The lives of three Australian children are cruelly affected when a bushfire known as the February Dragon sweeps across the countryside.

    "Exhilarating....totally convincing...wonderfully fresh and human...Every page is vibrant with live people in live contact." -- Saturday Review

    As acknowledged, he's drawn heavily on the historian J.C. Beaglehole's definitive volumes, as well as from other weighty sources. But this should not dismay the layman. He has the novelist's eye, not only in his firm but sensuous descriptions, but also in his stunning ability to evoke character, interweave various tales, & see a Jumble of facts & conjectures as a means of releasing whatever dramatic moments are around. The confrontation between aggressive Europeans & innocent primitive tribes affords ample opportunity. The book is a requiem for an idyllic past, moving in its picture of a wild civilization slowly eroding under the impact of commercial progress or geographical expansion, exciting in its interplay of differing psychological attitudes or customs, & developed with many crisscrossing references: Bougainville & Banks, Melville & Gauguin, the Bounty mutiny & the little known efforts of the Englishwoman Daisy Bates to save the Aborigines. A lovely, sophisticated work.--Kirkus (edited)

    Fully revised and updated, this Macmillan edition examines how distance and isolation, while tamed, remain vital to Australia's development, even in the twenty-first-century 'global village'.Author InformationGeoffrey Blainey has been Professor of Economic History and Ernest Scott Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, and Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard. His other books include "Triumph of the Nomads", "A Land Half Won" and "Our Side of the Country". He lives in Melbourne.

    

    Restless Men is Peter Pinney in Australia - one of this county's most colourful and popular travel writers, who has previously specialised in bizarre adventure in Africa, India, the West Indies, and Europe, now turning his attention to tropical Queensland and the Northern Territory.Colourful adventure, danger and comedy are as much to the fore as ever, for instance when Pinney sails his own crazy boat through the rip-tides of the Barrier Reef and then lands work as a kitchen hand on one of the islands where waitresses and the tourists make hay in the sunshine and moonlight; yet this book, perhaps simply because the people and their problems it discusses are of more immediate concern to Australia, as a strength, a depth, an underlying seriousness not so apparent in his earlier books; and for that reason it is Pinney's best.

    A story featuring several Aboriginal protagonists about black white relations in Australia in the mid 20th century.