Download or read book Mailman of the Birdsville Track written by Kristin Weidenbach and published by Hachette Australia. This book was released on 2014-12-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 regularly making running repairs to his truck to unloading and reloading tons of stores so that he could ferry his cargo across flooded creeks. Come sandhills, hell or high water, Tom Kruse kept faith with the locals up and down the Track. Tom was a real Australian hero - and no matter what happened, the mail always got through. 'Told with honesty and vigour' - Sydney Morning Herald 'A tribute to a man who earned the love of a whole generation of Australians and shows us that the pioneer characteristics of guts and good-natured stoicism are still beautiful' - The Age 'Full of characters' - Daily Telegraph

Download or read book Tom the Outback Mailman written by Kristin Weidenbach and published by Lothian Children's Books. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Big Tom Kruse was a real Australian hero. He'd pile his truck high with bags of mail, and furniture, and passengers, and would drive back and forth, across the outback, come rain or shine.

Download or read book Birdsville written by Evan Mchugh and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a town with seventy residents (on a good day), Birdsville is remarkably well known - the Birdsville Track, the rodeo, the pub, the infamous races. With its ruggedness, inaccessibility and larrikin charm, this small town on the edge of the Simpson Desert has become a symbol of the great Australian outback. What is it about Birdsville that has...

Download or read book The Man from Coolibah written by Milton Jones and published by Hachette Australia. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Mailman of the Birdsville Track, The Man from Coolibah details the life of outback cattle property owner, helicopter muster operator and knockabout bloke Milton Jones. The youngest in a family of five, Milton Jones grew up on large properties in the outback. His father was a farm manager and so his early life was a world away from that of city kids. Milton left school in Queensland in his mid teens and moved back to the Northern Territory. Mustering was in his blood and so his first job was as a bullcatcher. Milton Jones is a man of his environment; tough and hardworking with a firm opinion on most things that he isn?t afraid to share. The story of how he bought Coolibah Station in 1988 in cash and the way he has built up his country empire is just one element of this book. For him, wrangling crocs, mustering cattle, fighting bush fires and riding rodeo are the norm. Over 500 km away from nearest city, Darwin, his life is lived on horseback, his days ruled by the sunlight. With the help of a seasonal workforce, plus his 42 choppers and a dozen or so horses, his business musters cattle from across the territory. The Man from Coolibah shows us what it is like to live in the never never and brings the Outback to life. For the men and women who live in Milton?s world, things are changing but the harshness and beauty of the outback stays the same.

Download or read book Great Australian Outback Trucking Stories written by Bill Marsh and published by HarperCollins Australia. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Marsh knows how to spin a yarn' - Gold Coast Bulletin Whether they're carting produce, stock, fuel, or even (unbeknown to them) dead bodies, there's one thing that can be said about outback truckies - they're a colourful bunch. Meet the outback truckies who brave interminable distances, searing heat, raging floodwaters and foot-deep bulldust to transport goods all across this vast land, serving as lifelines not just to those in the bush but those in cities as well. From the truckie who found a creative means of transporting penguins, to the one who refused to 'abandon ship' as his truck sank into a river, these real-life accounts show the lengths to which these enterprising and resourceful men and women will go to ensure their load arrives safely at their destination. Bill 'Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer and performer of stories, songs and plays. He spent most of his youth in rural south-western NSW and now lives in Adelaide. Swampy is one of ABC Books' bestselling authors of Australian stories; this is his nineteenth book.

Download or read book Roads Tourism and Cultural History written by Rosemary Kerr and published by Channel View Publications. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roads and road tourism loom large in the Australian imagination as distance and mobility have shaped the nation’s history and culture, but roads are more than simply transport routes; they embody multiple layers of history, mythology and symbolism. Drawing on Australian travel writing, diaries and manuscripts, tourism literature, fiction, poetry and feature films, this book explores how Australians have experienced and imagined roads and road touring beyond urban settings: from Aboriginal ‘songlines’ to modern-day road trips. It also tells the stories of iconic roads, including the Birdsville Track, Stuart Highway and Great Ocean Road, and suggests alternative approaches to heritage and tourism interpretation of these important routes. The ongoing impact of the colonial past on Indigenous peoples and contemporary Australian society and culture – including representations of the road and road travel – is explored throughout the book. The volume offers a new way of thinking about roads and road tourism as important strands in a nation’s cultural fabric.

