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Australian Story


"Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is also so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened." ( Mark Twain, 1897 )

18th/19th Century
20th Century
21st Century

Aborigines and colonists
No playing cowboys and Indians

20th century timeline
Prosperity, immigration and conflict

21st Century timeline
Century of Asian engagement
Convict life
A life of floggings, regrets, and more floggings
White Australia Policy
From Convicts to Chinese
Bali bombings
Contrasting styles of media coverage
Convict crimes
Fishing, hunting, or looking suspicious...
The Survival of Douglas Mawson
The greatest polar expedition ever told
 
Escapes
The novel ways to escape
Gallipoli
Remembering loss in a useless battle
 
Convict voice
The voice of the dehumanised
John Monash
The father of the blitzkrieg
Female Convicts
Women and a reverend
John Simpson
A human soldier
Larrikin Legacy
Modern identity in penal times

Anzac Day
Remembering the fallen, not the enemy
 
Negroes
A shade of colour in white settlement
Tobruk
Desert rats defy the desert fox
Pelmuwuy
Justice
Nancy Wake
The white mouse
Eureka Massacre
The first diggers
Kokoda
Never giving up
 
Our Ned Kelly
The story of the aggrieved
Long Tan
The battle of propaganda
Matthew Brady
A new moral code
Referendums
Explaining a century of ‘No’
Jimmy Governor
A cry of insanity?
Prime Ministers
Beer drinking records and lost trousers
 
Mary-Anne Bugg
The Female Bushranger

 
Brave Ben Hall
A gentleman bushranger
   
Mary McKillop
A rebel and a saint