Access Must-Have Full Audiobooks in History, Australia & Oceania

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/503792 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Dissent

Author: Gideon Haigh

Narrator: Gideon Haigh

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 39 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2021

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

Longlisted for the 2022 Indie Book Awards. Longlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. Chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ in The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian Book Review. In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy drowned in a ditch that had filled with rain after being left unfenced by council workers. How the law should deal with the trauma of the family’s loss was one of the most complex and controversial cases to reach Australia’s High Court, where it seized the imagination of its youngest and cleverest member. These days, ‘Doc’ Evatt is remembered mainly as the hapless and divisive opposition leader during the long ascendancy of his great rival Sir Robert Menzies. Yet long before we spoke of ‘public intellectuals’, Evatt was one: a dashing advocate, an inspired jurist, an outspoken opinion maker, one of our first popular historians and the nation’s foremost champion of modern art. Through Evatt’s innovative and empathic decision in Chester v the Council of Waverley Municipality, which argued for the law to acknowledge inner suffering as it did physical injury, Gideon Haigh rediscovers the most brilliant Australian of his day, a patriot with a vision of his country charting its own path and being its own example – the same attitude he brought to being the only Australian president of the UN General Assembly, and instrumental in the foundation of Israel. A feat of remarkable historical perception, deep research and masterful storytelling, The Brilliant Boy confirms Gideon Haigh as one of our finest writers of non-fiction. It shows Australia in a rare light, as a genuinely clever country prepared to contest big ideas and face the future confidently. 'Gideon Haigh has always been an exquisite wordsmith, and he proves here that he is also an intuitive historian and acute biographer with a masterful control of the broad sweep and telling detail’ AFR Books of the Year 'Here is a master craftsman delivering one of his most finely honed works. Meticulous in its research, humane in its storytelling, The Brilliant Boy is Gideon Haigh at his lush, luminous best. Haigh shines a light on person, place and era with the sheer force of his intellect and the generosity of his words. The Brilliant Boy is simply a brilliant book.' Clare Wright, Stella-Prize winning author of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka   ‘Gideon Haigh has a nose for Australian stories that light up the past from new angles, and he tells this one with verve, grace and lightly worn erudition. I couldn’t put it down.’ Judith Brett, The Saturday Paper   ‘An absolutely remarkable, moving and elegant re-reading of the early life of an extraordinary Australian. Gideon Haigh is one of Australia's finest writers and thinkers … mesmerizing … one of the best Australian biographies I have read for a long time.' Michael McKernan, Canberra Times

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/501957 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Australia's Dambusters: Flying into Hell with 617 Squadron

Author: Colin Burgess

Narrator: Steve Shanahan

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 45 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2021

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

A truly comprehensive account of 617 Squadron, RAF, ​who carried out one of the most dangerous and audacious aerial bombing raids of World War II. It was the evening of 16 May 1943. Nineteen modified Lancaster bombers from 617 Squadron RAF, under the command of youthful Wing Commander Guy Gibson, roared into the night sky from their Lincolnshire base. They were on a top-secret Bomber Command mission, codenamed Operation Chastise, now regarded as one of the most dangerous and audacious bombing raids of World War II – an attack on the formidable, well-defended dams of Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Slung beneath the belly of each aircraft was one of the war’s greatest secrets – a bouncing bomb. Against the odds, and flying straight and level into the teeth of terrifying enemy fire, they succeeded in breaching the two principal dams. Many of the 133 airmen involved that fateful night hailed from Australia, and several would be counted among the 56 who would not return to base next morning. The Dams Raid led to the men of this gallant company – often referred to as a suicide squadron – taking on even more hazardous operations in the final two years of the war. Under valorous leadership, and now armed with massive Tallboy and Grand Slam ‘earthquake’ bombs, they obliterated vital Nazi installations, destroying such defiant targets as the heavily defended Kembs Barrage and the German battleship Tirpitz, often at a terrible cost in lives. First published in 2003, this deeply researched, revised and updated edition of Australia’s Dambusters offers a truly comprehensive account of the most famous bombing raid of the war through the words and stories of the courageous Australian airmen and others who flew on this and later perilous missions, remembered and forever immortalised as the Dambusters.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/502184 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Semut: The Untold Story of a Secret Australian Operation in WWII Borneo

