Outback Governesses by Paula Heelan

$9.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

Outback Governesses is collection of eye-opening stories about fourteen governesses who drop in, Mary Poppins-like, to educate children in Australia's remotest rural areas and in return receive a bush education of their own... The governesses are often young women from urban backgrounds, and they become part of the family they work for as well as the local community, and share the trials and tribulations of station life. They fall in and out of love, learn to ride horses and motorbikes, explore spectacular parts of Australia, help with station work, cook and eat with the family, attend rodeos, campdrafts, country races, and the local shows, and other bush events. There are medical emergencies, seasonal floods, bushfire and drought that all affect station life and the school routine. And then there are the unwelcome visitors to liven things up - snakes, bats, mosquitoes, centipedes, flies, feral pigs, red back spiders and the massive insect explosions following rain. There is always something happening and you can never be sure what the day will bring. Living and working in isolated areas can mean battling poor access to technology, teaching children who speak English as a second language and learning how to engage and motivate children who might be the only student in the classroom. Days can swing from triumphant, hilarious and joyful, to downright difficult - but it's clear from the tales in this collection, the rewards of teaching outback far outweigh the disadvantages - there is nothing like a bush education. ...Show more

GEOLOGY & LANDFORMS OF THE SOUTH-WEST by COPP, I.A.

$6.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

Pioneer Daughter - The Diary of Frances Louisa (Fanny) Brockman (née Bussell) by Gillian Lilleyman (Editor)

$69.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

The diary of Frances Louisa (Fanny) Brockman (née Bussell) is inthe J S Battye Library of West Australian History, where a copyis available to researchers on microfilm. The one volume ledgerwas donated to the library from the estate of Bussell descendantAthole Fergusson Stewart. A journalist, Ste wart drew upon hisgreat-aunt's record for articles about his family in the 1940s,and he described Fanny's diary then as 'a skeleton history of theMargaret awaiting someone to put flesh upon its bones'.Begun in 1872, Fanny's diary spans more than three decades.Her entries touch on the establishment of the South West timberindustry, the development of the pearling and cattle industriesof the North West, the discovery of gold, the rise in caves tourismand political change that led to Federation. With the researchfacilities now available, it is possible to fill in some of the missingdetail regarding these and other events, and to profile manyof the characters to whom Fanny referred. The advances intechnology that enable this have distanced our present age evenfurther from Fanny's than when Athole Stewart was writing 70years ago, making her entries on purely domestic and farmingmatters valuable social history.Fanny's diary is more than a social history. It is a story of sisterlylove and loyalty, and resilience in the face of adversity from acompassionate and indefatigable woman. It is time it came out ofthe archives and onto our bookshelves. ...Show more

Things We Love - A Collection of Recipes and Stories from the Hancock and Kidman Pastoral Properties by Wilkinson Publishing Staff (Editor)

$59.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

Every country can be defined by the food they eat, and how they prepare and cook this food. The same is true for different states within many countries, or even down to particular regions. The extraordinary range of differing food preferences of the population of each country, state or region has an unc anny knack of capturing the essence of each area's personality, whether stodgy, optimistic, mean, generous, pleased with themselves, bold, passionate, laconic, pride in what they do, risk-takers, disciplined, over-bearing, particular, unimaginative, creative, challenging; and the list goes on.This book richly captures the unique and powerful personality of those wonderful people who make up Australia's cattle station region; that vast, rugged and unforgiving yet mystical wilderness that is this cattle station country.These cattle station recipes and stories bring alive the optimistic, resilient, sharing, enterprising, self-confident, risk-taking, creative, laconic and proud free spirits that characterise our cattle station communities. ...Show more

Still in the Bush by Len Beadell

$22.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

Laden with trig poles, theodolites - and porridge - Beadell and his team built roads, laid out town sites and undertook an enormous survey programme in order to prepare a test launching area in one of the most isolated parts of the world. The problems ranged from taking astrofixes in a cloudy sky and be coming surrounded by a sea of red mud, to patching a bald spot on a pet joey. All were solved by using those two most necessary ingredients of life in the bush - ingenuity and imagination. Len Beadell's descriptions of the countryside, the adventures the team experienced, and the Australian bush characters they encountered are by turns illuminating and hilarious. His high-spirited account of the work that had to be done 'before they called it Woomera' makes vivid and entertaining reading. ...Show more

