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The Rier Torrens has a unique place in the history of South Australia, for it was near its course between the Adelaide Hills and the coast that the first surveyor General of the state, Colonel William Light, chose as the site for the capital, Adelaide.
In this book the author, Neville Collins, traces the course of the river from the hills to the sea and the developments which have occurred on it path since European settlement.
His account is complemented by numerous photographs that capture the river and its surroundings.
It should be a useful addition for those interested in the history of South Australia.
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Bob grew up with a love of Banjo Paterson, thanks to his dad who recited Banjo’s poems to him from an early age. As an only child, and with no kids on adjoining farms, his early years were spent in a mainly male environment listening to all the stories related by his neighbours and dad. Those yarns would later be the subjects of some of his poems. After escaping school he picked up a handpiece and went shearing for the next ten years as well as breeding fat lambs on the small family farm and began putting shearing shed yarns into verse to amuse his dad. In his mid-twenties he purchased some adjoining land, built a dairy on the growing property and spent the next 17 years milking cows as well as breeding sheep. When his sons chose not to join him on the farm Bob had amid-life meltdown and starting writing bush verse in the dairy. To get him to regain his sanity his wife encouraged him to lease out the dairy part of the farm and pursue his dream of becoming a bush poet.
While distributing his first book in 1991 he discovered the Tamworth Country Music Festival and the fledging bush poet breakfasts at the Longyard. Blown away by the poets who were performing their poems from memory, Bob returned home from his first visit highly motivated to lift his game.
Twice winner of the prestigious Bronze Swagman award for written bush poetry at Winton. Queensland, and collecting four Bush Laureate Awards for written and audio work at Tamworth, Bob is in demand for festivals and corporate work all over Australia. Sheep dags and cow manure are a distant memory!
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In an era of technological communication, where emails and social network platforms have become ingrained in the status quo, “The Stamp of Australia” is a refreshing love letter to the past, detailing the manner in which Australians have communicated with each other and the world over the past 200 years.
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The Story Behind the Scenery is written for tourists, campers, cyclists, hikers, and grey
nomads. In it, two expert geologists guide you through the heart of Australia’s fascinating
geological history.
This Tom Kruse 2 DVD series includes stories about Harry Ding, William and Ken Cromble, Sidney Nolan, Henry Butler and the Page family tragedy remarkable B&W photos of trucks and the people of the Birdsville Track – 1953 colour movie of the Birdsville mailrun – Ted Egan sings The Last of the Packhorse Bagman.
This historic double DVD set celebrates the life and times of Australia’s best known outback mailman.
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This is the remarkable story of an extraordinary life. Winifred Steger was born in England in 1882. To break the cycle of poverty her father takes part in a land grab and books a passage for his family to head for Australia, work the land and strike it rich.
Arriving in Australia, Winifred and her father find that their land grant is covered with a prison of prickly pear and is worthless. Faced again with poverty, endless backbreaking work and isolation in an unfamiliar country, Winifred’s father spirals into depression and alcoholism leaving Winifred emotionally along. From skivvy in a bawdy house to loveless marriage, Winifred battles almost insurmountable odds to maintain her dignity and sanity, finding solace as she creates fictitious scenarios to ease her hardship.
The Washerwoman’s Dream is an epic story that could easily be the stuff of fiction. Hilarie Lindsay has meticulously researched and reconstructed Winifred’s life through her memoirs, newspaper articles, short stories, letters and 14 unpublished novels. This is an account of the amazing life of a forgotten Australian writer and a woman with indomitable spirit.
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‘In language and content this book of an Australian airgunner’s war is strong meat. But it bears on every page the stamp of authenticity and can be thoroughly recommended for the graphic, unblinkered insights it gives into the author’s three years’ experience in RAF bombers … this vivid, often brutal book … is vastly entertaining, with many humorous passages – and some sultry ones, too, on the amatory side of life in wartime England.’
LESLIE JILLETT, Sydney Morning Herald
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Recollections of the pioneering years of transportation in the deserts of OUTBACK Australia.
Memoirs of a man starting with a horse and cart, who pioneered a reliable outback transport service, including the Birdsville Track mail run for twelve years
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Many Jobs that were once part of everyday society no longer exist. Tales from a crocodile hunter, tin miner, blade shearer and karri timber-getter reveal an adventures pioneering spirit. Rural towns have disappeared from the nation’s maps like Wilson in the Flinders ranges and Old Adaminaby in the Snowy Mountains. Former residents tell how this came about.
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At the time of his death in 1933 at the age of 89 years, William Harry Tietkens was described as ‘probably the last of the old school of Australian explorers’.
It was high praise for one who had arrived in Australia as a 15 year old boy and then abandoned by his guardian on the goldfields of Victoria to fend for himself.
The comment placed him up with exploring luminaries such as Stuart, and many others who conducted explorations in the late 1800s. It was high praise indeed for a man who is virtually unknown to many readers of Australian history.
Perhaps this was because on two occasions he was second in charge of major expeditions led by a better known explorer (Emest Giles) and, as is common in such circumstances, all fame is credited to the person in charge.
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Tin Mosques and Ghan towns covers one hundred and thirty neglected years of Australian history, for fifty years of which the camel trains criss-crossed the continent, carrying the necessities of life, and some few of its luxuries, to settlements in the isolated interior. Throughout those years the turbaned camel drivers, exotically dressed and often fragrant with the oils and perfumes of the East, fought a bitter battle for the inland cartage trade with the quintessential symbol of outback adventure, the bullocky. Christine Stevens has recreated the story of the Afghan camel men, their wives and their families, from a wealth of unpublished sources. Supplemented by over one hundred rare and original photographs, the result is a mixture of adventure, courage, villainy, tragedy, high romance and low humour. No one with an interest in Australian history should miss it.
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Too long in the Bush is the story of how, from 1956 to 1958, Len Beadell and his team made the first road across Central Australia east to west, 1500 kilometres from the Alice Springs road to Carnegie homestead 650 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie.
Soft-cover
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Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia’s landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people and a willingness to Cast away the trappings of her former…
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Tumby Tom Tierney is regarded by many as the fisherman’s fisherman. It has been said, in fact, that he could catch a big snapper in a roadside puddle on a bent pin with half a banana as bait!
Despite being born into a family where angling was never a high priority, Tom soon developed an interest in pulling all manner of fish from the water – an interest that gradually developed into a life-long obsession.
Competitive by nature in all sports, it was inevitable that Tom’s obvious skills with rod and reel would ultimately propel him into competition fishing.
Master storyteller Ryle Winn learnt his craft in the backblocks, experimented with it in the public bar and honed it in between musters and sale yards. In Ryle’s third collection of true tales, ordinary situations can turn into mayhem at the drop of a hat. Meet a ute load of wayward working dogs, a horse…
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This book is an autobiography of the second half of Terry Krieg’s life commencing in 1974 and continuing to the present, 2013. It’s mostly an account of a series of walking adventures, long and short, which I did in the company of Australia’s foremost desert adventurer, C. Warren Bonython. It also includes writings on issues, places and events which have been important in my life since meeting Warren.
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