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'The true story of Horrie the Wog-Dog who was adopted by the Australian Signal Platoon of the M/G Battalion, in spite of all rules against keeping pets, and how Horrie not only won his stripes as a valuable addition to the group but had the further distinction of being smuggled into Australia on their return. The Wog-Dog was sneaked into Greece, went through the evacuation, carried messages as well as proving a dependable warning against air attacks. He went to Syria and Palestine, never learning to tolerate Arabs - he suffered cold and sickness, he fell in love with Ishmi, he was bombed off his ship and he never once was found during all necessary cover-up travelling. A story for all dog lovers, in spite of heavy Australian slang and style, of a dinkum Aussie who was kept, protected and loved by dinkum Aussies. Sentimentality over canines seldom misses fire.' - Kirkus Review (USA)

In Crocodile Land is principally the story of travels by lugger through northern waters and into slimy creeks where the huge crocodiles abound. The author took part in many hunting expeditions and enlightens us on the various methods adopted for catching these fearsome creatures. The party had more than a little success, to the great glee of the blackfellows who accompanied them.

 

We journey next into the country of the buffaloes. Here on sunlit clearings through thickets of pandanus palms the buffaloes were to be found in hundreds... There is plenty of risk in hunting the buffalo... Once the shooting starts, the horse must continue his gallop, faster than the buffaloes and alongside them, keeping them going. One stumble and the end is near for horse and rider. - Western Mail, Perth 1946

 

Although it has the thrill of crocodile shooting and trapping as its central theme, the book also affords a sympathetic and fascinating study of the aborigines and their tribal customs, slants on the dangerous sport of buffalo hunting, and vivid pen pictures of Wyndham, Darwin and other far northern towns. - Adelaide Advertiser, 1946

 

Introduced by Tony McKenna

Ion “Jack” Idriess (1889 – 1979) is recognised as one of Australia’s great storytellers, having published over 50 books including the Outback tales of Lasseter’s Last Ride, Flynn of the Inland, and The Cattle King alongside major histories of Broken Hill, Broome and Cooktown.

 

This book is his last interview in 1975, prompted by the then-young Tim Bowden, for a possible ABC Radio program that did not eventuate due to Idriess's fading voice. Within this book Idriess talks of his early years in Broken Hill, he tells of his earliest writing for the Bulletin, on living and photographing Aboriginal tribes in the Kimberlys and Cape York; on the writing of his books like Madman’s Island and My Mate Dick; his life with the pearlers of Broome and Thursday Island; on the joys of prospecting, living in the Wild, and on Lasseter and his diary.

 

Full of colourful characters and true stories, Ion Idriess allows us into his unbridled enthusiasm for Australian and Aboriginal history.

This immaculately and painstakingly researched book, through its biographies of Oxley, Evans, Fraser and Harris explains the impulses that drove these men to explore and map the colony, to collect, identify and categorise its flora. But it succeeds in doing more than that because it also elucidates the motivations that drove them to become colonial entrepreneurs, farmers and businessmen, who in the pursuit of individual wealth advanced colonial prosperity. This important book makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Australia's European origins. - Emeritus Professor Richard Waterhouse

American-born Gus Pierce arrived in Australia in 1860 and promptly deserted, swimming ashore at Port Phillip. He worked as a photographer for Batchelders and painted scenery for the Lyceum theatre before hunting for snakes with Joe Shires - the inventor of a snake-bite cure. He compiled a strip map of the Murray River from Albury to Goolwa, by navigating it in a canoe with an Aboriginal dancer and a tracker in 1863, eventually skippering several steamboats along the Murray between 1868 and 1876.

In 1869 in Echuca he began painting historical panoramas and toured scenes, with musical accompaniment to Wagga Wagga, and a further series showing at his Hill End Tent Theatre in 1872 in a musical recue with William Gill, who went on to write the first Broadway musical. His Mirror of Australia panoramas were toured to Geelong and Castlemaine - where he added the male impersonator, Ellen Tremayne in 1881. Impresario, navigator, photographer and artist of Austral scenes - here is his confounded life with his own illustrations.

