A bind up of Hugh Lunn's two bestselling memoirs, Over the Top With Jim and Head Over Heels. One of the classic childhood memoirs complete with vividly painted characters, teachers, siblings, parents, the people who came to the Lunn family's bun shop and most of all the suspicious Russian kid with the funny name, Dmitri Egeroff (Jim), Hugh Lunn's Over the top With Jim is a laugh out loud account of a bygone Australian era. Successive generations have fallen for Hugh and Jim and their mates, as the strong sales of the book can attest. Now in a bind up with the follow up, Head Over Heels, which ... View More...
Saigon,1967. Fresh-faced 25-year-old Hugh Lunn arrives in Vietnam at the height of the war to cover it for Reuters and quickly meets a fascinating cast of characters: journalists, Vietnamese, military and best of all, Dinh, the Vietnamese reporter and guide who spoke his own brand of English (Dinglish) and whose wisdom and humour become inextricably bound up with the young reporter's view of the war. Before long the author experiences the full horror and tragedy of war, and finds himself questioning not only the US/Australian role in Vietnam, but his own role in a war where images and words co... View More...
'the best Kelly biography by a country mile' The Australian A bestseller since it was first published, NED KELLY: A SHORT LIFE is acknowledged as being the definitive biography. Ian Jones combines years of research into all the records of the era and exhaustive interviews with living descendants of those involved, to present a vivid and gripping account of one of Australia's most iconic figures. About the Author: Ian Jones is Australia's foremost Ned Kelly historian. A former TV and film producer, he was a producer of the film 'The Lighthorsemen' (he also wrote the script) and also created th... View More...
Nemarluk, one of the most feared Aboriginal renegades in the north of Australia, had vowed to rid his land of all intruders. This is the story of the last three years of his life, and his extraordinary battle with the tracker, Bul-Bul, brought in by the Northern Territory police in a final desperate attempt to put an end to Nemarluk's fight. Ion L. Idriess had already brought Lasseter and Flynn to the public's attention with his action-packed stories. He had first-hand knowledge of the courage of Nemarluk and wanted to immortalise the man he called the King of the Wilds. View More...
In times past there was an Aboriginal man called Cumbo Gunnerah His people called him The Red Kangaroo. He was a clever chief and a mighty fighter (this man from Gunnedah) Later, the white people of this place called him The Red Chief. It would be hard to find a more satisfying hero than the young warrior Red Kangaroo, who by his mental and physical prowess became a chief of his tribe - the revered and powerful Red Chief of the Gunnedah district in northern New South Wales. His story is a first-rate tale of adventure but it is something more - a true story handed down from generation to genera... View More...
John Flynn is one of Australia's greatest folk heroes. His achievements are stuff of legend - no other Australian has had more monuments dedicated to him than John Flynn. Flynn established a network of cottage hospitals, flying doctors, patrol padres, welfare centres and radio transmitters to create a Mantle of Safety that would allow the Outback to be habitable for men, women and children. Critique: Ivan Rudolph brings out Flynn the man who, like no other,revolutionised the lives of people in the Never Never country of Australia. Fred McKay View More...
The rise and fall of the brothers Gibb is perhaps the greatest saga in Australian, even world, music history. As ubiquitous as the falsetto harmonies, flares and multi-platinum record sales were the tragedies: the highs, the lows, the highs again. And then the brothers fell, one by one. Not long before his death, Robin made it clear that he believed the Gibbs had been forced to pay the highest possible cost for their success. 'All the tragedies my family has suffered . . . is a kind of karmic price we are paying for all the fame and fortune we've had.' This is the story of all four brothers' i... View More...
The story of Harry Readford, born in 1841 on the frontier of the infant colony of New South Wales, who became a proficient bushman, stockman, drover, explorer, pioneer and above all, a renowned cattle duffer, has passed into Australian folklore. The pivotal event in the story was the famous cattle theft in 1870, of 1200 head from the Longreach area of Central Queensland, and droving them nearly 1600 kilometres through virtually unexplored desert country deep into South Australia. This feat, and the subsequent "infamous" trial at the Roma courthouse in 1873, was portrayed in Rolf Boldrewood's... View More...
For the crime of robbing a wealthy woman of a silk bonnet and a few guineas, an illiterate Cornish woman faces the hangman's noose. Her death sentence is commuted; instead she finds herself transported in chains on the First Fleet to Botany Bay, New South Wales to serve seven years penal servitude. So begins the extraordinary but true story of legendary Mary Bryant, the only female convict to escape from Botany Bay and whose open-boat escape voyage with her husband, two children and seven other convicts, must rank along with Captain Bligh's as one of the most amazing and courageous in history.... View More...
The truly classic Australian story of Tom Kruse - legendary mailman of the Birdsville Track. For the people who lived in the desert between Marree and Birdsville, contact with the outside world was hard and sporadic - but one man was their lifeline: Tom Kruse. For more than twenty years he was the connection with the outside world for the families, station workers and others who lived along the Birdsville Track. Tom delivered everything from the mail and newspapers to fuel and food - whole communities waited in anticipation for him to drop off their supplies. But it was a hard life, from re... View More...
