In 1919 the world was still suffering from the enormous losses due to the Great War. Yet that same conflict had brought forth men and machines capable of fulfilling the age-old dream of manned flight. [click to continue…]
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Murders of miners and missionaries by Papuan warriors and reprisal massacres by patrol officers and magistrates were common in British New Guinea in the late 19th century. In 1901 the charismatic star of the London Missionary Society, the tough and experienced Reverend Chalmers, was lured into an ambush on Goaribari Island. Chalmers was known during his long career as ‘the Livingstone of New Guinea’. He and his party of twelve were beheaded and eaten. More than twenty Goaribaris were killed in a government reprisal raid. Another missionary, Harry Dauncey, found 10,000 skulls in the Goaribari Island’s Long Houses in 1901. Even as late as 1957, Australian government officials on one occasion confiscated 78 skulls on Papua’s Casuarina Coast. [click to continue…]
Captain Harold Chesterman was one of the many quiet contributors to our society – heroes, really – who have lived amongst us without widespread recognition. Master Mariner follows this remarkable man’s professional association with the sea from when he was one of the few Australian lads enrolled in a British maritime training college, through his career as a young naval officer commanding ships that fought in the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War, to when he captained a support ship that serviced lighthouses and beacons along the Queensland coats. [click to continue…]
From the moment Tom Downs was born backwards – the moment of his mother’s death – time has held him the wrong way round, like he’s caught inside a fractured story. [click to continue…]
If you like stories about the North you will like this book. Blackheath & Thornburgh College, in “The Towers”, is ninety years young; ninety years of growing future North Queenslanders; [click to continue…]
Captain James Cook discovered Norfolk Island during his second voyage around the world in 1774, and felled one of the island’s distinctive pine trees to make a mast for his ship, the Resolution.
audio excerpt for Norfolk Island
Cat no: 3724
When Professor Ken Dutton was invited to inspect an old hand-written volume in the University of Newcastle Library, and if possible advise on its provenance, he little suspected that he was setting out on a journey of discovery, which would completely absorb him for several years. [click to continue…]
The Australian Outback and the American Wild West were two of the last frontiers in the territorial conquests and expansions of the 19th century. These frontier territories were wild, lawless and extremely colourful. Although the American Wild West has been celebrated repeatedly in Hollywood films and countless books, we Australians have been much slower to celebrate the heroes and sagas of the development of our Outback. [click to continue…]
Art expert Davenport Jones has moved into the heady world of the international art market in London and now works as a senior executive in the old and established firm of Londy’s. The novel is a hilarious account of Davenport’s passage through his world and his pursuit of a cache of valuable avant-garde paintings by a reclusive Russian master in St Petersburg. [click to continue…]
Contains stories previously published in Bleating about the Bush and Back at Sundown, as well as new material.
audio excerpt for Still Bleating about the Bush
Cat no: 2962
