The young Wooreddy recognised the omen immediately, accidentally stepping on it while bounding along the beach: something slimy, something eerily cold and not from the earth. <i>Since it had come from the sea, it was an evil omen.</i><br /><i>Soon after, many people died mysteriously, others disappeared without a trace, and once-friendly families became bitter enemies. The islanders muttered, 'It's the times&apo ...
"Colour Blind tells the story of two wars affecting Australia a hundred years ago: World War I that everyone knows about, and the lesser known one, the battles that past generations of Aboriginal Australians faced. Not the British Invasion, but the struggle more than a century later when Aboriginal men who were willing to serve alongside non-Aboriginal Australians, their mates, were not seen as worthy of doing so. And the battle for ord ...
Tully's great-great uncle Michael was hanged for murder more than a century ago. According to family lore, he was attacked in a pub – accused by his attacker because as an Irish immigrant he was taking work from locals. At a time when anti-Irish prejudice was rampant during an economic depression, he never stood a chance of justice.<br /> <br />The bare bones of the story are more or less 'true' but have been fleshed o ...
Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go … Maggie is Thursday’s Child, a spirited girl growing up in an English country village surrounded by apple orchards and hop fields. Neighbours are friends and the local landowner, the Squire, is a fair, decent man to his workers. Life could be idyllic, if not for the unwelcome intrusion of air raids. This is 194 ...
"She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything else she undertakes, almost invincible." Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in 1814, when she was eighteen. By then, she had been living for two years in a scandalous relationship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married with children. The novel was conceived in a contest with h ...
Its theme is simple: a tale of Miss Susan Brady, a woman with ideas above her station, who is spurned, and whose jealousy corrodes her life and drives her to try and sabotage the happiness of John Iredale, the prosperous South Australian grazier who has broken her heart… Classy stuff, this – the fruit of delighted observation, of a sensuous and irrepressible joie de vivre. You cannot fake this quality, it is remarkable… there lingers in one&apo ...
In Egypt, in Gallipoli and in France, they are many who sleep beneath a small wooden cross and each cross will testify to people over there that we from downunder knew how to fight for a noble idea. In this WW1 novel, published in English for the first time, Jim and Dick are two lively boys from the bush, along with 20,000 other Australians and New Zealanders, who embarked on what seemed to be a great adventure when they enlisted in the 1st AI ...
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.<br /> <br />Ion L. Idriess had already brought Lasseter and Flynn to the public's a ...
In the 1860s in the Colony of Victoria, Tabu an aborigine goes 'walkabout' after a violent tribal fight during which his brother is killed. He rescues the wife of a drover/farmer – Michael, who is an escaped convict. He hires Tabu to help him drove sheep into the mainly unexplored northern districts of Victoria to the Murray River. Only a few hardy explorers and drovers had previously been through this country when bringing stock overl ...