Download or read book Boom and Bust written by Libby Robin and published by CSIRO PUBLISHING. This book was released on 2009-03-06 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Boom and Bust, the authors draw on the natural history of Australia's charismatic birds to explore the relations between fauna, people and environment in a continent where variability is 'normal' and rainfall patterns not always seasonal. They consider changing ideas about deserts and how these have helped us understand birds and their behaviour in this driest of continents. The book describes the responses of animals and plants to environmental variability and stress. It is also a cultural concept, when it is used to capture the patterns of change wrought by humans in Australia, where landscapes began to become cultural about 55,000 years ago as ecosystems responded to Aboriginal management. In 1788, the British settlement brought, almost simultaneously, both agricultural and industrial revolutions to a land previously managed by fire for hunting. How have birds responded to this second dramatic invasion? Boom and Bust is also a tool for understanding global change. How can Australians in the 21st century better understand how to continue to live in this land as its conditions are still dynamically unfolding in response to the major anthropogenic changes to the whole Earth system? This interdisciplinary collection is written in a straightforward and accessible style. Many of the writers are practising field specialists, and have woven their personal field work into the stories they tell about the birds.

Download or read book King of the Outback written by Kristin Weidenbach and published by . This book was released on 2017-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sidney Kidman runs away from home at thirteen and travels to the outback on a one-eyed horse. He finds stray cows in the scrub, swims across rivers by hanging on to a bullock's tail and dreams of having the biggest herd of cattle in Australia.Many years later, when the workers on Sid's cattle station organise a giant rodeo for Sid's birthday party the cattle from the bush take fright in the city. People panic and horses bolt. Can the Kidman stockmen save the day?King of the Outback tells the rags to riches story of one of Australia's greatest pastoral pioneers.

Download or read book The Battle of One Tree Hill written by Ray Kerkhove and published by Boolarong Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1840, Brisbane was the furthest outpost of settled Australia. On all sides, it was embedded in a richly Indigenous world. Over the next few years, mostly from across New South Wales northern plains, a large push of pastoralists poured into the Darling Downs, Lockyer and much of southern Queensland, establishing huge sheep stations. The violence that erupted welded many of the tribal groups into an alliance that, by 1842, was working to halt the advance. The Battle of One Tree Hill tells the story of one of the most audacious stands against this migration. It concerns actions engineered by a father and son, Moppy and Multuggerah. In 1843, this culminated in an ingenious ambush and one of the first solid defeats of white settlement in Queensland. The battle at Mount Table Top, 128 kilometres west of Brisbane, astounded many at the time. The response was most likely the largest action of the frontier wars: the assembly of some 100 or more officers, soldiers, police and armed settlers – much of the region’s white settlement – drawn from hundreds of square kilometres. This force sought to drive out the warriors, but despite their best efforts, resistance not only persisted, but managed a few more victories. A fort had to be established to protect travellers, and brutal skirmishes, massacres, raids and robberies trickled on for decades. The Battle of One Tree Hill introduces us to many of the flamboyant characters, curious reversals of fortune and neglected incidents that together helped establish early Queensland. This narrative work combines decades of archival research, analysis, reconstruction and interviews conducted by historians Ray Kerkhove and Frank Uhr.

Download or read book Quicksilver written by Nicolas Rothwell and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction Quicksilver begins on a quiet day in contemplation of a lizard deep in the heart of the outback but quickly moves to the Russia of Tolstoy and Gorky, and on to other lands and times, bringing into play universal questions about the essential nature of the human condition. Rothwell’s chief subject is always the inland: the mystic Kurangara cult that flourished in the Kimberley; the story of the Western Desert artists, their works and their eventual fate; the tracks across the wilderness of Colonel Warburton and George Grey; the bush dreams and intuitions of D. H. Lawrence and the landscape word-portraits by the great biographer of nature Eric Rolls. In Quicksilver Rothwell masterfully takes us in search of the sacred through place and time, in an enchanting reverie of calm wondering. Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Quicksilver, Belomor, Heaven & Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior. He was a senior writer for the Australian. ‘Fluent and expressive prose, which always seems to be moving towards the rhapsodic while stopping short of actual indulgence.’ Age ‘Nicolas Rothwell is a weird and wonderful writer. In this new book, Quicksilver, he takes the form of nonfiction and turns it into an extraordinary drama of spiritual quests and cultural hauntings.’ Australian ‘Nicolas Rothwell’s Quicksilver also straddles the line between memoir and reportage. He is a worldly yet desert-bound writer, one who can look at a lizard baking on a rock and think of Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy.’ Australian ‘It is impossible to understand Australia without venturing into the interior and far reaches of the continent. Divining the sacred, Rothwell moves effortlessly from Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia to the Pilbara.’ Mark McKenna, Best Books of 2016, Australian Book Review ‘The Czech-Australian journalist Nicolas Rothwell could be described in many ways, but perhaps most economical is as wanderer and wonderer: across territories, eras, peoples and cultural boundaries. This collection of essays takes us to the Australian interior, to the High Tatra in Slovakia, to the ruptures and upheavals of central Europe in the 1980s, and to the prison camps of the Soviet Union: Gorky, Tolstoy, Tarkovsky, Darwin, Lawrence are some of our travelling companions. Its title piece is an astonishingly suggestive and beautiful linking of the life and times of Jewish mystic and cult leader Jacob Frank to the latter-day exploration—or exploitation—by outsiders of the Aboriginal artists of the Western Desert.’ Guardian ‘Rothwell’s prose is lucid and absorbing. His enterprise is abundantly subjective; this is its purpose and its strength...Rothwell draws his reader into a shadowy and beautiful realm of thought.’ Times Literary Supplement ‘It [Belomor] is a masterpiece. And the book that followed it this year—six uncategorisable essays welded together by the author’s inimitable prose style and enduring fascination with Australia’s top end and desert country—is equally deserving of that overused term.’ Saturday Paper, Best Books of 2017

