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1940.Wartime Australia.Key members of Menzies' government die in a fiery plane crash.What went wrong and what happened next?In August 1940 Australia had been at war for almost a year when a Hudson bomber the A16-97 carrying ten people, including three cabinet ministers, crashed into a ridge near Canberra.

Born of the Sun records the lives of seven young Australians who achieved widespread fame in their fields of endeavour between 1866 and 1933— rowing, rugby, swimming, boxing, cricket, medical research and on the battlefield —and who all died in the plenitude of youth. In doing so, it offers fascinating insights into Australia’s coming of age. This lively account illuminates the lives of Harry Searle, Lonnie Spragg, Barney Kieran, Les Darcy, Archie Jackson, Professor John Hunter and Lieutenant Eric Edgerton.

Australians take for granted the presence of their federal government yet it is impossible to overestimate, as this full biography reveals, the role Andrew Fisher played in its development. The book also reveals the skills with which Fisher led the ALP in its early years and his important contributions as wartime Prime Minister and as High Commissioner in London. Andrew Fisher: An Underestimated Man attempts to account for the obscurity of one of Australia’s greatest reformers.

Part biography, part transnational history, this study details the life and career of Percy Spender, one of Australia's most prominent twentieth-century political figures. Spender served his country in government, in opposition and as an ambassador to the United States in a long and prestigious career dominated by Australian foreign policy. Spender's role in moving Australia closer towards American influence - while pushing at the boundaries of Australia's 'Britishness' - is a key element in Lowe's narrative.

Australia's Prime Minister and premier diplomat in the 1930/1940s, this new biography presents him as a consistent internationalist and places him in a global context. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was at the centre of Imperial politics for more than two decades from the early 1920s until the end of the Second World War. This new biography presents Bruce as a consistent internationalist. Educated in Melbourne and Cambridge, Bruce, as a businessman, was alive to the importance of international commerce, and particularly Anglo-Australian trade. This lay at the core of his internationalism, which took the form in the 1920s of encouraging the political and economic integration of the British Empire. Bruce's punitive treatment of militant Australian trade unionists and his upholding of constitutionalism and law and order in the 1920s was part of an effort to defend one form of internationalism, commitment to the British Empire, against the competing international ideology of communism. While continuing to support a unified British Empire acting as a progressive force in world affairs, Bruce championed stronger international collaboration through the League of Nations and the United Nations and through cooperation between the Empire and the United States.

In \"Great Central State\", Jack Cross tells the story of South Australia's ambitious - or foolhardy - plan to become the premier colony of Australia using its own unique experience in planned colonisation, and its bid to develop the north coast as an integral part of South-East Asia.

The First World War marked the emergence of the Dominions on the world stage as independent nations, none more so than Australia. The country's sacrifice at Gallipoli in 1915, and the splendid combat record of Australian troops on the Western Front not only created a national awakening at home, but also put Great Britain in their debt, ensuring them greater influence at the Peace Conferences. Australia was represented at Versailles by the Prime Minister, the colourful Billy Hughes, whom Woodrow Wilson called 'a pestiferous varmint' after their repeated clashes over Australia's claims to the Pacific Islands its troops had taken from Germany during the War. Hughes was also the most vociferous (though by no means at all the only) opponent of the racial equality clause put forward by Japan. Indeed, it was fear of Japanese expansion that drove Australia's territorial demands in the Pacific.

The Versailles Conference saw the awakening on the world stage of Australian nationhood after the sacrifices of war.