Author: Christine Helliwell

Narrator: Christine Helliwell, Dorje Swallow

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 53 minutes

Release date: July 2, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 1

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

March 1945. A handful of very young Allied operatives are parachuted into the remote jungled heart of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, east of Singapore, there to recruit the island's indigenous Dayak peoples to fight the Japanese. Yet most speak next to no Borneo languages and know little about Dayaks, other than that they were once headhunters who might kill them on arrival. For their part, some Dayaks have never before seen a white face. This is the story of Operation Semut, an Australian secret military operation launched by the organisation popularly known as Z Special Unit in the final months of WWII. Anthropologist Christine Helliwell has called on her years of first-hand knowledge of Borneo, interviewed more than one hundred Dayak people and all the remaining Semut operatives, and consulted thousands of military and other documents to piece together this astonishing story. Focusing on two of Borneo's great rivers - the Baram and Rejang - the book provides a detailed military history of Semut II's and Semut III's brutal guerrilla campaign against the Japanese, and reveals the decisive but long-overlooked Dayak role in the operation. But this is no ordinary history. Helliwell captures vividly the terrors of the jungle environment into which the operatives are plunged. And she takes us into the lives and cavernous longhouses of the Dayaks on whom their survival depends. The result is a truly unique account of the meeting of two very different cultures amidst the savagery of the Pacific War.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/511709 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Only the Brave: July 1944--The Epic Battle for Guam

Author: Don Keith

Narrator: Steven Kearney

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 37 minutes

Release date: June 29, 2021

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

For Dutton Caliber's American War Heroes series, a World War II narrative on the American liberation of Guam in 1944, focusing on the twenty days of intense combat as the Marine Corps took the island back from the Japanese. On July 21, 1944, a US Marine division landed on the beaches of Guam, a once sleepy island in the Pacific that had been seized from the Americans by the Japanese in the hours after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese would not be giving Guam up easily. The large enemy force defended the island viciously, punching holes through the American lines, attacking from the flanks, and eventually resorting to banzai suicide attacks. The fighting was bloody and brutal, every bit as deadly as Iwo Jima or Okinawa would be. Now, acclaimed author Don Keith offers up a compelling account of one of the toughest fights of the Pacific War, a battle that led to ten thousand American casualties and four Medals of Honor.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/509306 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific

Author: Nicholas Thomas

Narrator: Mark Robertson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 3 hours 52 minutes

Release date: June 15, 2021

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account. One of the Best Books of 2021 — Wall Street Journal The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean?  In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas from late prehistory onward. Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from genetics, linguistics, and archaeology, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the seagoing technologies that enabled them, and the societies they left in their wake.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/501747 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Convict-era Port Arthur: Misery of the deepest dye

Author: David W. Cameron

Narrator: Ant Neate

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 2 minutes

Release date: June 1, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

Detailing the development of the prison and its outlying stations, including its dreaded coal mines and providing an account of the changing views to convict rehabilitation, Convict-era Port Arthur focuses in on a number of individuals, telling the story through their eyes. Charles O'Hara Booth, a significant commandant of Port Arthur; Mark Jeffrey, a convict who became the grave digger on the Island of the Dead; and William Thompson, who arrived just as the new probation system started and who was forced to work in the treacherous coal mines. Convict-era Port Arthur will for the first time provide a comprehensive history of Port Arthur, its horrors and its changing role over a fifty-year period. In gripping detail, using the experiences and words of the convicts, soldiers and administrators who spent time there, David W. Cameron brings to life these deeply miserable days.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/537750 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Palace Letters: The Queen, the Governor-General, and the Plot to Dismiss Gough Whitlam

Author: Jenny Hocking

Narrator: Katherine Littrell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 53 minutes

Release date: May 4, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

What role did the queen play in governor-general Sir John Kerr’s plans to dismiss prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, unleashing one of the most divisive episodes in Australia’s political history? And why weren’t we told? Under the cover of being designated as private correspondence, the letters between the queen and the governor-general about the dismissal have been locked away for decades in the National Archives of Australia, and embargoed by the queen—potentially forever. This ruse has furthered the fiction that the queen and the Palace had no warning of or role in Kerr’s actions. In the face of this, Professor Jenny Hocking embarked on a four-year legal battle to force the Archives to release the letters. In 2015, she mounted a crowd-funded campaign, securing a stellar pro bono team that took her case all the way to the High Court of Australia. Now, drawing on never-before-published material from Kerr’s archives and her submissions to the court, Hocking traces the collusion and deception behind the dismissal, and charts the secret role of High Court judges; the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser; and the Queen’s private secretary in fostering and supporting Kerr’s actions. Hocking also reveals the obstruction, intrigue, and duplicity she faced, raising disturbing questions about the role of the National Archives in preventing access to its own historical material and in enforcing royal secrecy over its documents.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/511864 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Mallacoota Time

