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The Sydney Opera House is a breathtaking building, recognised around the world as a symbol of modern Australia. Along with the Taj Mahal and other World Heritage sites, it is celebrated for its architectural grandeur and the daring and innovation of its design. It showcases the incomparable talents involved in its conception, construction and performance history. But this stunning house on Bennelong Point also holds many secrets and scandals. In his gripping biography, Peter FitzSimons marvels at how this magnificent building came to be.

Sir Hubert Wilkins is one of the most remarkable Australians who ever lived. The son of pioneer pastoralists in South Australia, Hubert studied engineering before moving on to photography, then sailing for England and a job producing films with the Gaumont Film Co. Brave and bold, he became a polar expeditioner, a brilliant war photographer, a spy in the Soviet Union, a pioneering aviator-navigator, a death-defying submariner - all while being an explorer and chronicler of the planet and its life forms that would do Vasco da Gama and Sir David Attenborough proud.

Sport was never meant to be complicated. No gibberish, no statistics, no talk of green-zones, black-zones, channels and percentage plays, no cheating, no grubbiness and certainly no ball-tampering.Peter FitzSimons celebrates the good, the generous and the kind in Australian sport, the genuine characters, the national treasures and the special moments when the losers were the true champions and the game, whichever game, was done proud. 

All those great and not so great sporting moments that have made us chuckle, roll and roar with laughter, told in Peter FitzSimons' inimitable style. Putting his unique spin on our sporting life, Peter FitzSimons celebrates the tall tales and true, the outrageous yarns and the knockabout humour from the footy fields, cricket grounds, dressing rooms, bars and commentary boxes of Australia.

Known to millions of Australians simply as "Smithy", Sir Charles Kingsford Smith was one of Australia's true twentieth-century legends. In an era in which aviators were superstars, Smithy was among the greatest and, throughout his amazing career his fame in Australia was matched only by that of Don Bradman.

Great stories from around Australia to lift your heart, make you laugh and puff out your chest. In his very popular Saturday column, the 'Fitzy Files', Peter FitzSimons usually writes about famous sports men and women. But from time to time, he throws in stories taken from grassroots sport and daily life.

The story of one man who had the guts to lose his gut. This is an audiobook that will finally help an ordinary bloke lose weight. Ever struggled with your weight? Or did you stop struggling years ago and let the pies win? Peter FitzSimons has been there and eaten that. In The Great Aussie Bloke Slim-Down, he will lead you through the fads that failed him, the diets that died fast and left him furious, and the ways his waistline kept the belt industry in business.

In the early days of April 1941, the 14,000 Australian forces garrisoned in the Libyan town of Tobruk were told to expect reinforcements and supplies within eight weeks. Eight months later these heroic, gallant, determined "Rats of Tobruk" were rescued by the British Navy having held the fort against the might of Rommel's never-before-defeated Afrika Corps.

In 1854, Victorian miners fought a deadly battle under the flag of the Southern Cross at the Eureka Stockade. Though brief and doomed to fail, the battle is legend in both our history and in the Australian mind. Henry Lawson wrote poems about it, its symbolic flag is still raised, and even the nineteenth-century visitor Mark Twain called it: "a strike for liberty". Was this rebellion a fledgling nation’s first attempt to assert its independence under colonial rule? Or was it merely rabble-rousing by unruly miners determined not to pay their taxes?

In the early 1930s, Nancy Wake was a young woman enjoying a bohemian life in Paris. By the end of the Second World War, she was the Gestapo's most wanted person. As a naive, young journalist, Nancy Wake witnessed a horrific scene of Nazi violence in a Viennese street. From that moment, she declared that she would do everything in her power to rid Europe of the Nazis. What began as a courier job here and there became a highly successful escape network for Allied soldiers.

Australia's best-selling nonfiction author of all time. Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia's greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz.

For Australians, Kokoda is the iconic battle of World War II, yet few people know just what happened and just what our troops achieved. Now, best-selling author Peter FitzSimons tells the Kokoda story in a gripping, moving story for all Australians.

The Battle of Le Hamel on 4 July 1918 was an Allied triumph and strategically very important in the closing stages of WWI. A largely Australian force, commanded by the brilliant Sir John Monash, fought what has been described as the first modern battle - where infantry, tanks, artillery and planes operated together as a coordinated force. Monash planned every detail meticulously, with nothing left to chance. Peter FitzSimons brings this Allied triumph to life and tells this magnificent story as it should be told.

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland. The magnificent ship is already boiling over with a mutinous plot that is just about to break into the open when, just off the coast of Western Australia, it strikes an unseen reef in the middle of the night. While Commandeur Francisco Pelsaert decides to take the longboat across 2,000 miles of open sea for help, his second-in-command Jeronimus Cornelisz takes over....

The problem was that Les Darcy didn't want to march at the fore of such a procession, nor to such a destination. He wanted to continue what he had been doing to extraordinary acclaim before the war began - taking on the best boxers the world could throw at him, and lifting his entire family out of poverty as he did so. Torn between the duty he felt he owed his family, and the duty many felt he owed his country, Les made his choice ... and faced the consequences.

It's early 1918, and after four brutal years the fate of the Great War hangs in the balance. On the one hand, the fact that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia - immediately suing for peace with Germany - means that no fewer than one million of the Kaiser's soldiers can now be transferred from there to the Western Front. On the other, now that America has entered the war, it means that two million American soldiers are also on their way, to tip the scales of war in favor of the Allies.

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

Most Australians have heard of the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 and of Harry 'Breaker' Morant, a figure who rivals Ned Kelly as an archetypal Australian folk hero. Born in England and emigrating to Queensland in 1883 in his early 20s, Morant was a charming but reckless man who established a reputation as a rider, polo player and writer. He submitted ballads to The Bulletin that were published under the name 'The Breaker' and counted Banjo Paterson as a friend. 

The name Captain James Cook is one of the most recognisable in Australian history - an almost mythic figure who is often discussed, celebrated, reviled and debated. But who was the real James Cook? This Yorkshire farm boy would go on to become the foremost mariner, scientist, navigator and cartographer of his era, and to personally map a third of the globe. His great voyages of discovery were incredible feats of seamanship and navigation.

On 31st October 1917, as the day's light faded, the Australian Light Horse charged against their enemy. Eight hundred men and horses galloped four miles across open country, towards the artillery, rifles and machine guns of the Turks occupying the seemingly unassailable town of Beersheba. What happened in the next hour changed the course of history. This brave battle and the extraordinary adventures that led to it are brought vividly to life by Australia's greatest storyteller, Peter FitzSimons.