The primary source documents underlying John Thomas Bigge's 1822–1823 reports to the British Government on the state of New South Wales under Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Bigge was commissioned to investigate the running of the colony — its convict management, land grants, public works, and Macquarie's controversial policies — and his reports had significant consequences for the direction of Australian colonial administration.
Keith Windschuttle's controversial challenge to the accepted historiography of Tasmania's frontier period. Published in 2003, this first volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History focuses on Van Diemen's Land from 1803 to 1847 — covering the period of the Black War and the removal of the surviving Aboriginal population to Flinders Island.
Robert Hughes's landmark history of convict transportation to Australia — from the First Fleet in 1787 through to the end of transportation in 1868. Hughes documented the full scale and brutality of the transportation system — the ships, the prisons, the assignment system, the floggings, the Norfolk Island hell and Port Arthur, and the lives of the men, women and children transported from Georgian Britain to the other side of the world.
A history of the merino and wool in Tasmania. The book traces the story from early Merino sheep and the Forlong family's records, through Tasmanian sheep studs and wool production across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, wool manufacturing and Tasmanian wool brokers, to a closing chapter of facts about sheep and wool.
An account of Nicolas Baudin's two-year scientific expedition to the coasts of Australia. Baudin commanded two ships — the Géographe and the Naturaliste — on a voyage commissioned by Napoleon to survey the Australian coastline and collect scientific specimens. The expedition spent considerable time in Van Diemen's Land, where Baudin's interactions with the Aboriginal population were documented in detail by the expedition's scientists, and where he encountered Matthew Flinders in Encounter Bay in April 1802 — a meeting that has become one of the most discussed moments in Australian exploration history.

