania is the testicle of Australia, suffusing the mainland with strength and vigour. What a pity there is only one of them".

No visit to Sydney is complete without a trip to the historic Rocks district on the harbour foreshore. And no visit to the Rocks would be complete without this self-guided audio walk. The Rocks is the enclave where European Sydney had its beginnings. Here the first convicts were ordered to build their huts and here they worked the sandstone that made Australia's first buildings. This self-guided walk will take you to the places they lived and tell you their stories.

One month into our stay, we'd managed to dispatch most of our charges. We executed the chickens. One of the cats disappeared, clearly disgusted with our urban ways. And Lucky [the cow] was escaping almost daily. It seemed we didn't have much of a talent for farming. And we still had eleven months to go." Antonia Murphy, you might say, is an unlikely farmer. Born and bred in San Francisco, she spent much of her life as a liberal urban cliché, and her interactions with the animal kingdom rarely extended past dinner.

After half a century of travel, from Ethiopia to Tibet, from Belfast to Jerusalem, Pico Iyer asks himself what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. In a spectacular journey, both inward and outward, Iyer roams from crowded mosques in Iran to a film studio in North Korea, from a holy mountain in Japan to the sometimes spooky emptiness of the Australian outback.

When a nine-year-old R.A. Dalkey decided he was going to become an Outback truck driver, the poor Australia-besotted boy had no idea what he was getting into. He’d been born on the wrong continent, for a start. And even if he could make it out of Africa one day, where was an Australian work visa to come from? A sensible adult would have filed that dream away as a juvenile fantasy and gotten on with life. Especially after taking five attempts to get the most basic of car licenses. But R.A. Dalkey never claimed to be a sensible adult, did he?

The story of a man who chose to reinvent himself instead of playing victim. Number one in its series, this newly released adventure book comes with the best romance and suspense a true story can ever give. Sick of being treated like a foreigner in his home country Madagascar, Black Candy decided to migrate to Australia with his family, in the quest of freedom and a fair go.

What would you do if you only had five years left to live? For some, this is a tragic reality, for most, it’s a question they will never be forced to answer. Luke Richmond asks this question often, not from morbid curiosity, but to ensure he is filling his days with value and living life with no regrets. The awareness of a finite reality has taken Luke from a small town in rural Australia, into the harshest and most challenging environments on Earth.