At any given moment in our history Australia has been in the middle of a mining boom. This timely book is a history of the iconic Australian towns that arose with these booms over a century: Broken Hill, Mount Isa, Queenstown, Mount Morgan, Port Pirie and Kambalda. Mining Towns shows the rich cultural and historical legacy these towns helped create as townspeople - those working below the ground and those above - sought to make their lives in them. The current 'fly-in-fly-out' mining culture means we may not see the likes of them again, which, as this book shows, will be a great loss.

Newcastle's most notorious riot lives on in the lyrics of Cold Chisel's 1980 song Star Hotel, grainy YouTube videos and Novocastrian mythology. To understand the whole story of the Star Hotel riot, it should be seen alongside other moments of resistance. Radical Newcastle brings together short essays from academics, local historians, journalists and radicals to document the region's radical past.