It is the story of Albert Facey, who lived with simple honesty, compassion and courage. A parentless boy who started work at eight on the rough West Australian frontier, he struggled as an itinerant rural worker, survived the gore of Gallipoli, the loss of his farm in the Depression, the death of his son in World War II and that of his beloved wife after sixty devoted years - yet he felt that his life was fortunate.Facey's life story, published when he was eighty-seven, has inspired many as a play, a television series, and an award-winning book that has sold over half a million copies.

    It has since become a classic of Australian history. Drawing from documentary and oral evidence, the book describes in meticulous and compelling detail the ways in which Aborigines responded to the arrival of Europeans. Henry Reynolds’ argument that the Aborigines resisted fiercely was highly original when it was first published and is no less challenging today.

    

    He watched a tribe making stone axes and met a pygmy people who wore extraordinary bulbous hats made from their hair clippings and woven to their scalps. On the island of Pentecost he marvelled at the courage of the sensational land-divers who jumped head first from a tower over eighty feet high with vines tied round their ankles. On Tanna he observed a cargo cult and talked to its leader, and on Tonga he filmed the Royal Kava ceremony, the most important and sacred of all the surviving ancient rituals.David Attenborough describes Madagascar as "one of Nature's lumber rooms, a place where antique outmoded forms of life that have long since disappeared from the rest of the world still survive in isolation". Here he observed many species of lemur, including the enchanting snow-white sifakas and the 'dog-headed man', the indris, about whom there are many legends; he collected fragments of the largest eggs in the world laid by the now extinct Aepyornis, and saw the ritual of the turning the dead.Finally, in the Northern Territory of Australia he filmed the aborigines' way of life, examined the remarkable rock paintings which parallel the first drawings made by mankind, learnt about the legends in which they describe their myths of the creation of the world, and met an old man who lived a hermit's life in a remote part of the outback in an upturned water tank.Vivid descriptions, hilarious incidents, and extraordinary encounters makes this book superb family reading.

    

    

    

    This is the story of two Australian boys who enlist during the first World War and land on the Gallipoli Peninsula under intense Turkish fire.

    HARDCOVER

    Fairweather travelled extensively throughout Asia and his sojourns in China, the Philippines and Bali were the source of inspiration for many of his paintings. His particular form of figurative abstraction owes much to his fascination with Chinese calligraphy, which he studied in Shanghai and Beijing during the 1930s. Joanna Capon follows in Fairweather's footsteps through China and Pierre Ryckmans applies an ethical model of traditional Chinese painting to explain the artist's obsession with the act of painting.

    "Being 47 strange sights Observed from eleventh storeys,In a land of cream puffs and crime,By a Flat-roof Professor;And her set forth in sketch and rhyme

    Replete with color illustrations and distribution maps and written by more than one hundred experts, this book surveys the rich and varied world of Australian mammals, describing every species known to have existed during the last two hundred years.

    

    In London, Miles Franklin was producing her first "Brent of Bin Bin" book and would soon return to Australia. Katherine Susannah Pritchard was enlarging her view of black and white in outback Australia, and the team writing under the name M. Barnard. Eldershaw had published its first novel and won the Bulletin prize. Gathering these writers into a network by her support and criticism was the influential Nettie Palmer. In the mid-1930s, these women and other writers such as Eleanor Dark, Jean Devanny, Dymphna Cusack and Betty Roland, faced the impact of fascism and another war. The platform and the writing desk had different and often conflicting appeals; and the Depression underlined the already precarious existence of the woman writer. This text traces the lives of a generation of Australia's women writers through letters, diaries, notebooks, and the memories of their contemporaries.