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As a grounding to become a bush poet Bob Magor spent the first ten years of his working life disrobing sheep. He then graduated to staring up the back end of a herd of dairy cows twice a day for seventeen years. This is a probable explanation for his strange outlook on life! As well as paying the bills this lifestyle also provided him with a wealth of rural experiences to draw upon for writing bush verse.
Inheriting a warped sense of humour from his father, Bob has always been a keen studier of his fellow man and delights in recounting situations that only a fellow farmer could get involved in.
since the release of his first book of verse in late 1990 Bob has found himself in demand to perform at festivals around the country and has collected an ever increasing band of devoted fans.
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Another of Rex Ellis’s books, written in good humour. Every camp while travelling in the remote Australian outback involves a campfire and this book includes stories gathered along the way.
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This engrossing book tells the rich and fascinating story of the Victoria River Downs Station in the Northern Territory, from the early white explorers who battled the vastness of the environment on their gruelling expeditions inland in search of good pastoral country, to the present day.
The Big Run captures the spirit of what was once the world’s largest cattle run and this updated edition incorporates the recent history of “The Big Run” under the management of Janet Holmes á Court’s Heytesbury Pastoral Group.
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A charming nursery rhyme book containing many Australian characters from the bush. Wonderfully written by Bindi-Bindi and illustrated by Heather Blackstock, this lovely book will keep children entertained for hours.
Hard-cover
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To write the history of the Ghan, Basil Fuller made the journey in a brake van from Port Augusta to the Alice, speaking with old-timers who remember those epic days. Fascinating glimpses of the past – tales of itinerant doctors, cameleers, and navvies – are interwoven with a first-hand account of this vital train service that has become an Australian legend.
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The Kokoda Trail is a remote jungle track in the old Australian Territory of Papua where Aussie Diggers and the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels battled desperately against Japanese invaders to save Australia in 1942. The Kokoda Trail campaign, fought out over six months and two day on a narrow front in appalling conditions, has become an honoured part of our Australian heritage. But there is much more to the Kokoda Trail than this. Historian and adventurer Stuart Hawthorne looks back 130 years over the Trail’s captivating past.
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Tom Cole hunted crocodiles and buffalo, was a horse-breaker, brumby runner and drover, owned and managed cattle stations and coffee plantation.
The Last Paradise is the sequel to Tom Cole’s bestselling autobiography Hell West and Crooked and recounts his story of thirty years in New Guinea amongst ‘crocodiles, cannibals and coffee’.
Operating as the first professional crocodile shooter in New Guinea, Tom Cole risked life and limb hunting from frail canoes in wild and sometimes unexplored country, working with everyone from cannibals to missionaries to government officials, and the larger-than-life characters still drifting around the Pacific after the war.
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Len Beadell is regarded as the ‘last true Australian explorer’ for opening up over 2.5 million square kilometres of rugged Australian outback.
This is a beautiful box-set celebrating Len’s successful publications and contains six special edition titles – Too Long In The Bush, End Of An Era, Bush Bashers, Still In The Bush, Blast The Bush and Beating About The Bush.
In 1957, officers from the Welfare Branch of Northern Territory Administration began Patrolling the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts. Here they found the Pintubi people, who had never been in touch with white civilisation. In 1963 the Melbourne Herald’s correspondent, Douglas Lockwood, was invited to join a patrol into the Gibson Desert to point about…
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Robert Bruce Plowman was born at Melbourne in 1886 and educated at State schools and at Scotch College there. He was from 1912 to 1917 patrol padre in Central Australia for the Australian inland Mission, and his experiences in that region are recorded in pleasing prose in the trilogy which began with “The Man from Oodnadatta”.
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It is a book about the people, men and women, who tried to make a living in this rugged, isolated and semi-arid area. It describes the often insurmountable problems of the many copper, gold, silver and coal mines, and also the battlers, dreamers, promoters, investors, swindlers and losers who contributed to the development of these mines in a remote and hostile environment.
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George Williams joined the South Australian Railways at Quorn in 1922, but was immediately sent to Oodnadatta as a youth labourer to the pumper. After 14 months he was transferred to Quorn and worked as a cleaner in the Loco Workshops.
On the 1st January, 1926, he signed over to the Commonwealth Railways and in the same year qualified as a fireman. George qualified as a driver in 1929, but was not classified until 1938.
A very entertaining collection of stories in the life and times of outback raconteur Phil O’Brien A ‘Best of’ Collection taken from his popular bestselling books,
101 Adventures that have got me Absolutely Nowhere’ Volumes 1 & 1 and ‘The Minor Successes of a Bloke that Never Had a Real Lot of Luck’
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When we think of trains we think of steam trains, those wonderful mechanical marvels that for more than fifty years huffed and puffed their way across the continent.
Ride with us through South Australia’s Flinders Ranges aboard the Pichi Richi Society’s Afghan Express, the Pichi Richi Explorer and Steam Motor Coach One, affectionately called “The Coffee Pot” as our cameras capture the romance and grandeur of a bygone era.
Meet the Conductors, Guards, Firemen, Drivers and the dedicated volunteers whose passion for steam keeps these magnificent relics of yesteryear running on the rails.
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Once upon a time in South Australia, politics had no parties and pastoral country no fences. In the mid-nineteenth century, William Morgan and Peter Waite from Bedfordshire and Fife arrived to fill the vacuum: Morgan helped provide stability for ‘reproductive works’ so that railways snaked across the new colony, cultural institutions took shape and the mighty Torrens was dammed; while with a shipload of high tensile wire and big dams Waite set up the arid zone for sheep.
Each experienced vicissitudes. Waite’s Cordillo Downs, Australia’s biggest sheep station with its buttressed stone woolshed in the remotest corner of the colony, did not survive as such. For politician Sir William Morgan, mining ventures in New Caledonia brought failure and eventual bankruptcy: he died aged fifty-four leaving no money but descendants who have made their mark in many fields, especially mining. His friend and neighbour, Peter Waite, lived to a great age – and his one grandchild married Morgan’s grandson. So the name of Waite has died out but lives on in his gift to South Australia and the University of Adelaide of his house and estate to found the Waite Agricultural Research Institute.
The Premier and the Pastoralist tells the fascinating story of these pioneering South Australian men.
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