Download or read book The Fierce Country written by Stephen Orr and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fierce Country holds no malice, but neither pity. It just sits, and bakes, and waits. We do the rest. We provoke it when we mine above its aquifers. Weaken it, and ourselves, when we leave mountains of asbestos to blow away in the wind. Misunderstand it when we see it as nothing more than a resource. Resent it when it takes our children. The open spaces and isolated places outside Australia's cities have unsettled us from first European settlement to today - often with very good reason. In this nail-biting book combining the notorious and little-known, acclaimed author Stephen Orr has collected true stories that have shaped and continue to haunt the Australian psyche: mysteries, disappearances, mistreatment and murder. Fatal conflicts between an Aboriginal tracker and the police employers hunting his community. An itinerant conman picking up tips for the perfect murder from a famous novelist around a campfire on the Rabbit-Proof Fence. And that fateful day when Peter Falconio pulled over beside a desert highway. Together these tales chart an undercurrent of shifting cultural tensions as Australians find, lose and question who we are.

Download or read book In the Vernacular written by and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting important works from one of Australia's leading scholars of media, culture, and policy, this study brings sharper focus upon both historical and industrial contexts. Engaging with the global debate on multiethnic societies by focusing on creativity at the margins, this survey argues that industrial and social trends in media, communications, and culture are outstripping the academic frameworks that were erected to deal with them.

Download or read book Flynn of the Inland written by Ion Idriess and published by ETT Imprint. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary story of a classic Australian Pioneer - told by Australia's 'Boswell of the Bush', Ion L. Idriess. Almost single-handedly John Flynn of the Australian Inland Mission brought to the outback the Flying Doctor Service and the Bush Hospitals. His magnificent vision, formed as he travelled on the back of a camel across the vast space of Australia's outback, took a lifetime of courageous commitment to bring to reality. 'It is impossible to read this book and remain untouched by the greatness of John Flynn's inspiration.' - Morning Post, London Ion L. Idriess celebrated Australia's exuberant history in over 50 books, written in an easy conversational style that has made him lastingly popular. In stories such as 'Flynn of the Inland', 'Back O' Cairns' and 'Lasseter's Last Ride', Idriess brings to life the wild beauty of the outback and the many colourful characters who people it.

Download or read book Beyond the Black Stump written by Alan Mayne and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have had little to say about the lands that stretch 'beyond the black stump'. These essays from around the country build inland Australia into our national history, crisscrossing both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors are Lorina Barker, Amanda Barry, Badger Bates, Peter Bishop, Nici Cumpston, Jean Duruz, Charles Fahey, Lionel Frost, Heather Goodall, Jenny Gregory, Patricia Grimshaw, Rodney Harrison, Rick Hosking, Darrell Lewis, Alan Mayne, Chrissiejoy Marshall, Margaret Somerville and Richard Waterhouse.

Download or read book Rippling Red written by Brigid George and published by Potoroo Press. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Agatha Christie style murder mystery set in Australia. Jerry Lewis killed by killer croc! A gruesome way to die. The newspaper article claimed Jerry had been snatched from his boat by a crocodile. But is that what really happened? Behind the laid-back facade of Darwin where an albino crocodile roams the waterways, evil ripples in the hearts of humans. The families left behind in the wake of these tragedies pin their hopes on amateur sleuth Dusty Kent who must somehow expose a fiendish killer. The story unfolds against a backdrop of spectacular sunsets as layers are stripped away to reveal twists, surprises, shocking truths and finally, the dark secrets that lie beneath still waters. Rippling Red is the third book in the Dusty Kent Murder Mystery series.

Download or read book The Regent written by Michael T. Gillies and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful documentary of one of the finest motion picture cinemas to be built in Australia. High quality coffee table publication for browsing, detailed reading or just remembering the glory days of a bygone era. Memories are made of this, from times when a theatre visit was more than just to a performance, it was a total experience.

Download or read book The Brisbane River written by David Gibson and published by Boolarong Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever been on the CityCat and wondered what heritage lies beneath the buildings that you are looking at along the river? This book explores the Brisbane River Heritage Trail one section going upstream and the other one downstream. Let the book be your guide. The Brisbane River is the longest river in South East Queensland and flows through the city of Brisbane before emptying in Moreton Bay. From its source around Mt Stanley, 344 kilometres to Moreton Bay, the Brisbane River with its many twists and turns presents the interested travelling public with a series of reaches with names that are at once geographic, historic and of social importance.