But for how much longer will the forest still be there, he wonders?Jeannie Baker's lifelike collage illustrations take the reader on an extraordinary visual journey to an exotic, primeval wilderness, which like so many others is now being threatened by civilization.

    Winner of Australia's Book of the Year 1988. Full-colour illustrations.

    Set in almost uninhabitable regions of Central Australia, The Songlines asks and tries to answer these questions: Why is man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals? Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it? Why have the great teachers—Christ or the Buddha—recommended the Road as the way. to salvation? Do we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room?We do not often ask these questions today for we commonly assume that living in a house is normal and that the wandering life is aberrant. But for more than twenty years Chatwin has mulled over the possibility that the reverse might be the case.Pre-colonial Australia was the last landmass on earth peopled not by herdsmen, farmers, or city dwellers, but by hunter-gatherers. Their labyrinths of invisible pathways across the continent are known to us as Songlines or Dreaming Tracks, but to the Aboriginals as the tracks of their ancestors—the Way of the Law. Along these "roads" they travel in order to perform all those activities that are distinctively human—song, dance, marriage, exchange of ideas, and arrangements of territorial boundaries by agreement rather than force.In Chatwin's search for the Songlines, Arkady is an ideal friend and guide: Australian by birth, the son of a Cossack exile, with all the strength and warmth of his inheritance. Whether hunting kangaroo from a Land Cruiser, talking to the diminutive Rolf in his book-crammed trailer, buying drinks for a bigoted policeman (and would-be writer), cheering as Arkady's true love declares herself (part of The Songlines is a romantic comedy), Chatwin turns this almost implausible picaresque adventure into something approaching the scale of a Greek tragedy.The life of the Aboriginals stands in vivid contrast, of course, to the prevailing cultures of our time. And The Songlines presents unforgettable details about the kinds of disputes we know all too well from less traumatic confrontations: over sacred lands invaded by railroads, mines, and construction sites, over the laws and rights of a poor people versus a wealthy invasive one. To Chatwin these are but recent, local examples of an eternal basic distinction between settlers and wanderers. His book, devoted to the latter, is a brilliant evocation of this profound optimism: that man is by nature not a bellicose aggressor but a pacific, song-creating, adaptive species whose destiny is to quest for the truth.

    Sally Morgan traveled to her grandmother’s birthplace, starting a search for information about her family. She uncovers that she is not white but aborigine—information that was kept a secret because of the stigma of society. This moving account is a classic of Australian literature that finally frees the tongues of the author’s mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

    

    An account of Sir Edward Dunlop's experiences as a medical officer in the prisoner of war camps in Java and on the Burma-Thailand Railway.

    The story of Australia's resistance hero, Pemulwuy, who kept British settlement around Sydney restricted for 12 years 1790-1802

    Explains how the Micronesian's ancient skills of navigation are at risk as its young people turn to Western ways.

    It is something in between - the record of a year of one woman's life spent in the mountain country of New South Wales. This single years reaches into the past and stretches into the future. The narrator is sharing with the reader. She writes, "it is now clear to me it is all coming and going, and then being alone and then more visitors and cooking and cups of tea and talking and picnics and writing in between. Something like that." Waterlily combines delicate perceptions with robust humour.

    Read together they make up an elaborate and unforgettable pattern of dreams and reality.'Landscape with Landscape is a work of extraordinary power and vision, one which will surely be an outstanding novel of the decade.' Helen Daniel, Age

    His work was a refreshing contrast to the mainstream of tailored understatement and civilised ironies. With seeming ease, he wove all aspects of his age - love, loneliness, society, drugs - into his poetry."To be a poet in Australia" he wrote, "is the ultimate commitment." In true bardic tradition, he lived an itinerant life and his output was prolific. Four volumes of his poetry were published in three years, and three others appeared posthumously. Now for the first time all Michael Dransfield's previously published books are collected together in the one comprehensive volume. This represent the full arc of his development. The introduction by Rodney Hall provides an illuminating retrospective of the poet and his work.

    Based on the film

    

    Follow a group of scientist over the world's smallest continent as they uncover facts about the colonization of Austrailia.

    

    

    When Bernard Buchanan, real-estate agent turned politician, barters vast uninhabited tracts to be used by a sinister, anonymous multinational company in exchange for the presidency of Australia, that open, friendly society mutates into a horrendous Orwellian state where people spy on each other, and "guest workers" (immigrants) are shipped off to work camps "for their own protection." As the state becomes more self-propagating, Buchanan grows so huge that he cannot see the ground and must be carried even to the bathroom by six aides, while he declaims: "I am the State." By now, he is infested by mice that gnaw at his entrailsbut at least, he thinks, he is feeling something. Eventually, his sensitive, enigmatic wife Dorina, who lives separately, is inspired by disgust for Buchanan to provoke, in an uncharacteristic move, a "showdown"enough has been enough. These are the bare bones of Hall's plot; this rich, challenging tale of power and corruption, filled with memorable vignettes, is told with the art, vigor, wit and poetry that we expect from him. Yet Kisses is so unlike Just Relations and Captivity Captive , particularly in length and range, that the reader has the unexpected joy of discovering a new Rodney Hall. His reputation in the U.S. as a uniquely gifted, intelligent and original storyteller grows with each book.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.