My father left Austria in 1956 determined to get as far away from Europe as possible, which happened to be New Zealand. Unlike most of the other Austrians who soon moved on to Australia, he stayed and married a local girl.

Wanting his children to assimilate he refrained from speaking German, but still dressed us in traditional clothes. I was born only 15 years after the end of WW2 when memories were still raw, very raw, and seeing a little boy running around in lederhosen and making gun noises must have alarmed the good people of Dunedin, many of whom would have relatively recently been fighting my relatives.

Eventually, I visited my Austrian family and saw something of Austria, and started to take an interest in its history, as I was aware that what was taught in schools and contained in history books written by academics from Oxford and Cambridge was very different to the history that Austrians knew. These books did not do Austria justice at all, and I felt that the country had a story that had not been told in the English-speaking world but needed to be.

So, I decided to write my own history, largely bypassing academic literature and going back to the original historic documents, many of which are now available online as digital images. It seemed to me that the accounts of people who were alive to witness and record events were much more important and trustworthy than what a professor thought 200 years later.

This meant I had to learn to read and translate old German script, which is not my first language, and is why it took me several years to write this book. I wanted to avoid the usual historians trap of simply reciting dates of battles and lists of Emperors and to try to discover some of the reason behind events.

With regard to WW2, which is still a very touchy subject 80 years later, I have tried to be as open and honest about Austria’s role as possible. I have also included the odd snippet about my family’s involvement where this seemed appropriate.

Due to recent events in Ukraine with some complications for Austria I have updated this book to a third edition. One of my occupations is geologist and so I couldn’t help writing something about Austria’s geological history.

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