Both the book and the film have achieved a cult status as the Australian answer to US and UK novels and films of 1960s youthful alienation. It is the gruelling story of a young Australian schoolteacher on his way back from the outback to Sydney and civilization when things start to go wrong. He finds himself stuck overnight in Bundanyabba, a rough outback mining town. An ill-advised and drink-fuelled visit to a gambling den leaves Grant broke and he realizes he has no way of escaping. He descends into a cycle of hangovers, fumbling sexual encounters, and increasing self-loathing as he becomes more and more immersed in the grotesque and surreal nightmare that his life has become.

    An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.

    In Rome on 6th September, 1960, Herb Elliott won an Olympic Gold Medal and one again proved himself unbeatable, the fastest and the greatest middle-distance runner in the world. For Elliott, as he tells here in his fascinating autobiography, it was the moment for which he had been preparing for years. The day he had marked down as his day, since as a promising eighteen-year-old he had watched the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. What does it take to bring a man to a peak of such physical power that he can repeatedly run a mile in under four minutes? From this story we find out. Elliott has been called an automaton; it is said that he sacrifices everything for speed – but as he explains, to him running is a challenge, demanding mastery of the body and the mind as well as the running of races. If he is going to run at all, he is going to run to win; he sees no point in running for any other reason. And the remarkable training programme through which he takes himself is enough to prove any unathletic and incredulous reader that he means just this. ‘Find your goal and work for it’, says Percy Cerutty, the coach to whom, as he is the first to admit, Elliott owes so much. His most famous pupil has followed his advice – to the highest point any amateur sportsman can aim for. Elliott believes also in the enormous importance of sport, not only for the individual’s sake, but for its power in bringing people of every nation together in competition. An athlete may train as an individual although he runs for his country; even more, like a scientist, he tries to create new standards for the human race. This then is the story of a modern athlete, a sportsman living under the extraordinary and rigorous conditions of the twentieth century sport. Today he has to be tough, resolute, ambitious, ruthless. Herb Elliott is all these things and has got to the top; from there he surveys his sporting opponents, and in this book he judges them and their performances, as well as his own achievements. A scarce and highly prized title.Photography. B/W

    Then there are the local arguments, that all seem to flare up around complicated bits of machinery, like water pumps and cars. All they really need is a little help from Bruno to sort everything out...This is the first of four books that inspired the television series Sun on the Stubble.