Author: Milena Cifali

Narrator: Milena Cifali

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 5 hours 38 minutes

Release date: March 24, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

Highly-regarded creative talent Milena Cifali is an award winning singer-songwriter and poet, who, along with her partner Jim Horvath, lost her home, instruments and beloved parrots in the Mallacoota bushfires on New Year's Eve 2019. Out of adversity, Milena has written a heartfelt book, sharing her personal journey towards recovery, against the larger backdrop of an unprecedented bushfire season and the coronavirus pandemic. The book showcases Milena's considerable talents of writing, poetry, lyrics, and photography to create a stirring and timely work. At its heart is the search for home and its aim to connect with Australia's fire ravaged communities and to provide solace, facilitating healing for all those suffering loss amongst these communities.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/491364 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Return to Uluru

Author: Mark Mckenna

Narrator: Mark Mckenna

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 26 minutes

Release date: March 2, 2021

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

A killing. A hidden history. A story that goes to the heart of the nation. When Mark McKenna set out to write a history of the centre of Australia, he had no idea what he would discover. One event in 1934 – the shooting at Uluru of Aboriginal man Yokununna by white policeman Bill McKinnon, and subsequent Commonwealth inquiry – stood out as a mirror of racial politics in the Northern Territory at the time. But then, through speaking with the families of both killer and victim, McKenna unearthed new evidence that transformed the historical record and the meaning of the event for today. As he explains, ‘Every thread of the story connected to the present in surprising ways.' In a sequence of powerful revelations, McKenna explores what truth-telling and reconciliation look like in practice. Return to Uluru brings a cold case to life. It speaks directly to the Black Lives Matter movement, but is completely Australian. Recalling Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man, it is superbly written, moving, and full of astonishing, unexpected twists. Ultimately it is a story of recognition and return, which goes to the very heart of the country. At the centre of it all is Uluru, the sacred site where paths fatefully converged. “I feel sure that this book will become an Australian classic, not the first of its kind, but certainly the most powerful narrative I have read of frontier injustice and its resonance in our lives today.” MARCIA LANGTON “Mark McKenna has exposed the wounded heart of Australia. Never has a history of our country so assumed the power of sacred myth. Return to Uluru is a spellbinding story of death and resurrection that is Australian to its core.” JAMES BOYCE

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/484245 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Kate Kelly

Author: Rebecca Wilson

Narrator: Nicolette Chin

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 9 minutes

Release date: February 16, 2021

Genres: Australia & Oceania

Publisher's Summary:

Kate Kelly has always been overshadowed by her famous brother Ned, but the talented young woman was a popular public figure in her own right. This moving biography tells her astonishing story in full for the first time. Kate Kelly, the daring sister of legendary bushranger Ned Kelly, was mysteriously found dead in a lagoon outside the town of Forbes in 1898. At the inquest, Kate's husband Bricky Foster claimed that she was addicted to drink and frequently spoke of suicide. However, a friend and neighbour testified that she had only known Kate to drink since the recent birth of her baby and that she never spoke of suicide. Was it suicide, accident or murder, and why had she changed her name to Ada? Kate's exploits as a decoy and runner for the Kelly gang are well known, as is her presence at the gruesome Glenrowan siege, and the street protests that failed to save Ned's life. In the years after Ned's execution, she appeared at public gatherings around Australia. Huge crowds came to see her talk and ride, and she helped to popularise the Ned Kelly story, becoming a celebrity in her own right. Then she disappeared from the public eye. Rebecca Wilson is the first to uncover what really happened to Kate Kelly. It will surprise anyone who thought they already knew the story of Australia's most famous outlaw. 'Rarely told in full, this is the fascinating life of one of the great characters in one of our greatest stories.' - Paul Terry, author of The True Story of Ned Kelly's Last Stand