(from The Spectator, May 1936)

In his introduction to Lasseter's Last Ride (Cape, 7s. 6d.) Field-Marshal Sir William Birdwood writes : "The annals of Central Australian exploration are tragic and heroic, but it is long indeed since I read a more moving story of endurance and heroism in the face of terrific odds than the epic which Mr. Ion Idriess has woven out of the last few months of the life of L. H. B. Lasseter."

The reader will agree with this, and wonder why he has not heard of Mr. Idriess before. He is well known in Australia, but this is his first book to be published in England. It will not be his last, if the present one meets with the success it deserves. Having himself been a prospector, the story he has constructed out of the fragments of documentary evidence - a few reports, the barely legible diary and letters found buried near Lasseter's last camps - is probably very close to what actually happened. Harry Lasseter had once discovered a rich gold reef in unexplored west Central Australia. Owing to a faulty watch, the bearings he took were useless. An expedition was fitted out to locate it. From the first, misfortune dogged the steps of the party. Food ran short and they returned to the base-camp - all except Lasseter, who went on alone. When his two camels bolted he was left waterless in the desert. Blinded by sand and tortured by dysentry, he found the reef, but died shortly afterwards, deserted by a tribe of aborigines with whom he had tried to make friends. Mr. Idriess tells this story in a simple, virile style which is, in its intense economy, comparable to Hemingway at his best.

"Comment diable sommes-nous ainsi passes, a l'etourdie, a cote des aventures de Napoleon Bonaparte, dit Bony?"
Jean-Luc Porquet, Canard Enchaine

Le roman classique de Joan Lindsay, Pique-Nique à Hanging Rock, est un mélange subtil d'événements mystérieux et effrayants qui se déroulent à une certaine période de la société australienne, décrite avec une nostalgie affectueuse. Le dernier chapitre du roman a été enlevé à la demande de ses éditeurs, créant ainsi un mystère dont des milliers de personnes ont demandé à connaître la solution. Le chapitre manquant révèle ce qui est arrivé aux écolières qui ont disparu de Hanging Rock après un pique-nique le jour de la Saint-Valentin en 1900.

Avec des commentaires de John Taylor et d'Yvonne Rousseau, ce livre est publié pour la première fois en France, dans une traduction de Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan.

Nous trouvons ici une sorte de réponse au mystère qui se situe au coeur de Pique-Nique à Hanging Rock. Nous découvrons pourquoi, une semaine après sa disparition, Irma Leopold, l'héritière aux boucles noires rebondies, est retrouvée avec des doigts ensanglantés mais des pieds nus "parfaitement propres" qui ne présentent "aucune égratignure ni ecchymose". Nous voyons la manifestation de l'obsession de Lindsay pour le temps - il est dit qu'elle ne pouvait pas porter de montre parce qu'elles s'arrêtaient toujours, comme c'est le cas dans le livre. Nous assistons à la disparition de Miranda et de Marion. Nous voyons des corsets suspendus dans les airs. Nous assistons à une fin aussi insolite que Lindsay le laisse supposer tout au long de Pique-nique à Hanging Rock. - Rony Ash, Literary Hub

From the author of Wild Cat Falling and Balga Boy Jackson comes this novel from 1979:

 

Every revolution needs a leader and there is no question in Alan’s mind that he is that leader. For inspiration he goes to Noorak, the law holder of his people, and hears the heroic tales of Sandawara, the last of the warriors, who died defending his land and his people against the white man in the Kimberleys. So Alan names himself and becomes the new Sandawara and the rest of the unemployed teenage Aborigines of his mob take the names of Sandawara’s followers. In his crash pad, a broken-down old house, the new Sandawara plots and schemes the revolution.

 

The story of this mob of anti-heroes, of a farcical inefficient revolution, gives a vivid portrayal of the new and frightening world of rootless youth, who lack identity and purpose and shoot as easily as they love because neither act has meaning.