Sometimes myths and legends can appear in the most unexpected places. The Brisbane Central Business District is one such unlikely setting. It is here that the young George Kiprios found accidental and enduring fame in his public persona of Rock 'N' Roll George. Many people who have grown up, or lived, in Brisbane have a story to tell about George. For more than 50 years, he was constant presence in a city that was evolving rapidly from sleepy country capital to modern metropolis. George touched the lives of Brisbane residents from all walks of life and our collective memories of him are nosta... View More...
The story of Ned Kelly is also the untold story of Michael Kennedy, the police sergeant slain and robbed by the outlaw 140 years ago. Both Kennedy and Kelly were Irish immigrants struggling to make their way in the new colonies of Australia - Kennedy was committed to defending the law, while Kelly was hell-bent on breaking it. When their paths crossed one fateful day at Stringybark Creek, it triggered the end for one and the beginning of an incredible myth about the other. Author Leo Kennedy is the great grandson of Sergeant Michael Kennedy. He was raised in the shadow of his great grandfather... View More...
It was a shocking crime that made headlines around Australia. An innocent young woman, violently attacked in her family home by a total stranger and left to die. Beaten repeatedly and soaked with petrol as her home burned, Lauren Huxley's life was hanging by a thread. Lauren's battle to survive caused an outpouring of public love and support. For her father, Patrick, mother Christine and sister Simone it was like being plunged into hell. Doctors gave Lauren only a five percent chance of survival. Her injuries were among the worst they had ever seen, so horrific that she was barely recognisable... View More...
When Silvester Diggles arrived in 1855 there was little artistic or scientific talent in the small frontier town of Brisbane. By the time of his death in 1880, his paramount legacy was a large book on Australian birds, profusely illustrated with hand-coloured lithographs. Acting as his own publisher from 1865 onwards, Diggles produced the first substantial zoological work to commence publication in Australia. The compilation and content of this rare work of art and natural history is examined here in the light of Diggles' life and times, as well as his ornithological predecessors and contempor... View More...
Growing up in North Queensland in the early 1900's. Australian children of this new millennium takes for granted a lofestyle that includes videos, T.V. Soapies, DVD's, computer games. But the children of a hundred years ago, the Federation era, had a different set of expectations. They walked barefoot through the bindies to school. Their homes were barkhuts with ant-beds for floors. they harnessed their billy-goat carts to fetch wood and water. This earlier generation of North Queenslanders lived with floods and droughts. They knew grinding poverty and they knew hard work, but they were proud ... View More...
Charlie and Pauline Rayment wouldn't live anywhere but the Outback. Charlie brought Pauline as a bride to 'Kurran', in the ranges of the Diamantina catchment. Pauline faced the wilderness while Charlie carved a property from the harsh environment. Their story typifies this new collection by Marion Houldsworth. Readers share the Outback experience at one remove; wake face-to-face with a rock-python, are sucked down in a whirlpool, trapped inside a water-tank, help a neighbour bury a dead child. They swim cattle across the flooded Burdekin, and, like Clancy of old, tail 'twelve-fifty fats' down ... View More...
Maybe It'll Rain Tomorrow is the perfect title for Marion Houldsworth's Volume Two of From the Gulf to God Knows Where. Rain is a lifeblood and a ubiquitous topic of conversation in the bush. It can mean the difference between success and failure; life and death. 'Maybe it'll rain tomorrow' is a catch phrase used by country people and expresses the optimism and courage they show in the face of often almost overwhelming adversity. Critique: This second volume of From the Gulf to God Knows Where is a tribute to some wonderful people. It is also a tribute to Marion Houldsworth's work. Readers... View More...
This is the inspiring story of a northern cattleman who built up the Urapunga cattle station from nothing. From the 1950s to the 1990s, he lived rough and worked hard. He worked closely with the tribal Aborigines, made Urapunga a dry station, coped with the many crocodiles in the Roper River, fought against cattle diseases, hunted buffalo, built himself a homestead and survived. Ray Fryer says of himself, "I always admired those old-time pioneers, the Duracks and the Buchanans. I wanted to do something like them; something worthwhile." So, when the government resumed the Fryer property for an ... View More...
Since its genesis in 1976, Midnight Oil - fronted by the charismatic and passionate Peter Garrett until his departure from the band in late 2002 - has at various times been synonymous with beer-barn angst, green political activism, indigenous advocacy and musical nonconformism. At the same time this hugely popular band has been a mainstay of commercial radio and an icon of contemporary Australian culture. Despite the band's high profile, its members are notoriously private people who have never before revealed details of the inner workings of Midnight Oil. In Beds Are Burning, Mark Dodshon tel... View More...
Thirty Years of Anger is an uncompromising story of one man's journey through the Australian underground hardcore punk and extreme metal scenes. Beginning in 80's Brisbane in the oppressive police state of Joh Bjelke Petersen where anyone who looks slightly different is hassled to no end and at times detained without reason by the cops. The Treasury Hotel being the focal point of activity where bands played every Friday and Saturday night and battle lines were drawn between Nazi skinheads and the notorious Sick Boys.'Marky Hardcore' as he came to be known fronts his own band Anger In Motion es... View More...
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