Blast the Bush by Len Beadell

$22.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

Blast The Bush CD - Duration 5 hours 45 minutes - 5 CDs. Directed and edited by Phil Sexton. Blast The Bush is the second of Len Beadell's best selling series of books where the story of the frantic and harried efforts of the people who worked on the British Atomic Testing Project, code named "X 200", i s told.   ...Show more

Beating about the Bush by Len Beadell

$22.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

Len Beadell's classic account of the building of the famous Gunbarrel Highway across Central Australia in which he recounts in his own colourful style the outstanding events of its construction.  

Yarns from the Aussie Outback by Graham Rogers

$25.00 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

Outback Highways by Len Beadell

$29.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

The Gunbarrel Highway story, and many more ..Len Beadell was often called the last of the true Australian explorers. As a surveyor and road builder he worked all over the outback - from Arnhem Land to the Gibson Desert. Drawn from his best selling books, these stories sparkle with humour and paint a fas cinating picture of the hard work, the bush characters and the rollicking adventures that were all part of Len Beadell's rich experience.   ...Show more

The Way it Was: A History of the Early Days of the Margaret River Wine Industry by Peter Forrestal & Ray Jordan

$39.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

Australians: Flappers to Vietnam #3 by Tom Keneally; Clare Drysdale (Editor)

$49.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA | Series: Australians

The outstanding final volume of acclaimed author Thomas Keneally's major new three-volume history takes up the story of Australia at the end of the Great War and explores its development as a nation during the tumultuous 20th century Australia emerged from World War I into a decade of profound change, characterized by a revolution in behavior among the young; by the first great age of consumerism; by the new and increasingly sophisticated impact of the movies; by secret right wing armies and the emergence of the Communist Party; and by two less remembered and very interesting PMs, the handsome, somber Stanley Melbourne Bruce of the Melbourne Establishment, and Jim Scullin, unpretentious Labor man of humbler Irish parentage. As in the two previous volumes, Keneally brings history to vivid and pulsating life as he traces the lives and the deeds of Australians known and unknown. As another war grew closer he follows the famous and the infamous through the Great Crash and the rise of Fascism, and explains how Australia was inexorably drawn into a war which led her forces into combat throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. At home an atmosphere of fear grew with the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin, the Japanese advance and then the American Alliance and the arrival of General MacArthur. Peace brought its own problems with the Depression that left one third of Australians unemployed. Keneally believes too that the 1950s are misunderstood—depicted by some as an age of full employment, by others as the age of suburban spread and boredom under the serene prime ministership of Robert Menzies. But Menzies was complicated and so were the 1950s. The result of masterly writing and exhaustive research is a volume which brings Australia's more recent history to vibrant life. ...Show more

Invisible Country: Southwest Australia: Understanding a Landscape by Bill Bunbury

$29.99 AUD

Category: AUSTRALIANA

When Europeans first settled in Australia, the land withheld many of its secrets from these new arrivals. There were broad rivers, wide plains and tall forests, all of which, to European eyes, suggested promising sites for settlement. To many of the new settlers, the First Australians were a puzzle. The y moved freely through country they knew intimately. They had useful things to say to the European newcomers - if they would listen. What few realised then was that Aboriginal people and the land they lived in were indistinguishable. Failure to read the people made it hard to read the country. Invisible Country describes the environmental change that has occurred in south-western Australia since European settlement, through four case studies of the development of local rivers, forests and coastal plains. These stories, compiled through extensive conversations broadcaster and writer Bill Bunbury has conducted with farmers, ecologists, traditional owners and others who rely on the land, are book-ended by an examination of the historical perspective in which these changes have occurred. It is a reminder that the land owns people, not the other way around, and is the beginning of a conversation about understanding and care for a land we are all lucky to live in. ...Show more