 

Idriess was a trooper with the Light Horse at Gallipoli, all the way to Beersheba, and his diary was published as The Desert Column. Drawing on his military experience, this is one of six manuals written for soldiers and civilians in 1942, when invasion by the Japanese seemed imminent. This volume includes the full story of the duel between Australian sniper Billy Sing and his opposite number, Abdul the Terrible in the trenches at Gallipoli.

 

A believer in guerrilla warfare in the open spaces of Australia, Mr. Idriess seeks, by thrilling narrative and advice, to teach young men and people of the back country how to use the rifle to the best advantage. To be a guerrilla one has to be a good rifleman - a sniper - acting independently of other troops, clever at camouflage, with keen ears, and with eyes that are observant and sharp. - Newcastle Herald

If any man was ever born to be murdered, it was William Lush - a hated drunk who disappeared after beating his wife to death. Plenty of men had the opportunity to murder Lush, some the means, none the motive. Jill Madden, his pretty step-daughter, had all three... When Lush disappears, Inspector Bonaparte must look for a body - and the murderer - before the Darling River rises to flood level…

 

This novel is one of Upfield's major accomplishments... Bony's determined search no matter where guilt falls is fascinating... This book is Upfield at his best. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

The Cape York Peninsula, 1920... as the three ex-diggers talked across the bar at the West Coast, swapping stories of the War and goings-on in Cooktown and along the coast, the pioneer vision would have still been fresh and sustained by hope and dreams. All that was needed was a little luck - which might come from the Chinese gambling den across the way, or at the races, or a tip on a 'sure thing', be it trepang, trochus, timber or the treasures of the earth. So that day Idriess signed up for a sure thing with George Tritton - or perhaps not such a sure thing; Dick Welsh, Idriess's best mate, chose not to go. Even so, a few days later Jack (Idriess's frontier name) and George set sail for Howick Island. Before the end of the decade Idriess had renamed both the Island and his companion - he wrote that he had gone to Madman's Island with his mate, Charlie...

 

Madman's Island; Idriess as character and author - fact or fiction. Fifty books later the seam he struck after returning from the War was mined out. There was nothing left that could be said about frontier life as Idriess saw and said it. It required and still needs to be understood from other perspectives. But Ion Idriess - as Jack Idriess along the Bloomfield, in the Tablelands back of Cairns, and along the coast of north Queensland - gives us a participant's view. It's a voice we should attend to - it's our voice from a fading past.

 

Myra Thomas, apparently dressed only in nightgown and slippers, has walked off the train somewhere along the 650 kilometres of track that crosses the Nullarbor Plain. With two camels and a dog, Bony begins to search the desert in search of her. He finds more than he bargins for - only to find a group of people imprisoned in the extensive limestone caves beneath the desert plain...

 

This is surely one of the two or three strongest of Upfield's novels. It is an eerie mixture of Aboriginal folk customs and white man's greed and lust for revenge. Something of a study of abnormal psychology, it nevertheless turns on people's very natural and nasty feelings... This book is a splendid combination of plot, setting and development. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

Margaret Preston, Australia's foremost woman painter between the wars, sent a series of shock-waves through Sydney's art circles with her vital art, her spirited journalism and her belligerent enthusiasm for living, during a career that spanned over seventy years.

'A red-headed little firebrand of a woman', she was an artist who never stood still, moving from realism to Post-Impressionism, to an Aboriginal-inspired style of art with unceasing verve and freshness.

MARGARET PRESTON is Australia's most original painter. Essentially a pioneer, she strikes out new paths, and her fervour for experiment has led her into diverse forms of art. As she has mastered each new method she discards it and moves on to something fresh. Her latest conquest is the Monotype, and this book reveals her achievement in this field. As a practical craftsman, she found intense pleasure in working out a rare method of making Monotypes that can only be compared with that used by William Blake - whose secret died with him. This method gives a special quality to the work, a depth and richness that is unusual in this medium. Superb craftsmanship, imagination and a daring yet subtle use of colour have gone to the making of these Monotypes. (from Introduction by Gwen Morton Spencer)