AustLit

'The long idyllic summer of Jan Ruff-O'Herne's childhood in Dutch colonial Indonesia ended in 1942 with the Japanese invasion of Java. She was interned in Ambarawa Prison Camp, along with her mother and two younger sisters. In February 1944, when Jan was 21, her life was torn apart. Along with nine other young women, all of them virgins, she was plucked from the camp and her family, and enslaved into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army.' (Publisher)

'The first book to tell the story of an Australian POW in the famous Great Escape from Stalag Luft III in World War II, this is a moving account of the far too short life of a talented young man and a family hit hard by the Depression and war.

'Shot down in 1942, young Australian fighter pilot John Williams DFC became a POW in the notorious Stalag Luft III camp in Germany. John had joined the air force shortly before the outbreak of war and, in the larrikin tradition, led his squadron into air combat over the deserts of Libya and Egypt dressed in sandals and shorts.

'Born into the throes of wartime Europe. The progeny of a turbulent family environment. An unwitting youngster regularly caught in bombings and ground action. Abandoned during a particularly grim situation. A child escapee and refugee. Internee of the German Works Camp programme and classified a Displaced Person (IDP) at conflict's end. Drafted by the UNO with the small remnants of his immediate family, a newly born sister included. Deemed fit and transported to far off 1950s Australia; all before the age of ten!

This account will touch every reader and allows him or her to relate with the traumas of a ‘wide eyed' young witness Arpad junior, his estranged father Arpad senior, a traumatised young mother Charlotte, plus a doting and unhappy grandmother Lidia.

'Barrie Cassidy's dad Bill survived more than four years as a prisoner of war in World War II. He first saw conflict on Crete in May 1941, during the only large-scale parachute invasion in wartime history. Just four days later, Bill was wounded and eventually captured.

'Twice he tried to escape his internment—with horrific consequences. He suffered greatly but found courageous support from his fellow prisoners.

'His new wife Myra and his large family thought he was dead until news of his capture finally reached them.

'The author who was conscripted for service in the army writes of his experiences before, during and after the Vietnam War. It is interwoven with his father's army service in WWII. In particular the author writes in depth his experiences in a battle at Fire Support Base Coral in 1968.' (Publication summary)

'Told through the bright and unflinching eyes of Cat Thao, a girl born in a refugee camp, We Are Here is a memoir that begins in 1975 with her family's gripping exodus by foot out of post-war Vietnam - a dangerous journey, unimaginable to most, on which most perished.

'The escape of Cat Thao's family from persecution traverses the horrific jungles of Khmer Rouge Cambodia and into the crowded refugee camps of Thailand. From which, finally, the Nguyens were allowed to board a Qantas plane to a freedom they wanted desperately.

'On the afternoon of 18 August 1966, just five kilometres from the main Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat, a group of Viet Cong soldiers walked into the right flank of Delta Company, 6 RAR. Under a blanket of mist and heavy monsoon rain, amid the mud and shattered rubber trees, a dispersed Company of 108 men held its ground with courage and grim determination against a three sided attack from a force of 2,500 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops.

'When the battle subsided, 17 Australian soldiers lay dead, 24 had been wounded of which one died 9 days later.

'John Cantwell, Queensland country boy, enlisted in the army as a private and rose to the rank of major general. He was on the front line in 1991 as Coalition forces fitted bulldozer blades to tanks and buried Iraqi troops alive. He served in Baghdad in 2006 and saw what a car bomb does to a crowded marketplace. He was commander of Australian forces in Afghanistan in 2010 when ten of his soldiers were killed. He came home in 2011 to be considered for the job of chief of the Australian Army. Instead, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital.

'In 1999 a young man from suburban Adelaide set out on an overseas trip that would change his life forever. Initially, he was after adventure and the experience of travelling the Silk Road.

'But events would set him on a different path. He would be deemed a terrorist, one of George W Bush's "worst of the worst".He would be incarcerated in the world's most notorious prison, Guantanamo Bay.

'And in that place where, according to an interrogator in Abu Ghraib, "even dogs won't live", he was to languish for five and a half years, suffering horror, torture and abuse, while Australians were told who he was - by politicians, the media and foreign governments.

'The remarkable true story Paul 'Warlord' Warren, the young soldier and former Muay Thai boxing champioin, who lost one of his legs when an IED exploded during a mission in Afghanistan. A story of enormous courage, great determination and deep love.

'Paul 'Warlord' Warren was an Australian Muay Thai kick-boxing champion who was used to the physically punishing world of martial arts at its highest level. But nothing could prepare him for the torment he would face in the Australian army. One month after he arrived in Afghanistan as a soldier in the ADF, an IED exploded, tearing off his right leg and instantly killing his mate, Private Ben Ranaudo.

'In the early hours of 2 October 2001, Mamdouh Habib and two young German men were taken off a bus traveling between Quetta and Karachi by Pakistani security officers. It was shortly after 9/11, and only days before the United States attacked Afghanistan. The Pakistanis were rounding up anyone who looked foreign or in any way suspicious, interrogating them, and passing them on to the Americans. A few unlucky ones were then 'rendered' to a third-party country to be further interrogated and tortured, where they either disappeared into a web of secret prisons or were sent to Guantanamo Bay.

These carefully researched accounts are testaments to tribes from all over the island continent, from Tasmania to the Kimberley. The consistent theme is of a people pushed to the limit, and their eventual attempts to reassert some control over their own lives and traditional resources.

'Every hill got a story is the first comprehensive history of Central Australia’s Aboriginal people, as told in their own words and many languages.

'Nyinanyi ngurangka – being on country – is not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but a hard-won right, a spiritual and cultural duty, a constant battle, a source of happiness and opportunity and the meaning of life all at the same time.

'In this heartbreaking, funny and poignant collection, 127 eminent men and women remember surviving first contact, massacres and forced removals and resisting more than a century of top-down government policies.

A series of interviews with Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory.