Books like Sacred Places — picked by fans

My late colleague at UNSW Canberra, Jeff Grey, wrote this important book at the age of just 31. The product of a military family, Jeff blossomed from a specialist in Commonwealth operations in the Korean war into the author of a confident, opinionated (but impressively well researched) general history that went through three editions before Jeff’s untimely death in 2016. Jeff deserves credit for seeing that despite the resurgence in interest in Australia’s military history over the 1980s, no one had spotted the need for a comprehensive book that showed us how the bits went together. Thirty years on, no one has bettered it.

The Broken Years is a wonderful book about what Australian soldiers thought and felt during the war.

It originated in Bill Gammage’s PhD thesis, which was the first systematic study of the soldiers’ letters and diaries collected by the Australian War Memorial. The result is an illuminating and moving masterpiece, which proved transformational.

When he began his thesis he was in unfamiliar territory, as the concentrated use of these sources was unprecedented — in fact, military history itself was not popular. But he persevered, gradually sensing he was on to something, and indeed he was.

The Broken Years became an enduring classic. It was personally very influential for me during the 1970s when I was a dissatisfied, recently graduated lawyer considering a change to something more aligned with my interest in history. I took the plunge, left the law, and I’ve been a historian and biographer ever since.

In 1942 about 22,000 Australians – an entire army division – were captured by the Japanese, mostly in Singapore. When the survivors returned from the Burma-Thailand railway and camps across south-east Asia and Japan, a third of them were dead. This ordeal, so much at variance with Australia’s tradition of victory in war, remained largely neglected. In the early 1980s academic historian Hank Nelson teamed up with Tim Bowden, a radio presenter, to interview hundreds of former PoWs of the Japanese, many speaking for the first time, and together they produced a powerful Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary series which told their stories. Hank produced the equally profound book based on the recordings, effectively kick-starting the investigation of PoW history, now an important part of Australian military history.

The study of battles, and often individual actions by small groups of men, has been an important part of Australian military history, and the Australian military historical tradition has produced many fine practitioners of operational military history. One author who produced a fine example of the genre is Gerard Windsor, the author of fiction and memoir who, though without any previous experience of writing military history, produced All Day Long the Noise of Battle, a study of the attack made by one company of Australian infantry upon a Viet Cong bunker system in Phuoc Tuy province, South Vietnam, in 1968. Sparked by a chance encounter with a schoolmate, Windsor began investigating a hitherto unnamed battle, one of the most fierce the Australians fought in their ten-year war in Vietnam, and a superb example of how to write about men in battle. 

A seriously underrated series set in Australia with the mysterious Heller, who is from a Nordic country (although it takes several books to find out more about him), and a young woman who becomes part of his chaotic family of misfits who run a security business, possibly with ties to the government and international espionage.

Every personal detail of Heller is grudgingly given, which makes it so much more intriguing. Each book is a standalone, but each adds more to the overall picture.

I wish I could tell you what happened to this talented author, but she disappeared mysteriously over ten years ago and has never written another book since. A true-life mystery.

Dyschronia is strange, complicated, overwhelming, frightening, and occasionally enervating – just like climate change. Jen Mills tells the story of a young woman in a small, dying town who can’t stop seeing horrible futures; or, perhaps, the story of a young woman who compulsively lies. You won’t forget the compelling and sickening scene of a town waking up to find the ocean has disappeared. This one is worth wrapping your brain around.

Even before Archibald Edmund Filby embarked on his famous African expeditions, he took advantage of a government-sponsored scheme to migrate to Australia. It was 1921 and his daredevil nature soon had him performing reckless feats as a buckjumper in a popular circus rodeo. Whilst trekking through this vast continent, he embraced the opportunity to become a jockey, photographer, actor, pilot, car salesman, and pearl diver.

Not only was A E Filby a famous British explorer, but he was also my Uncle Archie. What a shame he never saw his memoirs published before his death in 1942.

I enjoyed The Opposite of Life (which preceded this book) for its wit, originality, unexpected poignancy, and Australian urban setting. I think Walking Shadows is even better.

Librarian Lissa and her very uncool, but lovable, vampire buddy Gary return, and Lissa is drawn further into Melbourne's vampire underworld to protect Gary (the first of many wonderful ironies).

Someone is hunting vampires and Gary's on the hitlist, despite the fact he doesn't bite people or drink blood. (In Harris’s mythology, vampires don't need human blood to survive, it simply enables them to feel alive.)

There are still themes of death, grief, and consequences of choices, but these are balanced by moments where simple joys in life are celebrated and relished. I loved the deepening friendship between Lissa and Gary—theirs is a unique relationship in the world of vamp-based stories.

Remarkable accounts from nineteenth-century newspapers, letters, and diaries reveal that most Australian colonists realized that their invasion of the vast continent whose fringes they inhabited was not unfolding peacefully. Warfare broke out between the white invaders and Aboriginal peoples as the frontier shifted further from the coastline, and it was not until 1870 that the last of the British soldiers left the Australian colonies. Shockingly, over time many descendants of the British chose to forget about Australia’s frontier wars and even denied that frontier conflict had ever taken place. John Connor’s book provides significant insights into the militarized Australian frontier from the time of first settlement in the late eighteenth century through until the late 1830s. It’s an important reminder about the struggles that took place as First Nations people contested the incursion of the British into what became Australia. Connor writes back clearly and concisely against notions of the… show more.

This is still one of the coolest books I’ve ever read. It has wonderfully left-of-centre characters, original plot, and world building, a hint of darkness, and sharp dialogue. I love its Australian flavour (just enough to feel familiar). The setting is also off-kilter enough to be dystopian, but not so much so that it feels alien.

Best of all, at the novel's heart is an engaging, offbeat romance. There are also well-handled themes of alienation, grief, identity, and self-discovery.

(It was part of a gift pack of novels my Australian publisher sent me when I signed my first book deal back in 2011, and I instantly fell in love with it.)